Egyptian Mum Part 2- The Sex Talk

One day, while chopping carrots, it suddenly dawned on me that I had been remiss in my motherly duties and had neglected the ritualistic sex talk which all parents must endure at some time in their lives:

Suddenly overcome by an urgent sense of parental responsibility, I ran upstairs to where B1, B2 and B3 were playing...

Me: Ummm...boys do you need me to give you the sex talk?

Boys: No Mum, we know everything

B2: Yeah, we know about the penis and the vagina

B1: *giggles like a little girl* You said vagina

Me: Cool, then my work here is done *moon walks out of the room*


OK. So maybe I didn't do too well on the whole sex talk thing. But it's not like I had a good role model....

Egyptians love analogies. They have an analogy for everything. Nothing is what it is, it is always what it is like- men are like walls, women are like cat meat- you get the picture. Not surprising really when you consider what a flowery language Arabic is compared to English.

Consequently, my Mum's version of the sex talk did not involve a penis, or a vagina or birds and bees. In fact my Mum's sex talk did not involve sex at all:

" A woman is like a flower. The first time a man smells a flower, it
smells so lovely. He wants to keep smelling it. But the more he
smells flower the less he can smell until he can no longer smell
the flower and then he doesn't want it anymore and he
looks for another flower."

I first got the sex talk when I "became a woman". Until I got married, the sex talk was an annual event- always the same, never wavering. Without fail, my mother would sit me down and repeat the sex talk word for word (and she NEVER moon walked out of the room when she finished- that was my little innovation!)

I could be forgiven for thinking that I was actually getting a lesson in the fine art of flower arranging, or that sex was something that involved sniffing or that my mother's sex talk was an, albeit obscure, caveat against unpleasant body odour.

It did, infact, take me quite a few years to decipher my mother's coded message about sexual relations between a man and a woman. But by then it was too late... I'd already been sniffed and discarded in favour of another more beautiful flower with an alluring and hedonistic perfume that no man could resist.

My mother's analogy is not completely lost. With a few minor amendments I could really make it work. How's this:

Life is like a rose bush. Watch out for all the pricks!

*moon walks out of the room*