Brian Beckner and Cate McManus help you navigate the sex and relationship river. Submit questions to FanceeSex@TheBallerLifestyle.com
Dear Brian and Fancee,
Looking for some opinions/advice on how to handle giving my two daughters (ages 13 and 15) “the talk.” While this may not be in your wheelhouses of expertise, I do feel you guys are pretty spot on with your advice/approach on how to handle awkward situations in general. To date my advice to them, without being specific, is:
1. Don’t do anything you don’t want to do or are uncomfortable with doing.
2. Don’t get pregnant.
3. Don’t use our (my wife and my) bed.
Is this enough or do I need to go into “Birds and Bees” in more detail? I would prefer to take the Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell approach my parents and I took, but will follow your advice.
Would like to know if any of you received a “talk”, how it went, and whether there was a topic that you now think should have been covered or avoided.
Also, this seems to be some sort of an expected American parental tradition, is it done this way in Australia?
Love the Pod/Website,
Len in PA
Dear Len,
Thanks for writing in and thanks for listening!
I think the best approach is to first ask them what they know about sex – which let’s be honest, unless you’re Amish, is pretty much everything by now – then you can take it from there and explain that sex is for COLLEGE. I think putting the fear of God, so to speak, into teens is the best approach. Like showing them a graphic birthing video and some explicit images of STDs, or the nuclear option – show them all the seasons of Teen Mom.
Online porn is the biggest problem you’re facing – kids watching porn on their phones/ipods etc. and thinking that’s what normal sex is and then becoming de-sensitized to it. This is the more relevant talk to have at this point, that and teaching them to respect themselves which I’m sure you’ve been doing.
The only person I remember telling me about sex in any detail was a babysitter who I asked and she told me LOTS. I was so excited to find out finally and couldn’t believe someone was willing to tell me the truth, I think I was about 8. Also when I was a kid AIDS was a thing and my parents showed my this movie Christiane F. which was pretty controversial at the time about a young teen in Berlin who gets hooked on heroin, becomes a prostitute and eventually gets AIDS. My parents weren’t fucking around.
Let us know how it goes!
– Cate
Dear Len,
Unfortunately now that we live in the era of rainbow parties 15 is way too late to have “the talk.” These days kids have porno on their iPads and no one gets to tenth grade without boning their Spanish teacher. The fact that your kid has made it to 15-years-old without making you Grandpa Len should be counted as a huge victory in the war against horny teenage dick.
Should you have an open dialogue with your kids? Yes. Should you do it prior to them filling out college applications? Yes. But you’re actually on the right track with your discussion points. Sure, your kids are too old to get the birds and bees talk but they’re not too old to learn the more important lessons about sex and relationships. Namely that at this point there’s very little in it for them, but should they decide to experiment they should do it on their terms. Your job is to give them a judgment-free forum where they can talk to you (or preferably your wife) before they do something that they’re certain to regret.
– Brian
Occasionally we borrow questions from other advice columnists because our answers are better. The following came from Dear Prudence on Slate.com.
I have been married to my wife for two years, and we’ve been together for five. We have a great relationship, and both of us consider ourselves incredibly lucky to have found each other. However, so that I could understand her better, she recently told me some things about her past that have troubled me quite a bit. She said she has had quite a wild sexual past. She has slept with male strippers, been involved in aggressive sex with multiple partners that involved hitting, slept with a number of married men, cheated in most relationships, enjoyed getting choked during sex, and possibly even shared a sexual partner with her mother. She said she did these things because she was sad and depressed and sex made her feel better. She told me these things not to make me jealous or to hurt me, but for me to understand she is happier since she met me than she ever has been and doesn’t need to do these things anymore. I am having a hard time getting these images out of my head. Furthermore, I’m afraid this sounds like sexual addiction and that it could resurface. I’m desperate for advice.
