Sexy dreams – boys and girls fantasy world

Listening to a leak of Katy Perry’s “Milk Milk Lemonade,” a song cut from her latest album Teenage Dream, I was initially aghast at its robot-chanted refrain: “Milk, milk, lemonade / Round the back’s where the chocolate’s made.”

Ew. Thanks, Katy. But also, more directly: Thanks, childhood. While Perry may be trying to turn this little excremental ditty into a euphemism for anal, her use of public domain sing-alongs got me thinking about all of the roundabout misinformation that playfully plagues early sexual awareness.

God, remember when you first found out that blow jobs existed? Maybe you weren’t 13 (like myself), and maybe you were totally stoked (unlike myself), but the concept can fall hard on seemingly innocent ears.

Childhood, after all, is far from innocent. Sure, I thought that women were impregnated orally through French kissing, and that immaculate conception was a veritable phenomenon affecting the lives of the daughters of family friends (you can blame Sunday school for that one). But my Barbies should thank me for the glorious sex lives they led.

Plastics dry humping plastics aside, my pint-sized self was the victim of bewildering parental metaphors for sex and a mandate on fast-forwarding sex scenes. What I take away from my parents’ sheltering jihad is general bemusement more than anything. Because with all of the build-up, sex was sort of like that unseen monster in a horror film.

Imagination can warp and distort the beast so much before it’s seen. When it finally arrives – and I’m talking specifically about the ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s “Signs” here – you find yourself caught up in a plethora of politics, gender constructs and, yeah, maybe a life-threatening asthma attack too. But no one will get all these references, because that movie sucked balls.

My unplucked, homeschooled years spent knee-deep in film reels taught me that virgins get married to dashing young men in the best of movie endings and poetically take their lives in the most tragic. Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides” was one of those illicit movies I absorbed in secret at a young age as a self-administered form of sexual education. The film stayed with me as a sort of cautionary, albeit fictionalized, tale of what happens to young girls when they are sheltered to the extreme.

Virginity was a jar of pickles to keep locked in the root cellar, because if you sleep with the guy you’re groovy for before attaining the all-important wedding ring and marriage license, “He won’t respect you,” as Freddy says to Peggy on “Mad Men.” Extramarital sex was a leap I planned on taking into the dark unknown of deviant behaviors. But this was a secret I kept to myself amid purity rings, Bible camps and worship leading.

So when my confrontation with the scary movie CGI-rendered alien known as sex finally arrived, it came with little preparation, negligible protection and lots of effort. Yet, as the leviathan (i.e. a very large aquatic creature) finally reared its head, I was pleasantly surprised. This was no sped-up filmed frenzy of pretty people up to their necks in a sea of white sheets. Sex was and still can be messy, awkward, painful and (like Godzilla and the boogie man) scary at times.

But unlike the monsters that haunt children’s sleep, sex is no figment of our imaginations; it’s a very real act between two (or more!) very real people. While we wade through a mess of associations, assumptions and other such ass-es, we engage in an act of socialization so visceral and integrated into both our psyche and our physicality that our childhood baggage can’t help but get involved.

How do we take these childhoods of ours, fraught with their gendering nightmares, and segue into our sexy college years? I say, embrace the weird, Freudian clusterfuck that was your smaller self’s understanding of – I’ll whisper it – “S-E-X.”

Katy Perry’s regurgitation of literally shitty metaphors attempts to capitalize on juvenile humor, but I think she’s missing the point. It’s not just the sophomoric slang that made our transition from innocent to street-wise such an entertaining time. There’s something about that childish wonder and all-encompassing thirst for knowledge that translates well to the act itself.

Looking back at my youth, I am pleasantly surprised. While I may have been raised in a “conservative household,” my surroundings were imbued with a passion and doggedness that prepared me – albeit unconventionally – for an adventurous sex life. My parents may have tried their damnedest to keep me in the dark for as long as possible, but you’ve got to admire their endurance.

Tags: Katy Perry, milk, sex monster, under the bed

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 7:09 am by admin and is filed under Enticing Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.