This Was Television Asked & Answered: Was there a show or scene from a show that you were mortified to watch with your family? Did an awkward birds and the bees talk follow?
We’ve brought back Asked & Answered for a special love-themed edition, brainstormed by Kerensa and Emma. To quote Kerensa, “we thought that February would be the perfect month for this as it is the so-called month of love (and all that crap),” and the editors agreed!
So for each Friday in February (and one Friday in March), they’ve concocted a TV question related to love, sex, and romance for our writers to answer. The answers will be enlightening and embarrassing in equal measure. We hope you enjoy, and feel free to reply to the question with your own answer in the comments!
This week’s question is: Was there a show/scene from a show that you were mortified to watch with your family? Did an awkward birds and the bees talk follow?
Emma: I have a sister who is six years older than me so I watched a lot of TV and movies that might have been considered “too mature” in my early teens. My sister got a TV in her room long before I did and this is where I watched shows such as This Life (starring Deputy Rick himself, Andrew Lincoln). This Life was rather provocative at the time and often featured somewhat explicit sex scenes and I remember my mum walking in during one such scene. This moment was mirrored a couple of years later, when I too had a TV in my room and I was watching the equally risqué Queer as Folk (UK version). This incident was also mortifying.
Neither resulted in any further chats and as with the way my dad would change the channel if a Tampax ad came on, we just pretended that none of this stuff happened. Got to love the stereotypical British way of not talking about sex.
Whitney: Again, ours wasn’t so much a “birds and the bees” type of household so much as a “figure it out” one, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t attempts to get me to stop watching shows when questionable content came up. What’s weird is that what I was allowed to watch doesn’t really make sense compared to what I wasn’t. My dad and I watched every single episode of CSI: together from the very beginning (it started when I was nine) and the violence or gore of crime scenes was never an issue. But when people started making out or further? That warranted a dive across the couch and hands covering my eyes with a semi-joking/semi-serious “can’t watch that!”. Nothing can define cognitive dissonance quite like being able to watch a crime lab reenactment of a baseball bat to a skull, yet not witnessing Nick or Warrick make out with someone 20 minutes later.
Noel: Nope. We just sit there, silently, not saying anything. And then pretend it didn’t happen. This is how we deal with sex in the Kirkpatrick household.
Julie: This one actually happened in college, so no birds and the bees talk, but I remember watching an episode of X-Files with my parents where Mulder makes a comment about a woman named BJ. Apparently the fact that BJ is a euphemism for, well, you know had eluded me for 19 or so years, and I asked my mom all innocent-like, “I don’t get it. What’s so funny?” And then she told me what was so funny. Cringe.
Here are the other questions in this series about love, sex, and TV:
Which TV actor or character did you crush on that you now look at and think “Why?!”
This Was Television 
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