I CAN’T GET THAT PENIS OUT OF MY MIND

The technology described below has changed considerably since this piece was written—the idea of teenagers e-mailing each other, for example, now belongs to another, pre-texting era, as outmoded as the rotary phone. But parental anxiety about content, however it’s transmitted, remains perennial.

—J.A.

The children are sending out pictures of their penises over the computer. Enterprising youth!

I’ll be blunt: The penis that came into our house this way was at full attention. Is this funny? I don’t know. I really don’t know what to think. I’m kind of beside myself.

I sit down at my thirteen-year-old daughter’s computer one afternoon. I need to use her computer because my own computer has just lost its “logic board,” which means it keeps turning itself off. I don’t have the seven hours to spend at the computer store to find out whether the patient is going to live or die. (Who am I kidding? Of course it’s dying.)

And here on my daughter’s computer screen is her e-mail in-box. I hardly ever see her e-mail in-box except fleetingly, as I pass through the little nook in the hallway where I’ve moved her computer from her bedroom. Our school, and the entire parenting industry, tells you to have the computer not in the child’s room but in a more public, “well-trafficked” zone, so that the child isn’t seduced into dirty websites where strangers might try to send them pictures of, oh, say, their genitalia. If I happen to glance at her e-mail in-box, if I happen to even cast my eyes to that side of the little nook, my child scolds me, “You’re invading my privacy!” Which I am.

But apparently she forgot to log out this morning. It’s such a novelty to be alone with her e-mail. I’ve never done this before, I swear, but today I cannot help myself: I scroll through her in-box. I don’t open the e-mails, but if you have Gmail, which is what we have, the first line of the e-mail appears next to the sender’s e-mail name, like a teaser. So I am sort of reading her e-mails, at least the first lines of them.

All of the e-mails are from her friends, I can tell by their e-mail addresses. I’m hugely tempted to read them, but I don’t—even though they tell us at school parenting meetings and in parenting columns in magazines and in the parenting segments on the morning TV news shows that looking at your child’s e-mail is a parent’s right, even a duty. Just the other day, on the Today show, I heard a parenting expert exhort parents to read their children’s e-mail, and not in secret. Your children, he said, should be writing nothing that you can’t read “while standing over their shoulders.” Has this man ever met a teenager? Doesn’t he know how much they hate being watched doing anything, including eating an English muffin or waiting for an elevator? That even the squeakiest-clean teenagers in the land are allergic to having an adult standing over their shoulders? I’m sure that Mormon teenagers, when e-mailing their pals—See u in Temple Square! I am sooooo psyched 4 Tabernacle Choir!!!!—slap their hands over their computer screens when their parents pass by, protesting, “Mother! Dad! This is so my own personal business!”

Apparently civil liberties do not apply vis-à-vis our children and the computer, but I have mixed feelings about spying on children. In any case, these computer recreations were already out of the gate, galloping away with my daughter, long before I learned what they were; I was too late to make any privacy policies about them even if I’d wanted to. By the time I started hearing about them, she already had many secret passwords, and an entire hidden, soundless world of friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. I felt like I had hundreds of teenagers in my house, and none of them were ever going to leave.

*   *   *

So this afternoon I read the opening lines of her e-mails, because they are right there for me to see and I just cannot resist. They seem innocuous enough, if sort of schizophrenic—sometimes the children write childishly (“I am so xcited for Dunkin’ D’s!!!”), and sometimes they write like gang members, sort of: “Yo, bitch, dat sucks u have yr math tutor now”).

But here is an e-mail from someone whose e-mail address has no letters, only numbers, many numbers. And there’s no subject in the subject line. The numbers seem so technical, junk-mailish, that I think the e-mail couldn’t have anything personal in it and therefore it is all right for me to read. It’s like opening something addressed to “Occupant.” Or maybe it’s something mercenary, something that is going to cost me money. Maybe she’s ordered something from some online catalog, and I’m going to be charged for it every month on my cable bill.

I open the e-mail.

*   *   *

It’s a photograph. It’s been taken at a weird angle, and it’s out of focus. But not so blurry you can’t see it’s been taken in a bathroom—you can see floor tiles, and a used towel lying on them in a lump, and two large-cupped bras hanging from a hook on the back of a closed door.

And not so blurry that you can’t see the star of the picture, right there in the foreground.

Some kid sent this picture. Somebody my daughter probably knows. Oh, my God, are we about to be a statistic? Will someone from Newsweek be calling our house in the near future looking for a quote on Babies Having Babies? My baby! My baby who is still young enough to get the child’s fare on Amtrak, who likes strawberry milk, and horses, and making brownies? What is going on here?

I decide to print out the picture. I don’t know why. Just as I do it, my older daughter and her friend Desiree stop by for a visit. They’re twenty-three, they’re all grown-up, they live in Brooklyn. I think, They’ll calm me down somehow.

I hold out the picture. I say, “Look! Look at this!”

And these two New York City girls, these girls who have seen everything, say, “What the hell?”

They have no idea what to think either.

Then Desiree remembers something: It’s a fad, a teenage thing. She’s heard about it. Boys are sending around pictures of their penises that they have taken using their iPhones. (This was so new it wasn’t called sexting yet; there wasn’t even a word for it.)

