Watching Sex Scenes in Movies With Your Parents

This is a problem that I thought would gradually go away as I got older and my relationship with my parents turned more from “parent-daughter” to “friends!”, but as it turns out, nothing will ever lessen the amount of tangible awkwardness found in the room when the movie you’re watching with your parents turns into a soft-core porno for five minutes.

The first person to acknowledge the raging boner on the screen loses!

I think the first time I noticed that this situation fucking sucks was probably somewhere around 1998 when my mom had bought the two VHS tape set of Titanic, which came out the year before. 

TECHNOLOGY.

A key background note in this example is the fact that from the ages of 8 to 13, I harbored an absolutely ridiculous crush on Leonardo DiCaprio.  In my mind, Leo (I’m on a first-name basis with him, of course) and I were not only madly in love, but also engaged to be married and were one day going to have babies together that would be beautiful little replicas of him that I could stare at until he came home from work at night.  Every year on my birthday, my mom would make me a giant poster board of pictures of him, which would ultimately culminate in me staring at Leo’s picture late at night and having Sexy Time thoughts in my head (which, during those fragile years of 8 to 13, got so raunchy as to imagining us KISSING with TONGUES.  How dirty.)  All of this would be kind of embarrassing to admit if I:  1. Gave a fuck, and   2. Was the only girl to be that obsessed with Leo.  But I don’t, and most importantly, I wasn’t – nearly every girl I knew was jacking off to Leo before they even knew what jacking off was.  On an even further aside, I’m pretty sure that the reason every girl I know is now a giant raging bitch (myself included) is because of a direct linkage with the Downfall of Leo – in a grotesque spreading effect, his face has lost its boyish charm entirely, and he has become a flabby mass of creepy, “I-only-date-models-half-my-age” flesh in more recent years.  We’re all just really disappointed.

You look like my Chinese step-sister.

Anyway.

So my mother buys this Titanic movie, and needless to say, I’m fucking PUMPED.  I have never been more ready in my life to sit down and watch a movie – I even prepared by wrapping myself up in multiple scarves so I could pretend to be Rose to Leo’s Jack, and made myself a special mixtape that had only one song on it: ‘My Heart Will Go On’ by Celine “I’m Canadian” Dion.  So my mom and brother and sister and I all sit down and we pop the VHS in and for the first hour and fifteen minutes, everything is going smoothly (and by smoothly I mean I’m silently weeping into my scarves every time they pan the shot to Leo).  My entire fucking family is entranced by this movie right now, when all of a sudden Kate Winslet’s weird-ass nipples appear on the screen.

Kate Winslet, now starring in "How I Ruined Family Movie Night with my Pale Whale Body".

A feeling of sheer horror and dread had cracked at the tip of my spine and was slowly oozing its way down to my feet.  I glanced over at my sister, who, at four years old, looked both bewildered and ashamed, unsure of how the dynamics in the room had just shifted.  The silence was penetrating, and I could feel sweat beginning to form on my upper lip as my first real bout with anxiety reached its peak.  No one was moving or speaking, and my mother had become a tight-lipped mannequin who was slowly flushing with color.  It really didn’t help that this scene goes on for a solid three to four minutes of time, which felt like an eternity in our living room as we slowly became aware that all of us were looking at Kate Winslet’s 1900’s equivalent of sexting pics.  By the time Jack finished his (sub-par) drawing, I had been reduced to an almost fetal position, unable to cope with the horrible awkwardness that had just rained down upon my Family Movie time.

Of course, it only got worse – Jack and Rose bang in the car and then Rose does that awful hand thing in the steamed car window that I tried to recreate almost every time I took a shower in my mom’s bathroom (she had one of those glass stand up showers . . . it was perfect).  But still, nothing matched the dark feeling that grew deep in the pit of my stomach when we all were unexpectedly ambushed by Kate’s rack during that initial scene.  And even more disturbing was the fact that no one acknowledged what had happened after the movie had ended - there was no breaking of the layer of ice that coated our souls as the four of us watched that scene, and every time I’ve had to endure watching a movie with my parents and a sex scene comes on, that layer of ice just gets thicker and thicker (much like the iceberg that killed Jack and my dreams of fucking him).

You've all tried to recreate it too, so shut up.

I don’t know what it is about sex scenes in movies that make people so uncomfortable.  I mean, when I’m watching a movie alone, and a sex scene comes on, I’m like, “AWWWW YEAH BITCHES LET’S GET BUCK NAST-AAAY UP IN THIS SHIZZZ” (I’m white.)  But as soon as you throw the added element in of your parents, it becomes this tension-filled moment that makes you want to scrape your eyeballs out with a fist full of barbed wire.  I’m not saying that I think we should all get over that uncomfortable awkwardness and embrace watching sex scenes with our parents – that would be even fucking weirder.  I’m just thinking that if everyone could come together as a society and talk about this issue, maybe we might be able to come up with some safety plans or something.  Like, if we all agree that, on Nana’s 90^th birthday screening of “Black Swan”, there could be some sort of secret cue – a phrase or something – that would remind us all to brace ourselves or go refill the soda pitcher and restock the chips and dip, I think that would work out better than the system we have going for us.

Actually, Nana might be able to handle the lesbian action in "Black Swan" better than all of us.

Let’s be open to ideas, that’s all I’m saying.  Otherwise, Kate Winslet’s skin-colored nipples are going to keep slowly ruining our lives.