The Sex Talk

As our writer was to discover, the most difficult conversation you can have with your son hasn’t got any easier with the advent of internet porn.

- Benjamin Toledano

I WAS ENJOYING A WORK TRIP to France when I received a message from my wife telling me she had been looking through the search history on my 12-year-old son’s laptop and discovered he had been watching porn. I wondered how quickly I could change my identity, learn to speak French and unicycle, and start a new life as a street performer in Paris.

Because anything would be better than having The Sex Talk.

It was heartbreaking to hear my son had been searching for clips with titles like ‘Virgin’s first time’. I quickly understood what he needed to know, I just didn’t want to be the one to have to tell him.

I flew back to Australia, hoping to be hijacked, held hostage and executed, but there’s never a terrorist around when you need one. On the 23-hour flight, I thought quite deeply about how I might explain the mysteries of life to my son.

When I was 12, my mum had given me a booklet with a title like ‘How Babies are Made’. But I wasn’t interested in making babies – it sounded like something girls do – so I didn’t pay it much attention.

I half-recall a diagram of a uterus – probably the same one we studied at school in biology – and a caption about sperm meeting an egg in a canal. I already knew about the sperm-egg-canal thing, since I had seen it on an educational show on TV. But I didn’t know anything about sex.

To find out, I – like my son – turned to porn. In the 1970s, when I was young, we didn’t

have the internet. We had fishing nets. But we were gay. And by ‘gay’, I mean happy, etc etc.