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Let me tell you about my family. As a child, I spent a great deal of time with my father’s side, so I have an emotionally close, affectionate relationship with most of that side. I make it a point to visit them when possible, to call on holidays if I can’t be with them. They all esteem me highly, admiring my academic achievements and my worldliness (I was the first in the family to get a Bachelor’s degree or to travel widely).
However, they are largely conservative and occasionally sexist. Sexuality – my favorite subject of intellectual inquiry – is never discussed, unless privately between two people, and even then with hushed voices. In a group of three or more, the only mention of sexuality is the occasional x-rated quip, uttered exclusively by men. These are met with half-hearted disapproval that does not match the more severe disapproval that a sincere attempt at open discussion receives.
One year at Christmas, I gave to the above-mentioned cousin a book entitled Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut. This book explores the brutal slut labeling of girls that is rampant in high schools today. At age 15, she was old enough to be aware of (and hopefully to question?) this double standard.
“Oh, Zoe!” her father said to me reproachfully after reading the title, as though I had offered her an issue of Hustler magazine. “Did you get her a dirty book??” This is the same uncle who slipped condoms to my male cousins during a summer vacation a year later. My female cousin and I were never given condoms, though we were warned all our lives not to get pregnant.
“A dirty book?” I asked, perplexed. “No. It’s a study of the archetype of the slut as it exists the high school context.” Appeased by my gentle tone, but still disapproving, he muttered quietly along the lines of “Why would you get her that?” Meanwhile, the rest of the family sat silently in obeisance of taboo, neither expressing disapproval nor communicating discomfort.
I wanted, of course, to explain why I thought the book was significant or why it was silly of my uncle to disapprove, but I knew from past experiences that this would be futile. At best, they would avert their eyes and ask me not talk about it. At worst, they would each say the things they expected the others to expect them to say. For some members of my family, conservatism is sincere; for others, it is social protocol.
I believed that my grandmother would be receptive to a vibrator if given one discreetly, because she is, I believe, one of those for whom conservatism is largely protocol. I think this because of a private conversation that she and I once had—about the G-spot.
