The Truth About Girls

I always imagined that little boys were crazy masturbating from the moment they popped out of you, but actually it's little girls who are totally into their junk from age two or three. I also now understand the patriarchal fear of the vagina, because my daughter wields that thing like a gladiatorial weapon, all serrated and claw-toothed and shit. When she was three, I used to drive her brother to school with another six-year-old boy I'll call Ben. My daughter would diddle herself in her car seat and grin at Ben.

Ben told his mother, "I want to look away, but I can't."

My son recently told me about an incident in which his sister, who is half his size, managed to stick her naked vagina in his face while he was trapped under a couch and couldn't move. According to him, he was so traumatized "I cried for an hour."

"But was it really that bad?" I said, thinking, It's not even hairy or anything.
"Are you kidding me?" he yelled. "Have you ever had a vagina stuck right in your face?"
"No," I admitted. I'd had my chance in college, and I just never went for it, so what would I know, but I do believe that the pre-sexual boy's fear of the vagina is no joke. According to Camille Paglia, "...a boy thinks female genitals a wound, from which the penis has been cut. They are indeed a wound but it is the infant who has been cut away, by violence: the umbilical is a hawser sawed through by a social rescue party."* Thank you, Camille, I was wondering about that.

My daughter and her friend I'll call Rose have been playing at sex, or having sex, (I'm not sure what the difference would be), since they were at least four. Years ago, Rose told her mother, "We're lesbians." Back-peddling recently, she told me, "We're not gay but we're a little bit gay right now," sounding exactly like Ted Haggard. They were giggling and saying they had secret that they couldn't tell me but then, Oh alright, we'll tell you. "We pretended to have sex the other day. And it felt good."  Oh, whatever, I thought, you really think you can shock me now, little girl?

Having uninhibited girl children presents a problem for forward-thinking parents. We don't want to suppress all this healthy libidinal pro-pussy energy; why would we do that? To turn them into miserable humiliated 'tweens like we were? To be fair, my parents were totally ok about sex, but the culture around it has changed so much. At the same time, there's a point where it starts to get a bit scary. Like when the building Super has to come over to fix something, as happened to a friend I'll call Diana, while her daughter was lustily masturbating on the floor, all ten fingers deep inside her plumbing. Diana finally had to say, "That's something we might want to do in private, Sweetie."

*Sexual Personae. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, p. 16