Reading Sex-Ed Books for Kids

The New Yorker discusses sex education books aimed at children through the ages.

From the piece...

I looked up from my book.

“Hey, Dad.”

“Hmm?”

“What does ‘ejaculate’ mean?”

He put down the newspaper and sighed. I never did find out who stole the Countess’s blue carbuncle.

Kids today have different options. “You already know a lot about your penis,” Karen Gravelle begins, in “What’s Going on Down There?: Answers to Questions Boys Find Hard to Ask.” In “Sex, Puberty, and All That Stuff: A Guide to Growing Up,” Jacqui Bailey writes, “Whether her hymen is holey or whole, a girl is always a virgin if she has not had sexual intercourse.” Lynda Madaras’s “On Your Mark, Get Set, Grow!” includes a chapter subtitled “All About Erections,” although I’m pretty sure the Bette Davis joke is lost on her readers: they’re in fourth grade.

Think of the genre as something between Kinsey for kids and a juvenile “What to Expect When You’re Expecting.” Maybe you had one of these books when you were young. The big hits in the seventies were “ ‘Where Did I Come From?’: The Facts of Life Without Any Nonsense and with Illustrations” (1973) and “ ‘What’s Happening to Me?’: The Answers to Some of the World’s Most Embarrassing Questions” (1975), both of which were written by Peter Mayle, who went on to write “A Year in Provence.” If you put your mother and your father in a bathtub, Mayle suggested, you’d notice that they’re different. “You’ve probably noticed that already, but you notice it much more when you put them in the bath together.” “Vagina” rhymes with “Carolina,” Mayle explained, and an orgasm is like a sneeze. Gesundheit. You can see Mayle’s influence in the way the authors of these books try to be funny—deadpan and wide-eyed—but when they’re awful—phony, mainly, and joyless—there’s almost nothing worse, because if you’re nine and you’re reading a book with the word “uterus” in it, really, it’s bad enough already.