Trigger Warning: Admission of parental sexual knowledge and sexual experience
Where Rosemary’s Baby Came From
Rosemary’s Baby was another source of sexual knowledge for me. I had practically memorized the book as a pre-teen and when the John Cassavetes film was broadcast on TV in the 70s, I watched it every chance I got. I still preferred the book, however: besides a mention of
Rosemary’s menstrual period (!), there was a fairly graphic (by my 11 year-old’s standards) sex scene in it, and I studied it. Of course, the scene’s actual utility for me was limited by the fact that it was less a sex scene and more Satan raping a roofied woman, but at that time I was pretty unaware of pretty much everything and thus was willing to work with it. Perhaps I allowed myself to hope that when I did actually become intimate with someone that it would be of my own free will and there wouldn’t be a coven of geriatric witches observing my mad Cosmo skillz.
Fast forward about 20 years and you can find me in front of our video player with my husband and a friend who had admitted to never having seen Rosemary’s Baby. I couldn’t imagine not being acquainted with this magical book of my formative years that contained in its pages sex, witches AND Satan! I stand by my assertion that Rosemary’s Baby is a classic that has actually aged very well.
A movie night was set. I rented the film, our friend thoughtfully brought some rosemary-flavored ice cream from the specialty gelato shop, and along with my husband we watched the movie with me shouting out the more Satan-centered dialogue, which I had memorized as a teen.
Perhaps I should mention that I was eight months pregnant with my first child. Picture a heavily gravid woman, intoning the line, “Satan is his father, not Guy! Satan came to earth and begat a child of mortal woman…!” as my husband and friend look on in confusion and, on my husband’s part, maybe just a whiff of fear. Once our son made his entrance into the world (for the record: his eyes were blue, not sulfur-colored with slitted pupils), movie nights were pretty much a thing of the past, but that movie night was a memorable one, a good one to go out on.
What to tell the spawn?
To aid my children’s own forays into the thick and misleading forest of sexual knowledge, I left plenty of good reading material on our bookshelves, including Rosemary’s Baby (there were, to my knowledge, no takers).
In hindsight, I practically force-fed them sex education in excess in order to ensure that they were receiving accurate information, rather than “hearing It on the Street” (and in using that phrase, I am now officially an old lady). Dan Savage, Our Bodies, Ourselves, Anaïs Nin, Nancy Friday books, Rosemary’s Baby (seriously!), and some dedicated, even gender-specific sex ed books for teens. Potential source material is still unpredictable, especially with the internet, and I could only deliver so many flash-fed discourses on single topics to my captive audience (in the car): Condom Use, Consent, Emotional Readiness, Peer Pressure. Apparently the convenience of a ride from Mum was more powerful than the dread of a lecture on sexual health. My mother observed my efforts from afar with approval: in the very early days, when I informed her that my 3-year-old son knew where his sister’s clitoris was, my mother quipped, “He knows more than most men in North America!”.
The Next Generation
I’ve read all the Harry Potter books, each multiple times, and I am always interested in new material from the Potterverse. My daughter became a fan of the Harry Potter series when she was about 5, and because she was also an adept user of the internet she could have had a throwback educational experience similar to my own reading past. Please check out this thread, posted by a woman whose friend was reading what he thought was the Harry Potter series but was actually fanfiction. See, people, you need to check your sources!!
Anyway, to both of my children I apologize if you felt I was officious with the Sex Ed. I meant well. I did my best to include a broader sense of what ‘Sex Ed’ means, and it is with pride as well as contrition that I relate how my 16 year-old son said to me one evening after our family meal, “Mom, are you going to be disappointed if I’m not gay?”. I assume he was having me on but the answer was, and is still, “Whoever you are, whoever you discover yourself to be, we will love you just the same.”
I Started the Prozac In Paris 