In our family, the theme of sex was not to be banned, it simply did not exist. at all. But the time was like that. Not only my mother was silent. The adults were silent, the school was silent, television and the press were silent. It was like an information vacuum.



Even fresh were the echoes of the telemost of the 86th year “Leningrad-Boston”, when the phrase “In the USSR there is no sex” flew to the people.

Someone pronounced it with pride: “There is no sex in the USSR!”

Someone uncertain, as if doubting, seemed to be, but he did not see.

And somebody just said, “There is no sex in the USSR? Okay well”



Of course, we all know that the phrase itself was, as they say, pulled out of context. In the USSR there is no sex, there is love. There was only “sex” in the people.



For me, this phrase became the embodiment of the time of my adulthood, puberty. It was a time when I changed both in my head and body. Time for my unanswered questions.



The first interest is believed to have appeared in the kindergarten.

For me, a girl who grew up in a full matriarchate, with a rare Sunday daddy, it was twice as interesting as they, with boys, everything is arranged there. Our kindergarten games with daughters-mothers became more and more mature, and the games of doctors became more and more interesting. And in the quiet hour, moving the tabs, we and the girls quietly whispered that the boys, there, everything is confused - a lot of superfluity.



By graduating from kindergarten, we had a lot of time: we learned a song about the fun captain, learned to burn on boards, showed ourselves and saw others.



Like most of the children of that time, who grew up in small military towns, I spent all my free time outdoors. I went home to eat and watch another series of “Well, wait!” 

The street was not just a place for games, for communication, it was a powerful source of information. All the most interesting, scary, shameful, all the most forbidden I brought from the street. It was the street that told me what adults were silent about.



On the playground, in an old wooden house with paint, in a proven company, before me opened the door to the forbidden world of adult secrets.



Our company was led by my friend Olga. She struck me and admired me with the knowledge of such a huge number of nonsense: anecdotes, verses, songs.

Every day has benefits:

“Listen to another joke.



A boy climbed on a tree, a police officer approached him and said:

Go down. Not a tear.

What is your name? and Gan.

How is the name? and Don.

Where does your mother work? In the pharmacy.

A police officer comes to the pharmacy and says:

“Your Gan Don doesn’t tear!

And in response to him:

I had to buy the size.”



All of this anecdote broke up. Everyone except me. I didn’t understand what was funny about the fact that a boy with a strange name, Gan Don, didn’t want to come down from a tree.



Olga asked surprised:

Do you know what Gandhi is?

No, I shrugged my head.

This is... a candy. Tasteful and delicious. Go to the store and ask.



But in her cunning eyes there was a smell, and I understood that if the Gandon was really a candy, it was very unpleasant.



Yes, by the way, children of the 70s and 80s, do you remember how condoms were called in the USSR?

Products of No. 2. There is an opinion that rubber product No. 1 is an anti-gas, product No. 2 is a condom, product No. 3 is a calash, and number four is a napalnik. But it is just an opinion.



Condoms were sold only in pharmacies and were masqueraded with undetectable gray squares, like packaging paper. No flavour and no flavour.



So, taking advantage of her sexual awareness and my sexual illiteracy, Olga often suggested to me:

“Jeanne, look, there are high school girls sitting out on the bench. Tell them they are prostitutes.

What is it?

That means they are beautiful. They will be delighted and give you chocolate.



I may have been stupid, but very careful.

I didn’t get close, I stopped nearby, made a friendly face and gently, kindly said:

You guys are such prostitutes.



In response, a rubbish and a piece of dirt flew into me. I understand, I have to beat, there will be no chocolate.



In the fifth grade, I went to the camp, and brought back the "precious treasure" - a promised notebook, where were recorded frankly nasty anecdotes, songs and verses, with explanations of incomprehensible words. For a week I obscured the popular Olga in our company, or even in our yard. So that’s the garden – I became the star of the city.



The friends came in:

Hi my aunt Julia. Will Jeanne go out? - And I was quietly, stealing, because of my mom's shoulder whispered, "Tetradku grab."



