Between the lines: Books from which we learned about sex
Now about sex you can to google anything, and in childhood, it seems, we all had to learn from the air. The first glimpses of understanding came to us with the approved (and not very) society of literature, including encyclopedias and reference books, which shy parents slipped us in the hope of avoiding awkward conversations. We asked our peers to be remembered and share impressions of the first literary information about sex, which they managed to get to in due time.
My sex education was mainly carried out through books, but not at all those that are recommended to modern children. Simply put, I read either fiction and trained my imagination, or a special one — and I trained all the other convolutions of the brain. A series of books about the adventures of Angelica in green covers abounded with hot details that convinced me that sex is quite an exciting and romantic occupation, but did not bring us closer to understanding the technical side of the process. For a long time she was fully confident that a man and a woman are in bed only and are engaged in the fact that “they shower each other with fierce kisses and do not stop hot embraces”. Children of the late Soviet period remember very well that these books were publicly available and proudly adorned on the bookshelves in any apartment where the owners claimed a certain status in society. There was another book, I don’t remember the author, but I remember the title (I don’t google specifically so as not to tear down fragile girlish memories) - “Beautiful Frenchwoman, or Anabel de Croisier's Love Story.” There, on two hundred and something pages, the young girl was subjected to all kinds of love harassment (in the modern sense): men fell like a Canadian forest and dried out like the Aral Sea. There were a lot of juicy details, but in general at the level of light eroticism, without injuries for the girl's psyche.
My parents acted quite peculiarly, having completely entrusted sex education to me. Perhaps they were hampered by their own stereotypes, but I want to think that they, seeing my undying interest in books (by 12-13 years old, I really read like an obsessed, three or four books a week), delicately decided that sooner or later I I myself understand everything or ask. Perhaps they knew their child better than I know myself now. I don’t judge whether it’s good or bad, but there are no obvious injuries or gaps in my sexual experience.
Now I live in Denmark, I work with children and my Danish boyfriend also sometimes earns money in kindergarten. Here, children of seven or eight years old already know what homosexual families are, that they themselves appeared as a result of a very big love between parents, and they also joke happily if they see a fruit or vegetable resembling the genitals. Parents tell them about these genitalia, as necessary - when a child shows interest, in five or six years. Later, at the age of nine, the subject of sex education begins at school, where children are first explained to the principle of natural reproduction using the example of a bee and a flower, and later, at sixteen or seventeen, they learn to use condoms (boys and girls) on cucumbers, they say where the girls have a clitoris, and explain that what is happening in porn is very remotely related to sex in real life.
There were a lot of books in our library, and I, as a child, decided to read them all. Even this boring-gray "Mrs. Bovary" and especially this one, hidden away and wrapped in shabby paper, was made by Emmanuel Arsan. Both of these books in my case coincided with watching American sex educational videos of the 70s in English classes and vague murmurs of a school nurse at special lessons, after which everyone embarrassed giggles or deliberately missed. These lectures were held for boys and girls separately, which created a persistent feeling of the difference between our worlds and our sexes. So since then it has become a tradition. Outlined with a ball-point pen illustrations from a biology textbook, pearl beads on Emmanuel’s bare chest from the cover, an understanding of the need for protection and the ineffectiveness of vaseline - all this only contributed to the embarrassment during parents' attempts to talk about it.
The only book that really helped me, if not understand everything, then at least see the coordinate systems, is the wild “Teenage Survival Course,” which was written by rock star Dee Snyder from Twisted Sister. The star and fatality of the author caused me to doubt, as well as the fact that to use the words "ancestors" and "flat" in our time is generally legal. But it was he who spoke about what is happening in the head of boys and girls before, during and after sex; what is and should not be expected; what is the difference between attraction and love and why both are absolutely normal if you consciously approach everything. Thank you, Di, even though your music and shit, you were a mediator between the office where the girls were sitting and where the kids were telling us about sex the teacher of literature. And if I had a car then, I would know exactly what to do with an American schoolgirl if I myself were an American schoolboy. With a car.
The very beginning of the 90s, a stream of imported nonsense poured into the people of free Russia. I suppose the book, which became the first educational resource in my sex education, was in catalogs that were spread around offices, somewhere between the “Bible in pictures” and the novels of Stephen King. Dad brought it from work and handed it to me ten years old, rightly believing that with the recommended age range of seven to nine years there was no risk, and even more so in such a way uncomfortable conversations could have been avoided.
