“I feel bad for her kids”

Because I divulge my deviance online.

I wear a hat that says “SEX” when I pick up my kids from school.

I don’t actually know what the teachers or other parents think of me. But I do know what anonymous strangers online think, because here – under my real name – I write about my sex life as a married mother. And some people find that troubling.

They say, "What about her kids?" “Doesn’t she think about her kids?”

This didn’t surprise me. I grew up in the Midwest, where deviation was noticed. I know the pressures of peers within a conformist culture.

So before anyone had the chance to suggest I was endangering my children, I asked the question myself. I posed it to my husband. “How will Happy Endings affect our boys?”

His confused expression told me everything. He grew up with a mother who would paint watercolors from the Brian Duffy Pirelli Calendars and hang them in the bathroom. Sex wasn’t taboo in his home. Mothers and sexuality were never mutually exclusive concepts in his mind.

The imagery that inspired my mother-in-law’s watercolors and encoded my husband’s sexuality

He said, “Our kids are a product of sex. They might find it gross, but parents are always gross in one way or another.” He said they’ll know their parents shag – it’s obvious. And besides, the moral judgment aimed at me was never about our children.

The moral judgement was panic, triggered by my openness, in people who never questioned the box they live within.

Isn’t it funny that moral panic so often disguises itself as child welfare? Like the ‘traditional marriage’ ideologues who worry about tots raised in homes outside of the two-parent heterosexual script. Or those Internet warriors commenting concerns over a stranger’s toddler’s screen time.

They’re afraid of something, but it isn’t gay marriage and YouTubers teaching sign language through nursery rhymes.

It’s deviation itself.

Something different registers as dangerous. Deviation becomes deviance. Their worldview is bound by a box that was supposed to keep them safe, but never actually did.

All this moral uproar makes me think of The Scarlet Letter, which was required reading even in my suburban Midwest school. Most people remember the terror of being labeled an outsider. Fewer seem to remember that Hester’s openness didn’t destroy her, but Dimmesdale’s secrecy destroyed him.

Promotional material from the 1926 film of the 1850s novel

Anonymous internet users believe that expressing my sexuality in public harms my children. The alternative they’re proposing is silence. And silence is a known harm.

In the home I grew up in, sex was so taboo my dad couldn’t even say the word. He called it “hugging and kissing.” My budding desire felt illicit. Where there is secrecy, there is shame. Where this is shame, there is fear. Where there is fear, education struggles.

Leaving the box I was born into made me more responsible about desire, my truth, and the systems’ secrecy serves.¹ Being raised in a home where sex wasn’t taboo made my husband a self-assured man, a whole human, a sexually satisfied person, and a great partner.

Everyone technically has the opportunity to peep on their parents. Bedroom doors are as easy to open as internet browser tabs. But who really does?

I never went looking. I didn’t want details. I just wanted to know my dad was human, and that it was okay for me to be human too.

When my children become aware of my sex writing, I imagine they’ll ignore it. Their friends might not. But frankly, it will still be a far more grounded education than whatever algorithmic mess they’d otherwise stumble into online.²

In our home, sex is not taboo. Our kids already know that babies come from intercourse. They know about their bodies. That erections are a biological mechanism. They know it might feel good someday, but right now they think it’s a major inconvenience.

Our kids may get embarrassed by my openness, but I hope they will never feel ashamed about their sexuality. And whatever frightens them in life, I will do my best to make sure it’s not me or their humanity.

Anonymous internet users: if you ever find the courage to recognize moral panic as discomfort with an inherited worldview, you too might discover relief beyond precedent and groupthink.

Then maybe your kids, like mine, won’t experience sex as fundamentally different from picking their nose, as my boss Cindy Gallop says.³ Something everyone does. Something to do safely, given nosebleeds and the risk of spreading germs. Something most people keep private, not because it’s shameful, but because it’s personal.

They might, unlike their mom, choose privacy. But that is different than silence.

Secrecy corrodes people. Honesty exposes them. Only one of those actually harms anyone. If you didn’t learn that in 10th grade from The Scarlet Letter, here’s the reminder. The danger was never a woman who refused to hide. It was the culture that demanded the hiding in the first place.

The best gift I can give my children is to model being unafraid. To be wholly myself – to do the work I’m called to do, to tell the truth, and show them that sex, and the art it inspires, is a healthy part of a fully lived life.

And for everyone else, I’ll wear a hat that labels me as such.

Emma Stone in Easy A, the modern comedic reimagining of The Scarlet Letter, from 2010 - my high school graduation year

1. I learned how significant one’s sex life is to their overall health. I recognized that secrecy only serves the existing systems – and that sharing my sex life online can model love at scale while supporting my relationship in my home. Where my husband and I know how the Madonna Whore complex works in heterosexual committed partnerships, and found our way to make it hot.

2. Kids as young as six are finding porn online, and, unsurprisingly, it’s not positive.

3. Go watch Cindy’s advice on how to talk to kids about sex and porn. She is building the sex education platform that the world needs — the MakeLoveNotPorn Academy. If you want to help your kids have a healthy outlook on sex, go there and be a member.