On Thursday I saw that I had a very unusual notification of Facebook. Apparently one of my posts had been reported as being pornographic! Of course I had to find out which one as I would never dream of doing such thing - especially with my mum and several older relatives on my friends list..
Turned out it was one were I had mentioned what my 7 year old son had said that morning about getting his body parts mixed up. Its been a running joke in our family since he was a toddler and just learning to speak. He at that age had decided that if his boy bits included a willy then his sister's girl bits must have one too. I decided that to save confusion I would tell him the proper name for that part of a girl's anatomy. He took great delight at 3 in his new word clitoris.
So on Thursday morning he was running around the landing telling us that he didn't have a willy but a clitoris. I decided that I would share this on Facebook as I thought it was a funny anecdote. What I didn't realise that my use of the correct anatomical term for that part of female anatomy would fall foul of Facebook's porn crawler!
Funnily you can use the word willy as this is obviously far too English for an American corporation to be scared of ;-) So in honour of being marked as a pornographer here is a photograph of clitoria ternatea
So would you dare to use the word clitoris on Facebook?
The recent news articles about children needing to be educated about pornography really made me think as a mum of 2 young children. They are both allowed on the Internet and use both a PC and my iPad to access web sites and YouTube. Obviously at ages 9 and 6 this is under supervision and with parental controls in place.
However for a while the iPad was popping up mildly pornographic web sites due to automatic redirects from innocent seeming adverts. I don't think this happened when my children were using it but I would be distressed if they had been exposed to these images of naked women.
We have always had an open attitude to questions in the family. If my children ask me questions related to the birds and the bees I respond with the truth using appropriate levels of knowledge. The names of body parts are given their proper names even if we generally describe them as boy or girl bits for normal usage! My daughter has known for a while that a baby is made by a daddy putting it in the mummy's tummy.
On getting in the car on Monday night the radio automatically came on and BBC local radio was discussing the topic of teaching children about pornography. Of course my daughter heard the word and asked what it meant... So whilst driving along I had to give both children a brief description of pornography suitable for their age... They were both unsure as to why anyone would want to look at any as at the moment the thought of sex is thank goodness unappealing!
Then my daughter decided to use this is a chance to ask me for more details about how daddies put babies in mummies' tummies.. Not ideal timing with me driving and little brother in the back seat but honesty is best policy. They were then both trying to work out how the daddy didn't pee by mistake instead of making a baby... It's quite sweet that they think it just takes having sex once to make a baby (hope that discourages them from experimenting when older!).
How do you cope with questions about sex, babies and pornography from your children?
