When I was pregnant, the biggest mistake I ever made was not, as some may think, the weekly “family-size” package of Oreos, but rather reading all of those peppy advice books. This fact was most recently brought home to me during a downtown window-shopping expedition with my 8-year-old daughter, Clementine. We were looking at the displays in Black Hound Gallerie when I saw Clementine read something silently to herself; after a split second’s pause, she turned to me and asked: “Mom, what’s a pervert?” Here it was: the moment that all those advice books always referred to as a “teachable moment”; where I, as the parent, was supposed to deny my natural squeamishness and instead make myself available for questioning.
The last time Clementine and I had such a “teachable moment” was the time I rented Love, Actually to watch with her over Christmas break and somehow forgot about all of the incredibly graphic (but funny) sex scenes. According to the teachable moment theorists, when two of the characters started to assume a position that even I didn’t know the name of, I was supposed to turn to Clementine and calmly ask her if she had any questions about what she was seeing onscreen.
What I did instead was jab frantically at the remote control for a full minute (before finally realizing it was the control for a stereo that stopped working two years ago), toss all the pillows off the couch in a futile search for the DVD remote, and then, as a final resort, throw myself bodily across the TV screen. That’s when I noticed that all that snappy British dialogue had put Clementine to sleep probably twenty minutes before.
Hopeful of another reprieve, I glanced over to Clementine to see if there was any chance of repeat somnolence; unfortunately, however, it seems that Clementine finds Black Hound much more stimulating than Hugh Grant: she was wide awake, and still waiting expectantly for her answer. I could also tell by the gleam in her eyes that, in all likelihood, she already had a pretty good idea of what a pervert was; she was just trying to see if I would deliver the goods or if I would come up with yet another pathetic lie (like the time I told her that it was against the law for people to go to Disneyland more than once every three years). This time, and to the surprise of both of us, I delivered; or at least I tried to, while still staying within the boundaries of extreme tolerance. (Heaven forbid I should pronounce as “perverted” the very thing her future husband–or wife–likes to do the most).
“Well,” I hedged, “a pervert, I guess, is someone who, ah, thinks about, you know, sex, more than the average person.” Regretting immediately that I had committed myself to anything so definite, I began to backpedal faster than a Supreme Court nominee.
“Not that there is an average–I mean, people have been arguing about that forever. Look at Lenny Bruce. Look at the whole concept of ‘prurient interest’.”
Suddenly, I realized that maybe this was a “teachable moment”; I began to talk about the definitions of obscenity; about anti-miscegenation laws and forced sterilizations; even about James Joyce’s Ulysses and Nabokov’s Lolita, until suddenly I noticed that my audience was no longer listening, and had, in fact, probably had not been listening since the word sex left my mouth five minutes before; instead, she was skipping down Aspen street, singing “I’m a pervert! I’m a pervert!” at the top of her lungs.
So much for teachable moments. Next time I don’t care what the books say: I’m going with the pathetic lie. I wonder if she would have believed me if I’d told her that a pervert was somebody from Pervertia?