The mice and the bees.

When I was nine I learned how babies are made. It was during a trip to the grocery store with my dad.

Up to this point I had the usual types of misconceptions (hey, a pun) kids have on the topic. For example: I always loved spies and have been watching James Bond movies since Kindergarten. (Somehow I didn't learn about sex from those). When I asked my mom how babies are made she said, "Well, when two people are in love, a man 'gives' something to a woman and then she becomes pregnant." I imagined that like in the spy movies, the man breaks a capsule open over his lady's drink while she isn't looking, and stirs the powder until it dissolves. Basically, that he gives her a Rufi.

During this trip to the grocery store four or five years later I was begging for one of those piece of shit plastic toys you get by putting a quarter in a machine and turning the crank until a plastic bubble pops out. My dad gave me a quarter.

Driving home in his white VW Rabbit, the one where the floor rusted out until you could actually see the road, I opened the plastic bubble. Inside was an orange refrigerator magnet showing a line illustration of the male and female symbols crossed over each other. The circular parts at the top had Mickey Mouse ears. The copy said: "It's more fun than Fancyland."

There are about three things wrong here. 1) Someone thought it was a good idea to put suggestive slogans on a kids' toy. 2) The slogan is fucking stupid. 3) The toy is so cheap they couldn't even afford to license the word "Disneyland."

I opened the plastic bubble and turned it over in my hands, read it once, then again, still not getting it, puzzling there in my seat while my dad whistled "Watching the Detectives."

"Dad? What does this mean?"

He glanced over at the magnet as I held it out to him. He stopped whistling. "Right!" he said, cranking the wheel to turn the car sharply off to the side of the road. "Here's how it is, Kiddo..."

A skilled lecturer on most topics from physics and chemistry to literature, my dad went on to describe, in a very measured tone, far more than just the basics---the old in-out in-out, as it were---but lots of additional details I'm lucky didn't put me off sex forever. Including, god help me, some personal anecdotes from his own personal affairs that he shared in good faith by way of illustration.

Anyway, it's years later, and remembering the corruption introduced to my psyche by that toy, and seeing the steady rise of violence in video games and on TV, I've become an unyielding defender of childhood innocence. So I've submitted a design to the People's Shitty Toy Factory #36 in China for my own refrigerator magnet. Kids like cute animals, so it will show a simple cartoon illustration of a room overflowing with kitties, hanging from the curtains, spilling out of teacups, licking their cute little paws, and batting at balls of string. The caption says "Pussy Galore!"