Читать книгу What We’re Teaching Our Sons - Owen Booth - Страница 18

We’re teaching our sons about sex.

We’d rather not have to teach our sons about sex this soon, all things being equal. Our sons would probably rather not have to learn about sex from us right now. Possibly everyone would be a lot happier if the subject had never come up.

But we have a responsibility, we tell them, as we follow the tracks together through the fresh morning snow. If they don’t learn it from us, they’re going to learn it from their school friends and all the pornography.

The pornography is everywhere, waiting to ambush our sons. Possibly it’s already ambushed some of them. We don’t know how we’re supposed to respond to all the pornography. Obviously, we have fairly rudimentary responses to some of it. We’re not saints.

But the sheer quantity, the scale, makes us feel dizzy.

And old.

‘Well,’ say the dads among us who actually perform in pornographic films, ‘yes, but …’

‘Sorry,’ we say, ‘we didn’t mean to –’

‘No, no,’ they say, looking hurt, ‘don’t mind us trying to earn a living, trying to provide for our sons. It’s fine.’

Obviously, it isn’t fine. But, come on, nobody forced them into the business.

The divorced and separated and widowed dads among us, of course, have their own take on things. They’re back on the market, whether they want to be or not, after years out of circulation. They all have thousand-yard stares, like men who have been under shellfire.

‘It’s all different now,’ they tell us.

We stop by a silver birch tree, its branches heavy with a month’s worth of snowfall.

‘Different how?’

‘Everyone has more choice than they know what to do with. More choice and more expectations. And less hair. Nobody is expected to have any hair anywhere any more.’

We know about the hair. Everyone knows about the hair.

‘The hair thing has been going on for a while,’ we explain to our sons.

We don’t know how we feel about the hair thing. These days, we realise, we tend to look at women’s bodies with a combination of nervousness and awe. Particularly the bodies of the mothers of our sons. We’ve seen what those bodies can do, what they can take. We’ve watched them carry and give birth to and nurture children.

We try not to think of women’s bodies – and, in particular, the bodies of the mothers of our sons – as sexy warzones, sexy former battlefields, because it doesn’t seem all that respectful.

But there we are.

We wonder how useful any of this is going to be to the gay sons.

‘Oh, you have no idea,’ say the gay dads.

But the snow has started falling again, muffling our voices, turning the world back to white, and we promised the mothers of our sons that we’d all be back in time for lunch.