Are there some topics that leave you looking like this?
The other day I was having breakfast with my family, celebrating my mother’s safe return home after 10 weeks overseas for work, and the conversation turned to coffee enemas. No, I’m not sure how either, but it did, and unfortunately it was a conversation that just kept getting worse. From there we started talking about drop toilets, back to coffee enemas, over to the time my great grandfather was off to perform a baptism, dressed in all white, as you do, and had to stop at a drop toilet. Unfortunately he lost his footing, or seating, or whatever, and let’s just say he arrived at the baptism with his whites no longer white.
Then there was the time I was a dinner for a friend’s birthday with a group of people I had primarily never met before. Husband & I were seated at the end of the table opposite a wonderful young man, who’s name I won’t repeat lest he be identified but it was a humorous word for a part of the female anatomy, and a woman a couple of years younger than me. The conversation was going along as you would usually expect over dinner, although we had managed to hit it off and were having a rather good time.
At some point in the conversation the woman says “I had to explain to my father why women have to use more toilet paper during that time of the month!” I’m not entirely sure, looking back, how this was relevant to the conversation but it was certainly more information than we required over dinner. So I did what any self respecting person would do, I turned to the man opposite us and said “This conversation has taken a turn for the nasty, I like stickers. Do you like stickers?”
All of this got me thinking – when it comes to uncomfortable topics, how do you react? Do you carry on as if it’s not something you don’t want to be talking about, or do you change the topic? Perhaps to stickers, like I do.
At my work there are few things off the table for conversation. Working in an industry where it’s not entirely infrequent for a trolley full of models of vaginas to pass you in the corridor breeds that kind of openness, as does working with a lot of women. But I realise not everyone’s lunch time conversation would vary from periods and child birth to aliens, conspiracy theories and sex education in schools.
Perhaps it should, though. Perhaps society’s prudishness has gone too far when a remark about toilet paper during that time of the month can cause such a strong reaction in someone as to change the topic of conversation entirely. Or perhaps it’s for the good of everyone that general dinnertime conversation doesn’t include coffee enemas.
What do you think? Are there any topics you just won’t discuss? What do you do if you’re uncomfortable with the conversation?
