Parenting and Comprehensive Sexual Education.

This is the story of Sreeni. Sreeni spent fifteen-years in a deeply oppressive marriage with a patriarchal man with whom she also had two-children. Around the time that she was forty, and the kids were eleven and fourteen, Sreeni decided to leave this marriage. After she left, she started to pursue sadomasochism, polyamory and power-exchange like she had always wanted to, and as is customary for some people, her exploration began with a frenzy. During the course of this frenzy, a month or so outside her marriage, she came out to her children as her true-self. She began talking with them about ongoing relationships, she started being overtly submissive around them and talking to them about the various new sexual acts she was trying. After a lifetime of not talking to her children about sex or bodies, she laid it all on them in a short period of time and decided she wanted to continue the relationships with her children *as their friend*.

Look, I don’t know if Sreeni’s approach is wrong or right, I believe there are a myriad factors at play here that influence it, but I do know that when it comes to (alternative) sexuality, my sexual identity and sexual education, this has not been my approach.

In various forms, the question of being a parent who is also a fetishist/kinkster/poly/etc comes up over and over again. Sometimes people want to know whether their children should be aware of their predilections, sometimes they want to know how they can balance co-parenting and power-exchange with the same partner, sometimes they want to know how one can manage and/or explain marks/evidence of play, sometimes it is a broader question about the impact of a certain relationship-type on children and often there are questions about pregnancy and play. I cannot address the questions about pregnancy, I have never carried a pregnancy out to term, but I have been a parent for a while now. I am not a parenting expert (and I am not sure how one becomes that) and I don’t think you can find a one-size-fits-all answer to any of these questions, so please read my perspective on this subject as what it is, a *perspective* based on my experience.

What I am about to say may sound jarring at first but it’s true, until my child is a certain age (16-18), I do not intend to be a friend-parent. It would have been very easy and it was the primary piece of advice I got from *everyone* with regard to being a co-habiting step-parent, but I grew up as the confidante of my mother, a role I saw Sreeni’s children starting to take on in my brief dalliance with her, and it puts you in a strange, high-pressure situation. When your formative information about sexuality is coming from the *personal* experiences of your parent, the factor of bias is extremely high. Sex (and I mean sex in *any* form) is not an independent entity, it intersects greatly with relationships, society and one’s outlook towards the world. My mother talked to me about sex a lot but because I was her *friend*, it was almost always because she wanted me to use the knowledge I had about her to solve her problems or she wanted someone to listen to her experiences with it. Even before I had a reasonable understanding of sexuality, I was dealing with my mother’s very advanced sexual issues and perceptions, which meant I had to educate myself, and sometimes, then *her*.

It’s not that I do not think parents and children can be friends, I am friends with my mother *now*, and I am definitely friends with my younger sisters to whom I was a quasi-parent. One of them has actually been calling me *sauteli ma* (step-mom) since she was eight, and it’s a running joke that she was foreshadowing the future. Parental relationships truly benefit from the ability of the *parent* to let their children *grow*, they benefit from getting to the point where you relinquish any role-based power you have and learn to care without being controlling or overbearing. However, when you are raising children there are some responsibilities that come with factoring in the fact that these creatures are growing and learning the world in a way that is much more pervasive than growth is for an adult. In this space, I am happy to be the confidante of my kid, but I don’t think he should be mine.

The problem, I think, is that we see parental versus friendly relationships in a specific light, and in that light parental relationships are not as honest as friendly ones. This is not what I mean. I am a ridiculously honest person and by extension, a ridiculously honest parent. My problem with Sreeni’s approach is not the honesty, it’s the way it has been applied. First of all, the leapfrogging is a terrible approach. You cannot expect a child to understand polyamory (and its social context) before you have even taught them about any concept of romantic relationships. You cannot expect a child to understand the gratification (sexual or asexual) of masochism, before they understand the concept of sexuality. You’ve also got to be mindful of the social circumstances of the child. My stepson is a child of divorce (and a contentious one at that) and having his father be the permanent custodial parent was the first time he had experienced stability in his life.

At that moment, it was reassuring to him to see that his father and I were not on shaky grounds. I could have been *honest* right then and told him we were polyamorous and what that meant, and as I understand it, polyamory is not an unstable relationship-orientation, but the child didn’t know everything I knew about the world. He had to first understand and feel secure in the fact that loving multiple people does not lead people to divorce. Telling him then would have felt selfish to me, the easy way, instead of working to make sure he understood the world, himself, the impact of his parents not being together and how all of that could influence his understanding of relationships. Now, he know, and he’s practically *bored* by the information.

