A throbbing, heaving education

Here's one thing you're never quite prepared for as a parent — the sex talk.

I know, I know. I should have been talking about it naturally all along. And I have been having lots of sex talks — just, you know, not with my kid.

His schools have been more or less taking care of it since fifth grade, but, still, I'm always on his dad — "Did you talk to him yet?"

"Let him learn on the school yard like I did."

Oh great, because that really has been helping generations of men (and frustrated women)!

But whenever I've tried to bring up the subject with The Kid, I get shut down faster than the bars at 2 a.m. "Mom!!!!!"

So the way I've handled it is to leave all sorts of books on puberty, babies, etc., around. Whenever anyone comes over, I get the odd look or two, but I can tell by the dog-eared pages that someone's reading them — and hopefully not my male guests.

But when you come down to it, how did most of us learn about sex? Some women have written in to LisaBindaCity's on romance novels, Bodice Rippers, and how reading them as teens introduced them to the world of carnal knowledge — where everything is throbbing and heaving.

I'm all for throbbing and heaving but that was, for better or worse, not exactly my intro to sex. I actually learned about sex from my parents. Oh goodness, no — they didn't talk to me about it, but they sure had a lot of books — "The Joy of Shttp://www2.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifex," "Our Bodies Ourselves," "The Kama Sutra" — in their bedroom. So I did a lot of reading, even though I had to do a lot of sneaking around to do it. (Note to Mom and Dad: Sorry! I went to confession and God forgives me. Do you?) But the best education was, of course, my best friend's older brother's Playboys, which he conveniently left "hidden" under his bed. In other words, good ol' fashioned porn.

The funny thing is, romance novels — which the says account for 26.4 percent of all book purchased, about $1.4 billion a year — offer women the same thing porn — be it Playboy, Hustler or sites like EuroTeenSluts.com — offer men: part titillation, part escape, part promise of something other (and presumably better) than what they have.

And the rather innocent bodice-ripping/throbbing members of the past have now taken a decidedly more erotic turn, becoming more pornlike than ever.

But then again, so have things like cookbooks and food blogs lately, not to mention whatever's happening in the movies, on TV and displayed in magazines. I don't know anything that hasn't been pornified.

When I was young, we had to work really hard to see things we weren't supposed to see. Now kids can download it on their cell phones or open a romance novel ... or cookbook for that matter!

So, what's porn and what's not?

Do kids know more about sex than we did at their age, or are they just getting a skewed version of it?

And shouldn't "throbbing manhood" be a part of everyone's daily vocabulary (if not activity)?