Mother who says it’s her duty to ensure her teen son’s a good lover
By Amanda Lynch
WHAT would you wish for your son as he grows up? To triumph academically? To be a success in the workplace? Or to be a good lover?
While it goes without saying that I very much hope my 17-year- old son, Stanley, does well in life and is happy and content, I also wish him to be kind and thoughtful in the bedroom. I hope he’ll be able to satisfy a woman, both physically and emotionally.
After all, isn’t it my final job as his mother (and as a woman) to send him out into the world as considerate and respectful a husband or partner as he possibly can be?
These thoughts occurred to me the other morning as Stanley arrived home after a night out.
While I’ve suspected he’s been sexually active for some time now, all I’ve done is the traditional, cowardly thing of sheepishly slipping a box of condoms into his bedroom drawer and hoping for the best.
We’ve never had a proper chat about the birds and the bees, or all the emotions that go hand-in-hand with a physical relationship. It’s a conversation I’ve been meaning to have for a long time.
While we’ve had no problem talking about drugs and alcohol, and the perils of both, I’ve repeatedly dodged this particular subject. My principle fear was that, as his middle-aged mother, he’d find the discussion agonising. As would I.
Some of you, at this point, might be thinking that I’d be overstepping the boundaries as a mother in contemplating this discussion, and that it’s down to fathers to talk to their sons about sex.
Well, sadly, I don’t have a choice in this matter. Stanley’s father passed away three years ago, so it really is all down to me.
Indeed, when Stanley first started going to teenage parties, I made several awkward attempts to raise the issue. Sadly, the best I could manage was to bark slogans at his back as he edged out the door, such as ‘ Better safe than sorry’ and ‘ Remember, darling, no means no!’.
To which he’d reply, rather wearily: ‘Chill out, Mum, I’m not a rapist.’
After such a response, many mothers might decide to leave their sons to muddle on and find their own way.
Yet we live in an age when sex has never been more complicated. For young people today, sex is often first experienced alone, on a screen.
One click on the same laptop that your child uses for his homework and he can be bombarded with the vilest pornographic images. It’s all a far cry from the innocent first fumbles behind the bike sheds of my generation.
No wonder, then, that research has uncovered an epidemic of young men whose sexual health has been warped and damaged by online porn.
Angela Gregory, men’s sexual health specialist at Nottingham University Hospital, found repeated viewing of graphic material caused youngsters to become desensitised.
Such was the extremity of the stuff they’d already viewed online, they were simply unable to get aroused by normal sexual behaviour, .
I realised, at that point, that my conversation with Stanley was well overdue. I owed it to my son, and to society, to ensure that he has a healthy and balanced attitude to sex and women. To do this, we needed to talk as we have never talked before.
JUST as we mothers bring up our sons to respect authority, look both ways when they cross the road and eat their five-a-day, so it is just as important that we prepare them for this crucial part of adulthood and make them the best sons — and lovers — they can possibly be.
Thankfully, even before I embarked on all this, I knew that Stanley was already a fine boy: caring, funny and open, and comfortable in the company of women.
But regardless of my son’s stability and good sense, I’m not naive enough to believe he’s never taken a peek at porn. The chances are that, like most teenagers with the internet at their fingertips 24 hours a day, he’s already seen more than he should have.
If I’m honest, online porn has been one of my major concerns. While I accept that some adults, of both sexes, use X-rated material to pep up their love lives, this should never be accessible to children.
And what I particularly object to is the more extreme type of pornography that degrades women and normalises sexual violence. What mother wants her son to be influenced by that?
But does he know this choreographed, cold, brutal sex is nothing like true love-making? It’s all very worrying, to say the least. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed at the thought of the task ahead. Explaining the facts of life is tricky enough, but how on earth does a mum broach the subject of porn with her teenage son? Not least because I’ve never watched any of the stuff myself.
But knowledge is power, I told myself, and I decided take the plunge and dip into this sordid world to see what I was up against.
AS I disabled the parental security block on my broadband (which, since teenagers can get onto the web on their smartphones, is pretty useless anyway), I was immediately struck by how porn used to be much more difficult to access in the pre-internet era.
In my day, it took a brave teenager to brazenly buy a dirty magazine in the local village shop (how tongues would wag!). Once obtained, it was all pretty tame stuff.
With Stanley safely out of the house, I settled down on the sofa and typed in ‘free porn’ like any rookie teenager might.
Sifting through the many videos available, I felt at first curious, then revolted, then finally just empty and sad. Could this really have been my boy’s first taster of what sex and love is?
The least offensive films gave the misleading idea that women are machines. Simply push buttons X, Y and Z and she will automatically climax, loudly and gratefully. There was no hint of the fact that real women are complicated, that real sex can be clumsy and affectionate, and real orgasms can be rather elusive.
The worst films, dripping with misogynistic hatred, dispensed with female pleasure altogether, focusing on weeping girls subjected to sexual humiliation and extreme violence.
I’m still haunted by images of beautiful Asian girls enduring what can only cause extreme pain and injury — and this on a relatively tame website, not on the darker corners of the web where I’m reliably informed the content is far worse.
