Moms, The Last Thing Your Daughters Want From You Is A Vibrator

Buying your daughter her first vibrator is the ultimate in helicopter parenting

There’s a new trend in over-involved parenting, and it’s a big batch of NO. Moms are waxing poetic about buying their daughters vibrators and teaching their daughters the value of self-love. Christ, ladies. Have you completely forgotten what it’s like to be a teenager?

The last thing your teenage daughter wants from you is a vibrator. Seriously. The very last thing.

There was a post that went viral a few weeks ago about how important it is to buy your teenage daughters vibrators if you don’t want them to have sex. It was called, This Is Why I’m Buying My Daughters Their Own Vibrators. There is nothing wrong with being sex-positive. Yes, our kids should know about birth control and not be ashamed of things like masturbation. But assuming your teenage daughter wants to be taught “self love” by her mother will immediately make me think that you slept through your teenage years. Or have amnesia or something.

“What if these girls already knew what felt good sexually? What if they’d been at home, curled up with a copy of Jamye Waxman’s Getting Off: A Woman’s Guide to Masturbation, learning about their clitoris?” the author of the piece wonders. “She should be getting herself off while reading Forever (specifically around page 85 when Katherine and Michael have sex for the first time) by Judy Blume or The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily Danforth. Or The Basketball Diaries, oh god, The Basketball Diaries.”

Here’s how I expect any teenage daughter would respond to this:

MOMMMMMMMMMMMM! NO! WHYYYYYYYY? And then immediately throw all those books away, because the thought of getting off to the same thing as your mom did is just — no.

Then there was this article, Buying your daughter a vibrator: What the parenting books don’t tell you. “Rather than sit back and allow their daughters to learn the hard way that sex and orgasms don’t always go hand in hand, many moms are taking a proactive approach and teaching their teen daughters about the amazing benefits of self-love,” it reads.

Having an open, nurturing relationship with your kids means also realizing there are boundaries — and places you don’t belong. By all means, teach your kids that there is nothing wrong with masturbation from an early age by not attaching shame to the act. But as parents, apart from guiding our kids and making sure they have the sex education and access to birth control they need, we need to also stay in our own lane.

We have a tendency to want to do everything for our kids today, but maybe it should stop short of their damn bedrooms. We should give our kids the space to navigate this stuff. Buying them sex toys and teaching them about the “amazing benefits of self love?” Really? If my mom ever strung those words together I would have been eternally horrified.

It’s our job to tell our kids how their bodies work — honestly and without shame. The rest is up to them. It may be “sex-positive” to pitch buying vibrators for our teenagers, but it’s common sense to know that it’s a gift they do not want to receive from us.