I remember that I was captivated by the beauty of the pictures and the complexity of the processes described in the book, but only last summer, that is, twenty years later, when we had dinner with my parents, they, blushing, told me how I walked around the house, pressing the “encyclopedia” to my chest and enthusiastically said: "This book is my most-favorite!" - after which the frightened parents immediately got rid of her. However, I quickly had a more serious literature - the elegantly illustrated folio, Sex in the Cultures of the World, found in the parents under the bed. That was a book, so the book, as I also confessed to my parents at that dinner, but then they were laughing quite nervously.
I was probably lucky - in the two-volume book bought by my parents there were neither “faucets” nor pathological talking cats. I don’t know whether it was a conscious choice or just these books were lucky to be on the shelves at the right moment, but I finally learned about everything from the restructuring translated at the height of the French Encyclopedia of Sexual Life, released in 1991. A huge number of sexologists, psychologists and gynecologists worked on her, so she was verified on all issues and without awkwardly concealed modesty (which produced all the "faucets" in the analogues). In addition to the popular science of chromosomes, sex, fetal development, birth, contraception, and so on, the encyclopedia often answered some very obscure questions that only children could have thought of - and therefore it was clear how carefully is made. Today, as I understand, in France these books are already outdated and are no longer in circulation (in particular, in the third book, for teenagers from the age of 14, about homosexuality it is said that this is a “phase” that needs to be “passed through” society and to such thinking is now far away). I didn’t get to the third one, however, my parents bought only the first (from 7 years old) and the second (from ten years old) volumes of the encyclopedia, published then with a record 600,000 copies. In the first, semischematic harmless pictures and a very simplified, but honest story for the youngest, in the second there were also photographs, and a naked French woman from one of the turns for thousands of Russian teenagers became the first real sexual experience. Today, about that series of books, Russian moralists write the following: “Against the background of similar, supposedly childish, supposedly developing books with vivid illustrations, pornographic magazines looked as bland and colorless as the posters“ Wash your hands after the restroom ”." And they even accuse publishers of conspiracy against Russia and work in the pedophile lobby: “In the Soviet Union, only children's books were published in such numbers. The tradition was observed. Encyclopedia was also addressed to children ... From which foreign city were sent money for this corrupted edition, history domestic sexology is silent. "
Nevertheless, I would get to pornography in adolescence with books and without: by that time the pedophile lobby had managed to come up with the Internet. And of course, Sylvia Saint with Chacie Lane continued my sexual education here, but still I had to say thanks to those books - thanks to them I could understand how what is happening on the screen is true, what is actually happening there and why it isn’t a cast of reality, and a highly embellished fantasy on the subject. Therefore, when they talk about teenagers injured by pornography who think that the whole truth is on the screen, you should be reminded every time that this is only because no one bothered to tell the teenagers about the real state of affairs. And when they say that sex education in general is spiritless and immoral, I absolutely do not understand what is wrong with these people.
I had the Encyclopedia of Sex Life. It seems to be quite typical, and so were my peers. A thin book with a yellow cover, which depicted carelessly playing naked children, a boy and a girl. For some reason, for the first time, it seemed to me that these were two girls, and I didn’t see anything sexual about it. The book was compiled by French authors, contained a whole story of unobtrusively outlined sexual maturing of adolescents in conditions far from post-Soviet, and on the cover was a note "for children of 7-9 years old." The French authors probably knew better, but the book got into my hands, it seems, after I turned ten. Her mother bought two about two years earlier, along with the colorful comics that I begged of her. Not trying to hide cognitive reading, she, however, warned that I would get it later - perhaps because of my younger brother, with whom we read the same books and stored them on a common shelf.
Despite the quite conscious age, I don’t remember my reaction to the content of the book. There was no stunning excitement or deepest aversion. It seems I liked the pictures more. The way the characters were drawn, the cheerfulness they radiated, and the graphics themselves: idyllic mothers, pretty babies, frolicking children ... The only illustration that worried me in that very sense was where the young couple was shown at the moment of sex. But by the time I first opened this book, some vague ideas about the process already existed in my head, so the illustration did not become a discovery for me - more likely a confirmation of my fragmentary knowledge.
If we talk about the memories of this book that filtered my memory over time, I would characterize them as very positive. And I would be glad to replace a frank conversation with my children with such an encyclopedia. Frank talk to me, like many people, is poorly given, but I would answer questions somehow.
