What Your Parents Don't Know Can Hurt Them

When "high-class courtesan" Debauchette allowed Diane Sawyer to interview her for a recent ABC News special report on prostitution, her goal, she said, was to strike a blow against the "old Victorian trope" of the prostitute-as-victim. Instead, she became a bit of a victim herself. Though filmed in silhouette, her profile distorted and her voice electronically modulated, the blogger-prostitute got one hell of a surprise when her mother rang her up immediately after the broadcast. She said just two words: "I know."

Though few parents today can realistically expect their daughters to remain virgins until marriage, fewer still relish the idea of their children being paid for sex or, as in my case, having enough sexual partners to base a book on.

Debauchette's drama brought to mind the conversation I had with my parents following my decision, in 2005, to tell them about my own "secret" life. I was under contract to write an erotic memoir - - The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker, which would recount my sexcapades with dozens of men and too many orgasms to count. I assumed my parents would not be rushing off to the bookstore for it, but I did think they should know what I was up to.

I fared better than the poor Debauchette.

"Congratulations," said my father in his usual Brooklyn monotone. "But I won't be reading it.''

"I don't expect you to," I answered, relieved. I may not be a sex worker, but like many women who are, I struggle with the question of how much I want my parents to know. I'm 47, not some dewy 17-year-old, yet when I talk to my loving, progressive parents, sex is one of the few topics that remains very much off the agenda.

I was brought up in a happy, supportive Jewish family. Perhaps our bonds tightened following our relocating from a sleepy Jewish suburb on Long Island to vibrant, multicultural London. I was thirteen at the time, and the move resulted not so much in dizzying culture shock as in the complete rewiring of my brain. The girl who only weeks before defined "dangerous" as cycling down the hill no hands was soon hanging out in grungy basement clubs, dying her hair pink, and going to bed with boys who sang in punk bands.

At 16, I found out about sex from my best friend, Laurie, who had lost her virginity a couple of years earlier, just after turning 14. My parents were as loving then as now, but sex wasn't a subject that came up in conversation, and as a result I took their cue and kept my private life ... private. I may have been writing about it, but we didn't need to discuss the details. Being sexually active simply was assumed.

Ironically, in one of the most important conversations I ever had with my parents, sex was Topic A. At the time, I was unhappily married and contemplating divorce. My parents asked if I wanted to try working things out with my husband; I told them I wasn't sure. "Are you still having sex?" my father asked. The question took me by surprise - - not the usual father-daughter chitchat - - but it was absolutely right. He wasn't prying into my secrets; he was zeroing in a major problem in my life.

I told my father that my husband and I had not had sex for four years.

"If you don't have sex, then you might as well call it quits," he said. "Sex is one of the most important aspects of any marriage." I looked at my mother; she did not disagree.

My father's words were a revelation. I learned that my parents, well into their 60s, still were having sex. I also learned that I didn't have to stay on the shelf just because I'd had two kids and was in the twilight of my 30s. Shocking to admit but, until that time, I had assumed that, like me, the only thing my parents did in bed was sleep. My parents liberated me by teaching me that celibacy did not have to be my fate.

They may not like talking about my busy sex life, but they sure are smart about sex. If only more people were as open as they. People in the popular media, for instance. Diane Sawyer asked Debauchette if she had been a victim of abuse, taken drugs, had emotional problems - - the troika of questions used to reinforce the myth that trauma is a prerequisite for becoming a sex worker.

Violet Blue, a San Francisco-based sex educator, bristles at this common misconception. "There's still the assumption among the media that women who are too fond of sex or who work in the adult industry must have come from a dysfunctional childhood. The subtext is that liking sex in itself is somehow wrong." Bad parenting, she says, is "an easy crutch to hide behind, rather than examining the many reasons why we might want to work in the industry."

Therein lies the problem. Most people who, like Debauchette and me, find sex in quantity and outside of marriage, don't want their parents knowing much about what they get up to in the bedroom (or over the kitchen table, or on the sofa...). But we do feel the need to protect our parents from what others might construe about our upbringing. The sexually liberated woman, like the sex worker, has always been considered bad; today, her mother and father are thought to be even worse - - after all, their parenting skills are presumed to be neglectful, resulting in their daughter donning the cha-cha heels and strutting down the dark path to infamy.

In a recent London Sunday Times article about my busy swinger's lifestyle, the writer felt it necessary to point out that I was "The daughter of conventional and happily married parents in a close-knit Jewish family ... a bookish girl [who grew] up in London and America." True enough, yet I got the sense my bio was in the hands of yet another journalist who had struggled to find an excuse for my nontraditional lifestyle, and failed. Was I a disoriented international? A wannabe librarian turned hussy? A born rebel at war with convention? The writer missed the point. I'm no twenty-something bimbo sleeping around, aimless, in search of a dashing husband. I had that, and it didn't work out. I'm a middle-aged divorcee who made an informed decision to live a non-monogamous life - - just as Debauchette did in choosing to be a sex worker.

I feel for Debauchette. Her anonymity broken, she has had to endure unwelcome media attention. Perhaps worse, she must renegotiate her relationship with her parents. I face some of the same media-induced challenges - - unfavourable articles written by the conservative press, criticism of my sex-positive lifestyle. But instead of being dismissed as a tragic call girl, I am merely called seedy and undesirable rather than what I really am: sexually liberated and quite content.

My parents may not live my life, but they are happy I have found happiness on my own terms. They don't judge, but they know they themselves are judged.

"It doesn't bother me," my mother once told me, "but I don't want anyone to think I've been a bad mom." No doubt that's exactly what Debauchette's parents are thinking now.

Suzanne Portnoy is the London-based author of The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker and The Not So Invisible Woman, just out from Virgin Books. She writes about the sexual underground at SuzannePortnoy.com.