Dear Reeling Husband,
I think you need to ask yourself why you’re having a hard time getting over it? Are you unable to understand that depression makes people behave in a way they wouldn’t otherwise? Most likely it’s that you feel like you don’t know the person your wife used to be, which scares you. Also, that small misogynistic part of you is freaked out by a woman’s sexuality and how it makes you feel. She was in a different place emotionally back then though and it sounds like she’s worked through that and has come out the other side. If you really can’t get past what she’s trusted you enough to tell you then I think some couples therapy would be helpful. Just remember what’s important now is who your wife is to you and what you have together, the past is the past and no one can change it and obsessing over it will only cause you and your marriage grief. Time to learn some empathy and not make this about you and your insecurities.
– Cate
Dear Reeling Husband,
“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-ey’d monster, which doth mock
The meat it feeds on.”
― William Shakespeare, Othello
You better believe I just dropped some motherfucking Bill Shakespeare on your ass. Unfortunately for you your wife can’t unsuck all of those dicks, and the more you fixate on that the more you’re going to resent her for choices she made before she even knew you existed, which not only makes you incredibly unhappy, but also a huge asshole.
Guys seem to have a difficult time processing the fact that women have the availability of pretty much any sexual experience that they choose to endeavor because there will always be partners willing to oblige. That’s a hard thing to absorb because for most guys that was never an option, and it’s from that place that the jealousy is born. If you could have banged some strippers you would have. If you could have finagled a threesome or two, you’d still be a legend in your fraternity. And you’d expect your wife to accept you for who you are today and not judge you for sewing your oats when it was perfectly acceptable to do so.
The fact is that we are all a product of the choices we made in the past and when we choose a partner we ask them to take us as we are. You’re probably not perfect, and there are things in your past you would change but you can’t. So why are you judging her for her choices? Being affected by your wife’s sexual history only serves to make you feel like shit and look like a pussy, so get over it. Embrace what you love about your wife, and cherish the fact that she may have had a million dicks in every conceivable scenario and every combination of orifices, but at the end of the day she chose to spend the rest of her life with your whiny dick. If you’d stop crying for a minute you’d realize that this actually benefits you.
I’ll use the airliner analogy. Would you rather board a transatlantic flight with some rookie pilot on the yoke who’ll probably piss his pants at the first sign of wind shear, or a salty veteran who flew 40 missions in Nam and knows how to massage the tip of that stick until the entire fuselage is convulsing in waves ecstasy? Quit being a baby.
– Brian
My wife has imposed a “bedtime” on me with the strangest possible punishment. Last month she decided I was spending too much time on the computer and not enough time with her. So she declared that if I am not in bed before midnight, then we don’t get to have sex. The kicker? She starts without me—and if I’m even a minute late then I’m not “allowed” to touch her as she masturbates. Her exact words were “I’m having an orgasm with or without you, so if you want to join in you need to show up on time.” On the one hand I feel like this is sexual blackmail and want to refuse her on principle. On the other, I recognize I have been ignoring her in favor of addictive computer games and I wasn’t responsive to her previous “non-blackmail” requests to join her before 2 or 3 a.m. To bed or not to bed? That is the question!
Bedtime,
Let’s start with the glaring issue here – you’re a full-grown adult who plays video games until 2 or 3 a.m.?! This kind of behaviour is not that of an adult participating in a healthy marriage. I don’t blame your wife, in fact I applaud her, the only thing I’d change if I was her would be to make the cut-off 10 p.m. Who the hell stays up until midnight??!! Grow up, put the video games down – preferably for good – and attend to your wife’s needs and stop being such a huge loser.
– Cate
Hi Bedtime,
Congrats on being an even bigger pussy than that last guy. I thought video games were the exclusive domain of guys who can’t get laid? You’re telling me, you have a willing, possibly hyper-sexual partner in the next room and you’d rather play fantasy games online with acne-riddled teenagers?
You consider a horny woman essentially begging you to come bang her “blackmail?” And you’d rather wake her up from deep REM so you can get your 3 a.m. nut after a particularly rousing game of Call of Duty with some dork in South Korea? I hope that by the time you read this your wife has already left you.
– Brian
