{NSFW}For those who have children, are there signs of your intimate life around your home?

Read: intimate life=sex life

I’ve been reading about Pat Califia’s fascinating life living as a BDSM female-to-male transgender (FTM) person in a relationship with another FTM raising a child. Reading his work long ago was my first introduction into some of the things the BDSM community faces in terms of outside forces. Parenting, apparently, is especially difficult for people practicing BDSM because other people judge them to be incompetent parents, parents who put their children in proximity to an ‘unhealthy lifestyle’ and there have been many documented cases of children being taken away from parents who are in the BDSM scene because reactionary people tell on parents who practice BDSM (away from kids, in the privacy of clubs or what have you) and CPS (child services) are merciless. Califia was interested in interviewing parents interested in a BDSM lifestyle to see how they attempted to protect their families from those who think they can tell others how to live their lives.

One person said “By the time I was with my second husband, the kids were in their early teens and very interested in the new husband and what went on behind the closed doors. Luckily they went off to Grandma’s when my partner and I would be most boisterous, but there were times that it was obvious the next day that we’d been partying. We were fairly open about the bondage, and I supposed they saw some ropes around the bed.”

And so I wondered what signs of my own sex life are around the house that my children notice or can see and all I could come up with is that there are condoms everywhere (though neither of them know what they’re for, they just like shiny things). The sex toys aren’t often in use and are in a bag in a closet but they’re not hidden, they’re just there and I wouldn’t care if the kids found the bag, would be a good opportunity to talk about the playful and pleasurable aspects of sex.

Anyway, I wondered how you balance that kind of thing in your life…if you, as a parent, hide certain things from your kids…or hide what goes on ‘behind closed doors’ or are more open…I wondered why people are so uncomfortable about BDSM practitioners being sexual in their own homes even though they are parents….Should the ropes be put away, in your opinion? Clearly, I think the ropes are fine but I know that when I read that portion of the book I thought that many people would be uncomfortable at the notion.

You can also talk about (if you don’t have children) how your own parents handled these kinds of things.