No wonder immature youngsters can be traumatised and tainted by watching this stuff. It turns my stomach to think my lovely boy may have seen this sort of thing.
With almost comic timing, I then heard Stanley’s key in the door and was caught blushing, and with the laptop at full throttle, as I desperately searched for the mute key. After his confusion and shock faded, this ironic role reversal proved rather fortuitous in that it allowed us to do what I’ve wanted to do all along: talk openly.
With the laptop now firmly shut, Stanley confessed that my worries are a few years too late; it was actually four years earlier that his porn viewing was at its height.
‘Year Nine (aged 13-14) was peak porn year,’ he said — the time when he and his friends were glued to the internet. ‘But then it all started to seem rather depressing, and I stopped looking after a while.’
Stanley admitted that a few boys did get ‘ too into it’, but that it all
levelled out naturally once they started getting real-life girlfriends.
‘But didn’t you expect real sex to be like it is online?’ I asked, worried.
‘Mum, I’m not an idiot,’ he said patiently. ‘Porn is like professional wrestling. Everyone knows it’s faked, but we still enjoy watching it.’
While I’m impressed by my son’s clever insight, should sex really be compared to a highly scripted spectacle? What about intimacy? And romance? What about love? As our conversation began to falter, I decided to play my trump card and brought out a sex manual that I’d ordered for this very eventuality.
Now, please, don’t reach for the smelling salts, it wasn’t the Kama Sutra or anything like it. Rather it was an award- winning guide written by research psychoanalyst Paul Joannides.
Guide To Getting It On is 1,152 pages long — heavy enough to break your foot if dropped — and has been translated into 15 languages.
While I’d been summoning up the courage to have this conversation with my son, I’d done a lot of research and found this tome is considered a valuable tool for parents broaching ‘the chat’ with teenagers, and has been used in college sex education courses and the training of medical students in the U.S..
Everything, from kissing right through to every sex act you’ve never heard of, is covered with intelligence, common sense and a nice twist of understated sarcasm. My favourite quote? ‘ Next to bathing, humour is the most important sex aid’. Hear, hear!
Stanley took the book with a tiny sigh, buckling under its weight. But I spotted him reading it later, even chuckling to himself.
And, amazingly, thanks to the book, the conversation started to flow. It was a magic key to a relaxed, grown-up chat about sex.
That’s not to say that Stanley wasn’t initially unforthcoming or that we didn’t both feel rather awkward at first. We did. But it got easier. He opened up — and what he revealed was fascinating.
Stanley told me about the huge pressure on boys to lose their virginity. And, yes, he was among the first of his friends to have sex — in the traditional manner, upstairs on a pile of coats at a party (although to protect his privacy, I’m not going to say when).
He used protection, much to my relief. And while it was hardly wine and rose petals, the sex has got better, as for most of us, with time and practise.
When I mentioned that I’d waited until 19 to lose my virginity, he gave me a pitying look. We talked about everything, with seemingly no subject off-limits.
As for my biggest concern — whether he would be a kind and considerate lover, as attentive to his partner as to himself — I feel my worries have been allayed.
Although Stanley is currently single, both his sexual partners have been in the context of a relationship. To my knowledge, he’s not had any one- night stands.
When we discussed any emotions that his female partner might experience, I said: ‘ Be respectful, she’s giving you a gift.’ And he showed every indication of understanding what I was talking about.
SUDDENLY I felt rather proud of him. He’s all right, my son. Balanced, fair-minded and with a good attitude to sex. Despite the sheer quantity of misogynistic horror out there, all accessed at the touch of a button, my son has a thoroughly mature attitude to the opposite gender.
‘Women are just fellow humans,’ he said, calmly.
I’m sad his father isn’t here to see the man Stanley’s growing into, and I know he’d have been very proud of him. No doubt these conversations would have been different had they been held with him, and not me.
But I now firmly believe that mothers of boys shouldn’t fear speaking to their sons about sex.
Yes, it can be daunting, but our gender can be a bonus: we can give a female perspective on sex and relationships which a father can’t.
Of course, all parental relationships are different, but often mothers can be the more communicative ones, and a reluctant teenage boy may find the conversation more free-flowing with Mum there to fill the gaps.
While I had been admonishing myself for not having ‘the sex talk’ earlier, I can see now that in the eye-rolling, door-slamming defiance of Stanley’s early teen years, it would have been impossible.
All conversation was near impossible then, never mind such a sensitive one. It’s all happened at the right time — and I’m so pleased with the outcome.
Talking about sex and all the emotional pitfalls surrounding it has made us closer, and today I feel I know my son so much better than I did.
After all, how many mothers know where their son lost his virginity, how many sexual partners he’s had and his stance on Brazilian waxes?
Perhaps, in the end, The Big Sex Talk was more for my benefit than Stanley’s. Now I know for sure that he’s growing into the considerate, sensitive young man I always hoped he’d become.
Those future partners of his are lucky indeed. All in all, I think it has gone rather well.
Mission accomplished.