Monday, September 26, 2011

Fell EE tio and the Sexualization of Little Boys.

   In college, as a SOAN major, I read my fair share of the sexualization of women and in particular little girls, but I never believed that the same happened with little boys until the other day when the older son asked me, as we were sitting in the car, what "fell EE tio" was. I said, "WHAT?" Thinking I must have heard wrong, until he told me that some guys at school had told him it meant threesome in Spanish. Only then did I realize that fell E tio was actually fellatio.
   Oh God!
I told him it was something that nobody ever, ever, ever, ever, EVER did. EVER. I was so freaked out I couldn't think of anything else to say. This kid isn't even twelve yet and he already knows about threesomes. And a whole host of other sexually explicit things that I most certainly did NOT know when I was his age. And at the risk of sounding like a fuddy-duddy, what are parents teaching their kids these days? He interrogated me for several minutes, pressing me to tell him what it really meant, and then when we got home he just went to his personal Mac laptop and looked it up on Google and then came back and told me what it was.
   Sex Ed.pre-pubescent style.
I've never heard him say anything sexist, although, every time he sees a woman of color in shorts he does think she's a prostitute,  but the Googling thing did get me to thinking: If little girls are dressing and acting as women younger and younger, isn't it logical that little boys are getting their questions answered, as well as prompted by all the stuff bombarded by them on the internet? I know both kids have seen playboy magazines, they know what the Playboy mansion is, they just...know.
     I guess what really freaks me out is the fact that he seems so sexual so young. A few weeks ago he told me that his greatest desire in life is to see a girl go jogging without her shirt on.Is he physically able to appreciate this as a sexually developed human is? Or is he just reacting to all the extra-sensory direction in his life (his vast and hardly limited access to the internet, school, the media...) that tells him this is what this is, and this is how you--a boy--responds to it? I'm prone to thinking it's the latter, which is sad, because an early, in-adept, immature and crude education on sex is what breeds sexist and demeaning behaviors in our society. And now I'm seeing it in action.

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