(Why is the sex talk referred to as the birds & bees? Anyone know?)
I’m in the kitchen cleaning as the kids eat an afternoon snack and this is the conversation I’m overhearing:
9 year old to 4 year old, “Then we got on this giant slide and road down into mom’s belly! I mean her uterus.”
6 year old interjecting, “But dad’s sperm is really important, too! It’s important because it brings us to life and it connects with the egg.”
I did clarify there is no slide involved as far as I’m aware, but I can’t really dispute the existence of a slide. Maybe that is how little spirits come join their bodies. 🙂 Good reminder to review our sex talk with those who have gotten it and answer questions from those who haven’t gotten the full talk.
Ok, I had to look it up because when thinking about the phrase “the birds and the bees” all I came up with was a Cole Porter song. Turns out, I’m not that far off according to Wikipedia…
Word sleuths William and Mary Morris[1] hint that it may have been inspired by words like these from the poet Samuel Coleridge (1825): ‘All nature seems at work … The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing … and I the while, the sole unbusy thing, not honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.'”[2]
Several sources give credit to Cole Porter for coining the phrase.[3] One of the musician’s more famous songs was “Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love.” In Porter’s publication from 1928, the opening line for the chorus carried derogatory racial references like Chinks and Japs, later changed following CBS recommendation and NBC adaptation:[4]
And that’s why birds do it, bees do it
Even educated fleas do it
Let’s do it, let’s fall in love
Even earlier instances of this idiomatic expression appear in the Cavalier poet, Thomas Carew’s (pronounced Carey) work, “The Spring” (c.1640), in which, Carew uses earth and its change of seasons as a metaphorical depiction of women and their sensuality (The Norton Anthology of English Literature 1696).[5] To abet his ends, Carew alludes to the “birds in the bees” in lines 7-8 with the use of “swallow”, “cuckoo”, and “humble-bee” as seen here (lines included are 5-8): “But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth/And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth/To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree/The drowsy cuckoo and the humble-bee/Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring” (emphasis added; lines 5-9 from “The Spring”).[6]