That’s also how I approach the subject of power-exchange. Prior to the child, I enjoyed a good degree of domestic servitude, like cooking and scrubbing toilet-floors, and certainly, it may work to explain to a child that *you* are always the one cleaning the house because you like it and not because *you* are the woman (if that is the case) in the house, but it’s not so easy. You have to pay attention to the socialisation of the child. The first time I told my stepson to clean his room, he told me that boys don’t do that. That is how he had been raised (primarily by his grandfather) between the ages of three and seven. I could have explained that I don’t do it because I am a girl, I do it because that is the relationship-type in which I am engaged, or I could have ensured he saw his father cook and clean, and he learn to do it too. I chose the latter because, firstly, our involvement in power-exchange is not pedantic, if we can’t express it one way, we’ll choose another and more importantly, it is *much more* important to socialise boys to understand gender privilege better.

That doesn’t mean we hide our relationship or that we don’t express love to one another authentically around the child. In fact, since the beginning, I polish my dominant-partner’s shoes anywhere in the house. When asked, I simply explained it as an activity that grounds me, makes me feel the humility of labour and feels like love. This is the truth, but it only manages to not be damaging in an environment where the politics of labour are understood, and the child is able to see exchange of labour as a loving thing, not a gendered responsibility. It only manages to be believable in an environment where you can truly explain it for what it means to you and not what it represents to the world. It *is* complicated and that brings me to my second major issue with Sreeni’s approach, the attempt to foster honest and open dialogue (all at once) through self-declaration instead of fostering an environment where honesty is the norm.

I am not a declarative person (ironically). I don’t come out as *anything*. I never sit anyone down and tell them I have to share something serious and important with them. I just live my life as I live my life (without violating anyone else’s space) and if my identity happens to intersect with their comprehension of the world, they can always ask me about it *and they will know that*. I think sitting my child down and declaring to him that I am a masochist would put a lot of pressure on him, and expect a lot of heavy-lifting. Instead, we have for the past almost-seven years talked about sex, sexuality, the politics of sexuality, gender, the law, whathaveyou, a lot. You can’t actually leave sex-ed at genital identification, disease and procreation. There is so much to it at different stages. Genital are one tiny morsel of understanding sex and sexuality. We’ve had detailed discussions about periods to the point where he can explain them to anyone. We’ve discussed pornography and the process of consuming it ethically. We’ve discussed attraction, why he feels more of it for one person than another. We’ve discussed fetish and how it manifests in people. We discuss it all as concepts, in escalating stages, first. In these discussions, we bring up personal experience sometimes, but not in a way that one has to solve the problems of another. On my end, I share when there is didactic value to it, and on his end, he is bringing things he is learning to me, and it is so, so important that he do that.

It's not about talking to your kids about sex, it’s about ensuring they will talk to you about it when they don’t understand something, without being bogged down by shame or fear. It’s about genuinely creating an honest environment and not checking off broad topics of conversation from a list. A couple of years ago, in his tween-years, his (boy) friends started to make derogatory comments about genital-sizes to one another. He didn’t understand *and he came to us and asked immediately*. At that moment, sharing your experience from when you were their age could be valuable, at that moment you are not declaring, you are guiding and supplementing the guidance with your experience. At that moment, they want to feel less alone, less confused and they need to understand the social context of things better. In my version of sexual education, that will always come before declaring my sexuality, and in my experience, it has worked very well.

For instance, I have never told my child that I am a masochist but he identified me as such himself. For a long time, he didn’t know the term but he knew *me*. He saw me rejoicing at the prospect of cramps I had gotten from the gym. He saw me poking my lips with toothpicks and calling it fun. He heard me discuss the concept of pain when it came up in conversation. He’d heard me call bruises pretty. He saw me cry at sad music and be happy I was crying. He asked questions about it, he made fun of it and he even eventually related it to the weird joy he gets from rubbing salt into dry lips. When the term masochism finally came up, organically in conversation, he asked what it means, and when I told him, he immediately looked at me and said, “Oh, that’s what you are bro!” I love that. It wasn’t a value-judgement. It wasn’t loaded because comprehension had preceded terminology and identification of the concept in his parent.

That is the very basic gist of the approach I prefer to take, but please remember that it is, very basic, which makes me wonder if I should write a whole-ass book about it. Maybe tomorrow.