Blow-Up Doll? Wow Dad, Thanks for the Gift

I gave my 13-year-old son a Playboy magazine and an inflatable sex doll.

And it wasn't even his birthday.

Wow. My T-shirt is right. I am the World's No. 1 Dad.

Some of you don't look convinced. In fact, some of you look like you just got a mouth full of Novocaine. I can see your jaws dropping from here.

Don't judge. Unless you're raising the Boy in the Plastic Bubble, your teenage son has seen pictures of nude women -- if not in Playboy, then in some other magazine or on the Internet.

They were likely shown to him by another hormonal teen. At least I could talk about the images with my son, explain that women in real life aren't airbrushed and given several coats of varnish.

Thank God.

I am an unapologetic liberal feminist who took women's studies in college and wants to be Gloria Steinem when I grow up. As turn-ons go, I prefer the women who write for Mother Jones over the ones who pose for Maxim.

Leafing through Playboy, my son and I talked about how women (especially young women) are reduced to objects. Never mind their thoughts and feelings. They are pieces of meat to be drooled over and conquered.

If you conquer a lot of them, you're a "stud." If a woman conquers an equal number of men, she's a "skank" or "ho."

Son, meet the double standard.

We also talked about how pornography's obsession with perfect young bodies not only perpetuates a false standard of beauty but also promotes a certain form of pedophilia. See Hugh Hefner, an 82-year-old pervert who has aged about as gracefully as the Crypt Keeper, who uses his money and status to have sex with women young enough to be his great-granddaughters.

Men like that lead women to believe their only value to the world are their vaginas. And that's flat-out sick and wrong.

Women are put on sexual display throughout our society, usually as a means of selling something. I told my son it's OK to be aroused by such images. They are calculated to carbonate male hormones. Just know that some very scummy people are pulling your strings.

Now about that blow-up doll.

My son, like so many boys his age, was a mite confused about the female anatomy. Don't worry. I won't go into details. Let's just say the boy thought there was one big multipurpose room in the basement.

Someone needed to set him straight. I'd rather that person be me than Eddie Haskell, the jerk in home room.

I believe in being explicit, leaving no unanswered questions or lingering doubts. So I got a $20 inflatable sex doll and guided him like Lewis and Clark through the undiscovered country. Then, I hasten to add, the doll was quickly discarded.

So was the magazine.

I further to hasten to add that my son was absolutely perplexed why anyone would find either of those items suitable surrogates for interaction with actual living, breathing, thinking, feeling woman.

Such products are for brief educational purposes and cautionary tales only.

"At 13, you are on the edge of manhood," I told him. "You need to decide what kind of man you want to be." Men who buy sexist, exploitative garbage have to ask for it at the counter while women give them the stink eye, or they park secretly in the rear of "adult stores" and "gentlemen's clubs."

"Listen to me," I told my son. "No one even vaguely resembling a mature adult goes into an 'adult store,' and no real gentleman would be caught dead in one of those clubs."

I told him he should be the kind of man who can walk in the front door of any business in plain view of the street and wouldn't care if his sister, mother, grandmother or best female friend knew what he was buying.

He seemed to understand. We have lots of good father-son talks, he and I.

Nothing is taboo. The only dangerous topics are the ones that are censored and turned into tantalizing forbidden fruit.

My one rule is that serious talks require serious words. Sex organs will be called by their scientific names. Not Prince Everhard of the Netherlands. Not Squirmin' Herman, the One-Eyed German. That said, I will explain the meaning of any slang tern -- even if I often have to Google it myself.

That is my policy. And I am proud to say it works. I am raising a very sensitive, polite, mature and intelligent young feminist who despises pornography and respects women. There's nothing they two of us can't discuss.

Even if sometimes he pushes the envelope.

"Dad, why do some people like to have sex wearing handcuffs?"

Yikes!

Related: Girl Posts Racy Picks, Charged with Child Porn