Growing Up Sexless in Brooklyn

Now the oldest of my family's three generations of women, I am constantly amazed at how far we've come from my passage into womanhood, shrouded in mysteries and taboos, to today's free and open dialogue between mothers and daughters.

In my entire life with my mother, I never spoke a sentence to her that had the S-word in it. Learning the facts of life was not something we did at home, and certainly not something we talked about at home after we learned them.

Nor did we learn them at school. Sex education was not on the curriculum in elementary school, and was addressed in high school only as its role in reproduction, complete with charts and parts we never associated with our own bodies. The woman who taught this subject was clearly as uncomfortable with it as my mother. Somehow, she succeeded in making what has been the driving force of life since the beginning of time the most boring hour in the entire week's curriculum. I speak of the girls' class here. I suspect the discussion was livelier in the boys' class.

In my family, nobody went through puberty. These matters were not discussed. Fortunately, I had two older sisters to turn to when my period made its first frightening appearance. They introduced me to that basic fact of female life and assured me that I didn't need to go to the emergency room. My aunt made a special trip across the street to hug me and whisper in my ear, "Today you are a woman." I was eleven years old. I didn't feel any different from the kid I was yesterday.

Buying Kotex in those days when sex was in the dark was a sensitive issue. Since stores were not self-service then, you had to ask the sales clerk for them, so you waited until a woman was behind the counter. One of life's great embarrassments was having to ask a man for a box of your monthly needs, which were always stored out of sight. That's why, when I was just a kid, before I became a woman, I was often sent to the pharmacy by older sisters and cousins who didn't want to risk dealing with a male clerk. Not knowing what I was buying, and not yet indoctrinated in the shame of my sex, I skipped to the store, plopped my quarter on the counter and, following instructions, I announced to all within earshot, "I would like a box of sanitary napkins, please."

"Sex" wasn't the only word on the taboo list when I was growing up. When I came home from school one day and announced that Mrs. Wilson, my English teacher, was pregnant, my mother gasped, and warned me never to speak "that word" again. Nor did we see it in print. An avid reader of romance magazines, "enceinte" is the first French word I learned (a precursor to my becoming a Francophile, perhaps?). This carried over to the movies, where "fading to black" hid a multitude of sins.

Getting my first bra was another rite of passage for which my mother set the standard. It was her firm belief that I shouldn't wear a bra before I was twelve. Well, Mother Nature and my mother were at odds here because it was embarrassingly apparent that I was ready for one at eleven. Taking matters into my own hands, I locked myself in the bathroom and cut an undershirt into what was probably a prototype for the first training bra.

This is one area where, in just one generation, sex came dramatically out of the closet. When my daughter thought she needed a bra (though the need was only in her head), we made a date to go shopping the following weekend. "Don't tell Dad!" she exclaimed. I promised I wouldn't, but as soon as my husband and I were alone, I whispered, "Amy and I are going shopping for a training bra on Saturday." He whispered back, "What are we training them for?"

The generation of girls now coming of age has it even easier. The first time Amy's early-teen daughter visited us in San Francisco, she unpacked her bags, then asked, "Is there a Victoria's Secret nearby? I need some bras." A discreet glance told me the need was not yet there, but the desire was. So we walked to Victoria's Secret and picked out several styles. She made her choices and they were packaged in the Victoria's Secret seductive pink bag, which she carried home in full view of the passing public.

How painless the rites of passage are now for a girl on the threshhold of womanhood. How enlightened that embarrassment is no longer a part of that passage. How privileged I am to be invited along on that journey.