My six to seven years fell into a period of total liberalization, and in the field of book publishing for children, too — in the end, I didn’t have even one bold source of knowledge about the human body, but several at once. In addition to the legendary reference book, Pochemuchka, which did much to ensure that Wikipedia became my main website for relaxing in the future (there the topic was only mentioned in passing), I really liked to read and reread two American books published in our early nineties: " Growing up healthy "by Robert Rotenberg, the appeal of which was largely determined by the fact that the benefits of aspirin, jogging and differences between the sexes from the local illustrations were told by quite official Mickey, Donald, Goofy and others like them, and the" Secrets of Anatomy "illus trattoria Carol Donner, tells the story of how reduced to microscopic size of a boy with a girl are taken to different parts of the human body (by the way, the female, if I still remember correctly). Curiosity about the work of the body, these sources satisfy quite well - although sex as such, it seems, there was almost not considered (but the functions of the genitals were described quite readily). Of course, the parents themselves bought these books and put them on a shelf in a prominent place. Many answers to my "why?" I also received it from my grandmother-radiologist: for example, it was she who explained to me why we need tampons and pads, the advertisements of which appeared in the mid-nineties on television rather suddenly and in large quantities. Of course, with the onset of puberty, completely different information and other books were needed (searching for keywords typed in Russian, in the late nineties led to pages with pornographic stories): I remember very well how much time and energy I needed in fourteen years to buy a thin brochure about the types of sex in a book tent in the transition from the metro station "Academicheskaya".
I learned to read when I was three years old: my elder brother went to elementary school, taught the alphabet and put syllables into words, and I was spinning around and sharing. Then, probably, for the first time I got to the book “Where I Come From,” and maybe I looked at the pictures before. In this book was funny depicted a man - bald, short, with a tum. On the shelf with children's books was another such book, Encyclopedia of Sex Life for Children of Primary School Age, also with pictures, thin, with a blue cover. I will not say that these were my favorite books, I read everything avidly (and if my parents didn't hide these encyclopedias, then some adult literature was accounted for), but, of course, it was interesting. To be honest, I do not remember my first impression, but, it seems, they never told me what they found in cabbage - but I surprised and shocked many friends in the yard, kindergarten and later in school with my knowledge.
Guide to female physiology: I was five years old, I was digging on the shelves of my father and found an erotic magazine in which, surprisingly, the texts were more powerful than pictures. In the photos, the girls were sitting, legs apart, on sports equipment, the cover of which was replaced with velvet. The texts are their direct speech, which combined poetry and incredible (for me, a five-year-old) frankness. I stole a magazine to read before bedtime, hid it under a bed, but at night it was found by my grandmother, who for some reason began to sob loudly. My father could not say anything - well, do not scold me. In general, the main word applicable to sex in Russia, I realized - is "taboo". Well, I studied my own reaction to velvet, naked body and erotic texts.
Further it was not so interesting: the yellow Encyclopedia of Sexual Life with naked children on the cover became my reference book, from which I learned all the details. It seems to me that by that time I already knew everything - cable television, which was switched on at night on one of the federal channels, is much more informative. But the hand-drawn infographic telling about the device of the vagina and penis, from the book, I remembered forever.
I did not receive sex education, as awareness and awareness in the family. The topic of sex between me and my parents never rose, to be honest, I don’t even remember if I tried to start a conversation about it myself. During kisses on the TV screen, even in children's cartoons, I closed my eyes or switched the channel. Of course, I wondered where the children come from, but put this thought aside "until later, when the time comes." Accordingly, I did not see any sexual literature in my childhood. At the age of eleven, I watched Romeo and Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and, I remember, was pretty dumbfounded: what are they doing there? A few days later I bought Cool Girl magazine, and it became my first sexual literature, as far as it was possible. Later in our school, the local perinatal center gave a lecture on protection (only for girls), but by that time my older cousin was aware of everything. She gave me two tabloid novels where sex was described with beautiful phrases like “his marble rod”. It was a funny and embarrassing read. OK. Wand
Now my daughter is 4.5 years old, and she quite often raises the question "where do children come from." Today, before school, she said with a very serious look: "When a child is born, the muscles and bones of the mother's pelvis expand to let the fetus out." At the moment she does not have separate books about sex, but there is about how the human body works. And the cartoon "Once upon a time was life" (old French), it looks quite often, in one series there was a topic about how children appear and why boys are different from girls, and why all this is needed.