May 10, 2015

Aching testicles, bodacious breasts, and other childhood lessons in anatomy

Image from here.

“My testicles are aching,” my daughter confessed to me the other day, which is the only problem I’ve so far encountered in my experience of having taught her the correct name for anatomical parts. That eventually, one might get mixed up when meaning to say “limbs” and start talking about her balls instead. And maybe this is the danger parents are hoping to avoid, those who pulled their children out of Ontario schools last week in protest of the new sex-ed curriculum. That there are so many body parts and the children aren’t ready, and with everything getting so mixed up, gender fluidity is surely just around the corner. It’s contagious. What else can you expect when it’s scrotums for everybody, and sexual identity is all a slippery slope.

I haven’t actually read the new sex-ed curriculum, because unlike some people, I’m not a total pervert. And I’ve got better things to do than vet school curricula for ways it’s going to warp my child’s mind, because the world is going to warp her anyway, and here is the point where my job as a parent kicks in: I send her into the world and then, when she gets home, together we try to make sense of the mixed messages it’s throwing at her. Like why, for example, in a hyper-sexualized world (ever driven down a highway and looked at a billboard lately?), we are so fearful of teaching our children there is such a thing as sex or that parts of their bodies actually have names.

I can’t do it all on my own though. As Hillary said, it takes a village. From proximity to my body, my daughter has learned about all varieties of skin rash, but that’s only the tip of the anatomical iceberg—there is so much more. And my plan for this education, which I hope will avert much future sextastrophe (the more you know!) involves extra-curricular activities.

My daughter is enrolled at swimming lessons at the university pool, and we strategically avoid the Family Change Room. After her lessons, we head to the Women’s where she has her hair washed surrounded by naked ladies. An invaluable education—how to be subtle, for one thing, and look like you’re not looking, and also how not to pee in the shower, which is mostly “at all”, but if you have to, don’t announce it while you’re doing it.

Mostly, her post-swimming showers are a lesson in the exquisiteness of womankind. Women of all shapes, sizes, and colours, gloriously naked, just having finished some activity that makes her body strong. Beautiful, all of them, stunning in their variety. Contrary to what a series of lingerie ads might have you suppose, there are so many ways to have a body. No two alike. Shockingly, almost all of them have pubic hair. And the bodies themselves are big and small, curved and slender, muscular, wiry, always amazing (because it’s ill-fitting clothing that fails to flatter the body, I find. The body itself requires no flattery at all). Bums, boobs, tummies and, yes, limbs. We’re both kind of mesmerized. What a sorority. You’re a woman, albeit a small one, and you’re part of this, a body-haver. It’s the most incredible way to put the whole thing in perspective.

Of course, it’s not all naked utopia. You’ve got the woman who’s squeezing her ass-zits in the shower, and the other who is shaving her thighs, which is kind of gross because her pubes are flowing across the tiles. But that bodies are disgusting is an important lesson too. And that they’ve got functions, beyond their ability to be stuffed into a bikini and be beholden to the male gaze. We’re getting all of this in the Woman’s Locker Room and I’ve got to shut up about this, or swimming lessons are going to up their fees. And even if they did, I’d probably pay the difference. There is awkwardness, yes, and the pain of aching testicles, but it’s the best basis for sex education that I can imagine—the knowledge our bodies are gorgeous and amazing—and knowing this we’re better prepared to handle whatever this curious world hands us next.