Shame is holding me back from talking about sex with my son.

I’ve been circling around the subject of sex a lot over the past few years. I’ve had work to do on myself because of built up guilt over the way I treated women, starting from my teenage years. I now have a pre-teen son who I want, and need, to have open and honest discussions with about women and sex, but the shame I feel from those earlier years has me feeling inadequate to lead those conversations.

It was the words “You don’t know something is a cope, until it’s no longer a cope” from Bridget Phetasy in a recent episode of Modern Wisdom that made me realize that sex was a coping mechanism for me from my early adulthood. It brought to the surface a lot of feelings around pornography at a young age, a lack of education about sex from my parents, and more. It made me realize that the article you're reading now has been in the works for a long time, I just didn’t know how to start writing it. 

I was born in 1979, which means I’m right smack in the middle of the technology we know and love today being introduced to the home. My father loves technology, so we had personal computers in our house early on in the 80’s. This means that by the 90’s, BBS’ (Bulletin Board Systems), AOL, and Netscape Navigator, along with the chimes of dial up modems, were commonplace in the front room to our modest dwelling in southern Louisiana. 

Pornography sites of today didn’t exist back in the late 80’s and early 90’s. What we young lads lusted over was a sluggishly loading image, that grew down the screen line by line, creating anticipation around a reveal that had us feeling warm for reasons we were too young to understand. As modem speeds increased, and video started to creep its way onto the internet, the access to pornography for a middle aged teen was as simple as clicking a few buttons. Sex education had just been changed forever. 

I, as a young man, no longer needed to understand why sex exists. I just learned that with a few clicks of a button, I could bypass the courting, bypass the relationship building, and move straight on to the act of sex. I also didn’t learn that women aren’t always ready to have sex as they are in the videos I watched. In this adult fantasy world I was learning from, every woman was itching for sex, at all times, and I just needed to show up and give it to them. This crafted a young man who took those thoughts out into the real world, they didn’t just stay in an adult play world of fantasy and make believe.

Sex education isn’t just about the biology of our reproductive organs and why we have them. That is certainly part of the bigger picture, but sex education is about relationships, connection, dating, hormones, intercourse, reproduction, all the in-betweens, as well as all that can come from unhealthy and unprotected intercourse. It’s heavy and it can get nuanced, but it shouldn’t be cast aside because it feels embarrassing or taboo. And it certainly shouldn’t only be left to the school system.

I’m 45 now, so my memory could be off, but I remember 7th grade, and the one week of science class that was dedicated to teaching us everything we needed to know about sex. I remember the shoe box at the front of the class room that we could put embarrassing questions in. I remember all us boys making penis jokes, and giggling like goofballs the first time we said vagina to each other, along with the less proper words. Those moments in our protective groups are important in development, we learn what is proper, and not proper, to say outside those groups.

What’s also important, if not the most important, is the education that comes from within the family unit. I believe the lack of open and honest communication from my parents allowed my biological learnings, along with what I was learning from pornography and friends, to create a fractured image of what relationships and sex looked like in the real world. 

Losing your virginity seemed like a right of passage that was strangely discussed amongst my peers in high school. The desire to have sex was like an itch that I didn’t know how to scratch. All my teenage friends were talking about how great it was, and we know those teenagers had no idea what they were doing. I was watching porn regularly to reiterate how much these adults enjoyed sex, so the act of intercourse was always top of mind. I needed to lose my virginity. 

Getting into those details might be more than this article needs to be, but once it did happen, the flood gates opened. I was actively trying to find, and “date”, the girls that I could sleep with. I didn’t care that stories of how bad I was in bed were circulating. Having sex with a girl was loads better than masturbating, and I was chasing that high so I could keep recreating the acts I was watching in porn. I was learning how to create physical satisfaction without a care for the girls that were involved.

During your late teens and early 20’s everyone is experimenting, attempting to find themselves. We’re going to make mistakes, and we should do our best to learn from them. What I see in my memories is a young man who couldn’t do enough to recreate the sexual acts he was learning from porn. I truly believed that the women I was having sex with would enjoy recreating the positions and aggressiveness I was witnessing in pornography. It never crossed my mind to ask what they enjoyed, or how I could please them. 

I had an understanding that foreplay was a good thing, but I never knew there was an emotional element to those moments that prepared a woman for the physical act of sex to come. I just thought we needed to touch each other to ‘prime the system’. In pornography, there’s a formula that’s followed because they’re filming the progress of the act until completion; I tried to follow that formula to a T. Sex was about the pleasure of recreating what I saw in pornography; There was little communication, constant submission, and the man always finished. 