Desiree says those numbers I saw on the in-box are actually the boy’s iPhone number.

My older daughter says, “It’s probably just some boy she knows, some boy just trying to be funny.”

I want to know. I want to hear the voice of the boy who’s trying to be funny—or whatever he’s trying to be. I want him to know I know.

I call the iPhone number.

“Hello?” It’s a teenage boy’s voice. He says “Hello?” warily; I figure he doesn’t recognize my phone number on his iPhone screen.

“Hi! Who’s this?”

“M____,” he says, giving his name. Good Lord, this boy would probably follow a guy who said he had a hurt puppy in his car. I have this parental urge to say, “You don’t have to give me your name, I’m a stranger. You don’t have to tell me anything.” But I don’t.

“Hi, M! This is R’s mother.”

“Who?”

“R. Are you a friend of hers?”

“I guess. Kinda.”

“Where do you go to school?” He tells me, silly boy. It’s not my daughter’s school. It’s a school in her school’s neighborhood, and she does know some kids there, but I meet most of the kids she hangs out with, I hear their names over and over, and his name hasn’t come up once. I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know him that well. On the other hand, if I do decide to exact retribution, it will now take me about three minutes, just from the information he has given me, to find out who he is and what his parents’ home phone number is.

“I see,” I say. “I was just calling because your phone number showed up on my cell phone and I didn’t know who’d called me.”

Long pause. “Oh.”

And I think, He’s putting it together. He knows.

I say, “Okay, well, nice talking to you. Bye.”

And he says, “Bye.” He could have hung up on me, but he’s polite. He’s talking to a grown-up.

So. This seems to be a boy my girl kind of knows who is indulging in a disgusting fad. It’s disgusting, but it’s so disgusting it suddenly seems funny. Also, I’m so relieved that the possible other, darker scenario isn’t true—we are not going to be a statistic in Newsweek, it seems—that I’m practically giddy. My older daughter and Desiree and I spend the next few minutes laughing about M and his member and the conversations we might have with him about it if we meet him.

I hear the front door open. It’s my younger daughter, home from school. I’m still rattled by the picture, but now I feel panicky; I’m about to be busted. I’ve been reading her e-mail, I’ve printed it out, and she is going to kill me.

I think, Don’t make this some heavy thing. Be light, be light.

What’s my choice? We’re all standing here with these big grins frozen on our faces.

She comes into the room and says, “What?” She wants to be in on the joke.

“Honey, I saw this e-mail in your in-box.” I show her the picture.

“It’s so gross!” She’s giggling.

“Do you know this boy?”

“Barely. I met him, like, twice.”

“Well, what’s his point, really? Is he trying to be funny? Does he want to be your boyfriend?”

“I don’t know! He’s an idiot! Why are you reading my e-mail?” She’s smiling, though, so I know she will forgive me.

In the days that follow, M and his penis are reduced to a funny anecdote in our family, included in the category of penis humor that my girls and their friends have honed over the years (a penis ditty, the product of a long car ride in Italy: “Wanahini wanahini, hello, is that your penee? Wanahini wanahini, does it drive a Lamborghini?”).

I try to keep what M did down at fad status: just funnin’, a latter-day version of streaking or mooning or skinny-dipping at rock concerts. All of these activities involved nudity and exhibitionism and flaunting your privates, didn’t they? What’s the difference between that and sending a picture of your penis over the phone?

This interpretation refuses to sit right. Those other fads were all about being with other people; they were convivial, they were group romps. I think of M alone in his bathroom, looking at Mom’s bras and the dirty towels on the floor, taking pictures of his lonesome penis. Get out of there, boy! Go outside and get some air!

But just as grieving has its stages, I now enter a new stage of reacting to seeing a penis picture in a child’s e-mail. I have passed through Shock, Panic, Hilarity, Pity; now, finally—what took me so long?—I enter Outrage. My God, it is not all right to send a picture of an erect penis to a thirteen-year-old. I can’t believe how many days it has taken me to get exercised about this. She has seen pictures of penises before, but this one was personal, this one was meant for her. This one was in big, veiny close-up. Why didn’t I say to M, when I had him on the phone, “Don’t you ever send a picture of your penis to anyone again! I will send you to juvie!”

“Honey,” I say to my younger daughter one day when we are on vacation in the country, “were you shocked when you saw the picture?”

“Yes.” She’s smiling, but she says “Yes” in the same tone that she might say “Of course” or “Duh.”

“Well, what he did was send an assault, and that’s wrong, and—”

“Bye-bye.” She walks outside. She has always been a private person; she hates Talks. I bring it up two more times, but I’m rebuffed.

One afternoon I see her at the far corner of the yard, swinging on the swing set. Her older sister did the same thing when she was a teenager, on the swing set we’d bought for her when she was little. She’d go out there and swing back and forth, rocking herself into a kind of reverie.

Ten years later, the new baby came, and we bought a wooden swing set to replace the rusty old metal one. And now she has the same habit as her sister. Now, when there is absolutely nothing else to do, she goes out there and swings slowly, the wood making little creaking sounds like a sailboat’s mast in the sea.

I watch her. Has she forgotten about M’s penis? Will she ever?

She’s not telling.

Back and forth, back and forth, my baby swings and swings.