I taught my daughter the meaning of the word FUCK last
night.
Please stop reading now if you are already offended. I don’t actually care that you are offended,
I just don’t want to hear about after I tell the story. Should you feel the overwhelming need to
comment on my parenting or personal style, please rethink that position, and
then carry on with your life.
So, back to the word FUCK.
As a wordsmith and writer by design, I love words. All words.
I have always taught myself, and consequently my children, that there
are no bad words. (My mom would disagree,
and I can recall the taste of soap in my mouth as I say that, but that is
besides the point.) Some words have just
got a bad rap by being used so frequently as ways to hurt people that the word “bad”
is applied to them without regard to context.
And sadly, because we have often ignored context, some hateful words are
seen of as okay just because they don’t have a label as “bad” attached. Case in point, kids calling each other geek,
gimp, tard, fag, ho, and a plethora of other names have no idea what they are
saying in relationship to how hurtful they might be. Say the word fuck in the mix, as in “fuckin’
tard”, and even the youngest kids know that it is a problem.
That is sorta how the conversation with my daughter
started. She wanted to know why fuck was
a bad word. Giving her my usual answer
of “there are no bad words” was not going to cut it. So I wanted to know the why and how of why
she wanted to know. Turns out some kids
were having a conversation about a disease they heard of called “blue waffles”
that only girls get from fucking. Blue
waffles? Yeah, I hadn’t heard of it
either, but my radar of kid slang always being on , I did know that “waffle”,
like the words cookie, or muffin, was another name for a woman’s vagina. A blue waffle would be a really nasty disease
that you get from fucking that turns your “waffle” blue.
The internet was rife with info on this. Or should I say
mis-info on this. Yes, there is a
graphic picture of a woman showing her vagina with obvious bruising and
infection, and some colorful photo-shopping to make the whole thing look blue. This blue waffle is all the talk among middle-schoolers,
spreading the idea that a) the internet has the most accurate information, b)
sexually transmitted diseases are only one sided (only women get this,
apparently), c) that fucking was something bad and that if you did it, the
photo is what you get for your effort.
So when I told my daughter that no, you would not get a blue
waffle for fucking, it lead to a further discussion of what FUCKING really
was.
We started with the basic review that I had been teaching
all along; where babies come from, what sperm is, why you have a period, how to
keep yourself clean (with the vagina being self cleaning), and how boys are different
in reproductive activity. She was
attentive, but rolled her eyes a few times because, really, she knows all this
stuff, having had a very honest and open door childhood (for which I am
grateful!). “So what does FUCK have to
do with all this, Mom?” “It is just a word that got a bad rap when it means
having sex.” “Oh, okay, I didn’t know
that. That’s cool. Then why do people use it the way they do?”
I was a little stumped here, and just told her that sometimes
people are dumb. That if some boy comes
up and whispers in your ear that he wants to fuck you, it could mean that he
wants to actually make love to you, or that he wants to hurt you. Like every other word, it was all about
context. A guy yelling FUCK YOU to
another guy, while drunk, in a bar, probably did not mean for it to be a good
thing. A woman saying FUCK ME in the
midst of making love probably was just enjoying herself, and like everything else
we do in life, had a preference right then for sex that was a little
harder. We jointly came up with things
that sometimes we liked in different ways, such as running fast, or foot
massages. I told her sex was the same
way, and as an adult she would probably choose with her partner all kinds of different
things, including being fucked by consent.
I will stop now, because the conversation changed to all
kinds of different roundabout topics that nvolved health and safety, and love,
and respect, and disease, and more love. But mostly my daughter now has the
knowledge of what the word fuck means in all it’s contexts. I was more than a bit thrilled (secretly,
because outwards signs of it would have been too uncool for my daughter) that
she trusted me enough to ask, and that by the end of the discussion I think she
had figured out that nothing really was off limits with me and her. I mean, how fucking awesome is that?
