Well dear readers, my family was eating lunch at a cafe today. At a nearby table was a large group of teen girls with a couple of totem male friends (unsurprisingly, placed on the end of the table). As is now so often the case, they were inclined towards the noisy, vulgar and skimpily-dressed end of the spectrum.
My wife said to our son something along the lines of ‘don’t even think about bringing one of them home … we’re not sharing our stuff with the likes of them. If you want to be exploited, don’t get us involved.’ She’s only a small ‘f’ feminist, you see.
We briefly spoke about the need for him to exercise careful judgement in this regard, drawing on a couple of personal examples we know of.
Oh, and there was also a bird doing the rounds at the cafe too. An ibis. A waitress stopped and asked me if it was bothering me. ‘No’, I said. ‘I’m used to them by now’. My son mentioned that the popular name for these birds was ‘bin chickens’. They seem to be a bit like feathered rats, poking around much of the the time to get a free feed.
Which brings me to the point of this post. It’s a worrying time to have a teenage son. If you’re in the same situation, what are you doing to get him ready for the coming onslaught? And sex is only part of it.
Are you putting a book or books on his pillow? If so, which ones? One possibility might be Jordan B Peterson, for example.
What are you telling your son/s, and what are you leaving for him/them to discover for themselves?
I’m personally curious. Not asking for a friend.
See also:
The rise of the ibis: How the ‘bin chicken’ became a totem for modern Australia (7 September 2018) Possibly one of the most informative & entertaining articles ever to grace ‘The Conversation‘ website.
Elsewhere in this blog:
Len & The Lamprey: The other side to the issue of financial abuse
Feminism and Buddhism – Another shared cafe experience but with female attendees drawn from the next higher age group. And I don’t remember there being any birds present.