Mother styles from my testament notebook were scattered on other testament notes. I was mega popular. But not long. A week later, I burned this precious artefact in a titanium ball. The fear of being caught and hooked in something shameful obscured the thirst for fame.



And these pioneering camps, rural relatives and friends filled my sexual luggage with forbidden verses and scabies stories. Often the information received on the street was frightening and disturbing. She demanded explanation and explanation. To whom to go?



I decided and went to my mom. To my strict mother. I had only two questions. The first, somewhat late, but quite traditional and harmless childhood question - Where do children come from?

But here is the second, adult and dangerous question, I took everything out of the same cluttered house on the playground: “Mom, what is sex?”

In response, I got sharply and categorically: “Children are for love, and sex is dirty and shameful. They are just prostitutes.”



Mom’s intonation was frightening and did not have any further inquiries. Who are the prostitutes, I guessed, and so I realized the main thing: sex is bad, sex is dirty, sex is shameful.



And when the neighbor Natasha said that all the parents are doing THIS, I struck her with fists and tears:

is not true! My mother is not like that!



I studied in a rural school. Often there was a lack of teachers, lessons were combined. Sometimes housekeeping for girls and labour education for boys were transformed into one great common work. In this lesson, our constant worker Sergey Nikolaevich explained to us how to behave in the theater and who are homosexuals.



He did this as a worker, in a simple language:

“I go to school, I hear the boys in the class cuddle and say, ‘P@Doras! You are Dorothy! “They saw me, and their ears were squeezed, and they were squeezed. The word is literary and means...



And the laborer brought out a long, beautiful, incomprehensible word on the class board in large letters: HOMOSEXUALIST.



So, he says, fight for health, only literally.

Another worker taught how to behave correctly in cultural public places, in the theatre:



So yes, write it down. Not to roast, not to chew, not to mate. Nicholas, this is about you. And when you pass to your place, it is with apologies and face to face, because no one is pleased to smell your ass.



And immediately from the last part flew a quite logical question from the second-year-old Nikolayev:

It smells good at the front, right?



In the upper classes introduced a new subject "Ethics and psychology of family life". A dull, dull schoolgirl also dictated boring and colorlessly from the textbook under the inscription "family as a cell of society..." 

of boredom. We fell asleep.



And one day, either she got sick, or she resigned, but we had a new, absolutely amazing teacher. It was during her lessons that I saw the condom alive and learned that oral sex did not come from the word “orate”.



At one of the lessons, as a textbook, the teacher led the whole class to the movie "Greek fig tree". In the small theater we sat as enemies – boys to the left, girls to the right.

The essence of the film is this: a young sexy beauty travels around the country, embarrassed, flirting and looking at couples during sex. And shoots all this on camera to find out why people do love without love.



The same question was asked by the teacher after the film was finished.

But the two hostile camps were silent and tried not to look at each other. The boys laughed quietly. And the girls sat punctured by shame and outrage, because in the film was shown a lot of naked female body, and the male quite a bit, literally a piece of ass. And there was such a feeling that the boys saw us naked, and we weren’t.



But despite this shock, shame, and embarrassment, I was looking forward to the next lesson on “The Ethics and Psychology of Family Life.” For the first time I got answers to my questions. Not in the form of shitty verses and songs, these were correct and delicate explanations from an adult understanding woman. She spoke to us equally, like a woman with a woman, like a mother with an adult daughter.

Unfortunately, these lessons did not last long. Someone of the parents saw the disgrace and wrote a report to the director. And the “Greek fig tree” was replaced by the “family as a cell of society.”



Now my daughter is growing up.

And, remembering my teenage throws, this heavy burning soup in my head with a taste of shame and prohibition, I’m always open to her questions.

I never get rid of Dianka, say, it’s too early for you to know. Once he asks, then the time has come.  I am not ashamed to explain to my older daughter what my mother was silent about.



Well, what I can’t explain, I’ll help Yandex.