At this point, I know what you’re thinking, “Did Brian ever go too far?”. No, to the best of my ability to remember, I never raped anyone (update: someone told me I was wrong). In all of these feelings of creating submission from women, I knew there was a line. I don’t remember my parents talking to me about rape, or where that understanding came from, but I knew that rape was serious and it was a line that one didn’t cross.

That’s not to say I didn’t wake up in beds that were foreign to me, or in my own bed with someone who I didn't totally remember from the night before. Alcohol is certainly a part of my story, and something I plan to explore more, but unless it’s related to this discussion, we’re not going to veer too far off topic.

Somewhere in my mid to late twenties the shame started. Guilt was normal, the way I lived my life set me up for hazy mornings where I didn’t really remember all the details. Dr. June Price Tangney says that “guilt is related to a specific behavior, while shame is related to your whole self, implying a sense of being fundamentally flawed”. This is where I was in my life. 

As I would start to show interest in women, I would find myself stepping back, not engaging with them as I would before. I liked them enough that I didn’t want to use them and lose them. But I also didn’t know how to walk away from this desire to sleep with them. As a relationship would begin, I would feel weird trying to figure out if I liked them or did I just want to sleep with them. This caused me to “get weird” (in their own words), and they would eventually move on because I couldn’t get out of my own way.

I didn’t know it at the time, but this was shame from the way I treated women from my past creeping into my life. I wish therapy had been a part of my life back then, but I didn’t think of therapy as something to help with these scenarios. I just ignored all those feelings of brokenness and kept on living life. This is why I believe therapy needs to continuously be normalized in society. The more self-aware we become about our person, the quicker we know something feels off or different. From there we can reach out for help sooner rather than later.

These traits did carry themselves into the relationship with my wife. We have both had our own journeys, which have very much impacted our marriage, family, and kids. We’ve both found sobriety, worked through a lot of personal therapy, undertook a decent amount of marriage counseling, and had some seriously hard discussions. 

The sex that my wife and I have now no longer feels transactional. Which is what most sex in my life previously always felt like. The sex that my wife and I have now is a true emotional connection. It blows my mind how amazing this sex is to any sex I’ve previously had. Don’t get me wrong, a few times there things got pretty awesome, but what’s different now is that it isn’t only about my pleasure. The sex with my wife now is about our whole body pleasure together. 

A weird thought that came to me while writing this is that I can’t think of one time that I ever asked a woman what she enjoys. Of all the crazy encounters, I don’t think I ever came at the act of sex with a desire to pleasure the woman. I was only there to pleasure myself. I believe I just thought that the act of sex was enough for them, and so by ‘doing it’, they were getting what they needed. This is, and has been, a tough truth for me to accept.

I don’t want my son to have these issues. I want him to understand how to build a relationship with a woman, crafting an emotional connection, not only relying on the physical. Will he make mistakes? Yes indeed. I hope to help him become aware enough about himself that he knows what a mistake is to him and how to use that learning to adjust and move forward in life. I don’t want him to keep spiraling down the same emotional rollercoaster I did to try and find himself.

For this to happen, I need to be open and honest with him. He and I need to have candid conversations that introduce him to the realities of the world, and where he has control over how he navigates it. The “Birds and the Bees talk” is just the beginning. Sure, men fertilize (bees fertilize flowers) and women ovulate (birds lay eggs), but that only covers the functionality of sex. The way a man and woman interact with each other in life, and how they choose to engage physically, is much weightier than just the “in’s and out’s” of intercourse (pun intended).

Pornography is dangerous for developing minds, and access to it is only going to continue to get easier as the internet and technology surrounding it develop. Young men are going to get excited, and they’re going to show off what they’ve found. The hope is that when they understand what they’re looking at, or that they aren’t only learning from their peers, that the shine isn’t as bright. There can be a moment of hesitation, of remembering, that watching pornography shouldn’t be celebrated as an educational tool for those less initiated.

None of this is easy, and I don’t have all the answers. I’m just a dad trying to work through his own feelings of insecurity and ‘not enoughness’ so I can help my son navigate the world he will soon live in. Maybe that in and of itself is enough.

My hope is to start conversations around topics that help others live a life of fulfillment. Please share with anyone who may be searching for more.

Share