This Mom Explains Why She WANTS Her Sons To See Her Naked

September 11, 2014

Rita is a mother of four boys and she believes that boys at a young age should get a real understanding of what a woman's body looks like, before they are exposed to airbrushed images on the internet...

Via Fighting Off Frumpy

I live with a houseful of boys: four, to be exact. But they're still relatively young -- so there are no nudie mags stashed between mattresses, no stealthily-accessed porn sites that someone forgot to erase out of the Internet history, nothing like that. As much as I'd love to think my kids won't be curious, I'm well aware that won't be the case: those things are looming and will probably start happening much sooner than I'd like. (I mean, if I had my druthers, they wouldn't even think about sex until they were like 25.)

But before all that happens -- before they're exposed to boobs that are as round and firm as cantaloupes and pictures of taut, airbrushed, dimple-less butts -- I'm exposing them to a different kind of female body.

Mine.

Ours is not a modest household. I don't lounge around in the buff like my boys do (and I spend more time saying, "Put on some pants!" than anything else) -- but I've never refrained from changing clothes in front of them, or leaving the door open when I shower, or nursing babies without a cover. Because I want them to see what a real female body looks like. Because if I don't -- and their first images of a naked woman are the impossibly perfect physiques in those magazines or those movies -- what kind of expectations will they have? And what woman could ever live up to them?

Between you and me, I'm dismayed, big time, by my post-baby body. But for the sake of my boys -- and my future daughters-in-law -- I lie through my teeth. When they ask about my stretch marks, I tell them proudly how growing a baby is hard work, and that they're like badges I've earned (gaming references always hit home with dudes, no matter what you're explaining). As much as I'd like to cringe and shrink away when they touch my squishy belly, I let them squeeze my flab between their curious fingers. Do I hate it? Yes. I want to wail, "Leave my fat alone!" and run for the nearest over-sized T-shirt (or, like, the nearest liposuction clinic).

But I don't. Because for right now, for these few formative years, my flab is their one and only perception of the female body. And I want them to know that it's beautiful, even in its imperfection.

This article was written by Rita Templeton from Fighting Off Frumpy. Be sure to like her page on Facebook too!