Today, my 14-year-old daughter came home from school packing a rant.

This is not an unfamiliar circumstance, as any adult with open lines of communication with a teen knows. They love to rant, judge, blame and compare. Teenagerhood is about that: pushing back, seeing flaws, forming the self by bumping up against what doesn’t feel right and saying “ow.”

Sometimes her rants are about peers who annoy her or about teachers who, despite being surrounded by examples of sartorial excellence, insist upon wearing all the wrong clothes and dyeing their hair all the wrong colors.

Today’s rant was about her health class. “Mr. [redacted] told us to write down all the words we could think of about the sex ed stuff we’re learning,” she told me. “All the terms for the body parts. So we all did it. And then he wanted us to say the words. Say them out loud.”

I wasn’t sure why this bothered her so much. In our house, such words are spoken without fear. That’s been the case since my kids first wondered about how babies were made. I told them, using proper anatomical terms, and we’ve been in that zone ever since. “Yeah,” I said. “Go on.”

“And when we didn’t want to, like when nobody did, and the room was quiet and everyone was all embarrassed, he went into this sooooper long lecture about how our culture has all these hang-ups about saying those words. He’s all, ‘They’re just body parts. Like ears and noses and legs. What’s the problem?’ He used up, like, half the class period just ranting about it. ‘I let my four-year-old son say penis all he wants!’ he says. It just went on for…ev…er.”

Her irritation, as it turned out, was about the length of his rant, and the diminished amount of time the class had to actually learn the material they were supposed to learn that day. But it got me thinking.

Before I knew it, I was on to a rant of my own.

Penis. Vagina. Ovaries. Uterus. Clitoris. Vas deferens. Foreskin. Scrotum. Testicles.

The problem, as I see it, is that these are not just like any other body parts.

~

Dear Health Teacher,

I appreciate you for wanting to facilitate more comfort in using words like “penis” and “vagina” without shame. You are helping to arm kids with information they need about the mechanics of sex and sexuality. You want teens to be able to tell a doctor where something hurts or itches, and to be safe and satisfied in their sexual relationships. I know your job is not easy, and I know you do your best from a place of good faith. Thank you.

But hearing the word “penis” spoken out loud is not like hearing the word “ear” or “arm” spoken out loud.

Saying the word “vagina” is not like saying “foot” or “hand” or “belly” or “scalp” or “face“.

Words like “penis” and “vagina” point our attention to parts of the self that are enormously charged; that possess magic both light and dark.

Even now, in my perimenopausal slow-down, when I hear words like these spoken out loud, I feel glimmers of thrilling, disturbing, alchemical emotions and drives that overwhelmed me in my teens. I feel an edge of that super-charged, fabulous turmoil. It can still unhinge me.

My step son likes to bark out the word “Penis!” at random moments. I might be doing dishes, or helping another kid with homework, or folding laundry, but in that moment, my consciousness is overtaken by thoughts of an organ that I unabashedly, unashamedly adore. In those random domestic moments, I’ll blush and redirect my thoughts, because that’s not what I’m supposed to think about on Mom time.

Maybe I’m suggestible that way, more so than the average person or even the average teenager. And hooray for that, because sex is fun, and passionate overwhelm is not the worst thing I’ve ever experienced while doing household chores.

But still.

Perhaps these teens’ impulse to not bark these words out of context—to let them retain their magic, to hold them in reverence—is an impulse worth respecting.

Being able to yell out names of sex organs out of context separates us from the charge we have around them. Removing that charge is a well-intentioned—but lousy—idea.

The charge we feel around sexuality is linked with our innate emotional and sexual intelligence—the same intelligence that can guide teens to say “no” until they are really ready to say “yes,” and to steer their own ships through the dizzying archipelagos and surprise tsunamis of adult sexuality and romance.

Of course, we want to reduce culturally imposed shame around our bodies’ natural functions; school sex education helps do this. But we don’t have to dismiss the embarrassment and discomfort that come up when sex organs are being discussed in a room full of our peers.

We can make it part of the conversation.

Students’ expressions of emotion are something to welcome and acknowledge as part of the experience of learning about sexuality. These emotions are a brilliant lead-in to talking about how special and sacred our sexual parts and their functions are.

If we don’t let them feel something as part of the conversation, the message they get is that these body parts are just body parts, that a blowjob is the same as a kiss or maybe even a handshake, and that letting someone else into your most tender parts is no more intimate than having a conversation.

What if we honor the mix of big, sublime emotions that arise in sex ed class, instead of calling them a wrong-headed result of a prudish culture’s mores? Maybe teens won’t think we’re telling them sex can give you diseases or turn you into a parent when you aren’t ready yet—but, otherwise, is no big deal.

It is a big deal, and their hearts, minds and bodies know that.

Let’s not try to talk them out of it.

~

Author:  Melissa Block

Assoc. Editor: Kendra Hackett / Editor: Alli Sarazen

Photo:  Flickr