Not Family Friendly

Marty is my chinchilla. He is more or less my baby boy. I have other pets as well, but Marty demands the most attention. Chinchillas cannot be left alone for too many days in a row because they need to be let out of their cage to be able to exercise in a larger area in order to be able to digest food properly. When I'm going out of town for more than 2-3 days, I pack up Marty is his little carrier and we head off to my parents house so they can watch him.

I try to call every night in order to check in on how he is doing when he is away, and sometimes even to talk with him while he plays. But last night my parents had to call me because Marty got a little too excited and started to ejaculate. He's never done this before so I immediately start searching the web to see if this is normal or if I should be concerned. (It ends up that he is just entering into adolescence). During all of this searching one person commented on the chinchilla forum in the feed that I was reading about chinchilla ejaculation commented that the topic was "not very family friendly" which really got me thinking... does everything have to be family friendly? Is it even possible to have all topics be family friendly? And what does this phrase even mean?

The two immediate thoughts that come to mind are that it involves not swearing (which the feed didn't) and not talking about sex. While we may be able to control our language, I don't know if it is possible, or even good, to not talk about sex. Especially in this case. The animals we care for have very basic needs, including sex. It is built into their nature in order to be able to survive as a species. Yet, we as humans should not talk about it. We seem to be fine about discussing, or at least arguing about, sexuality, but when it comes to talking about sex it is taboo.

One of my favorite teachers in high school was my health teacher (who was also my gym teacher for three summers). He was a lovely man and he found great joy in talking about sex. On our first day of health class he wrote in large letters across the black board "Sex is good". But he went on to say that it is only this way if you are informed and in love. I believe that we live in a culture that knows little about sex and possibly even less about love, because of the silence the taboo has caused. I'm not sure if we are afraid of talking openly about the intimate, or if we are afraid that open and honest discussion will spur people to desire sex (especially youth), but I feel that our silence makes the thought more tempting then open conversations. And it also makes it less safe. In our attempts to censor ourselves under the banner of being family friendly, we are doing a dis-service to the young people in our care.

If we continue to try to use the abstract nature of being "family friendly" to censor ourselves, I fear for the future of our youth, who will only know about sex from the images they see on tv and in the movies. They will not know about different types of contraception or how to protect themselves from STIs. And as for me, as a celibate young woman with a chinchilla, I would not know how to care for Marty as he transitions into chinchilla adolescence. Perhaps we need to rethink what it means to be family friendly and what the costs could be.