"Fake? Really, Mom? How can you tell?"

The generation gap widened. In his age of Jenny McCarthy/Pamela Anderson/perfect MTV babes, puffed-up beach balls on women's chests look normal to him. I mumbled a few words, trying to describe the difference. Fortunately he did not ask me to sort out the naturals from the pretenders, and to my relief he took the magazine to the privacy of his bedroom.

As a writer of erotica and a woman who grew up in sexual ignorance, I don't believe in censorship for children. But I also don't believe in tossing smut at them before they're ready, either in print or on the Web. So I have no problem with Playboy being kept out of view in convenience stores, or with erotic Web sites having adult-warning pages. Kid-filtering software is a little iffier to me; it seems like a good idea, but too many parents I know who have this in place are the more clueless ones who need better communication and more time with their kids -- kids who then have to hang out at other people's houses to learn things.

Like my house. Six months after the Playboy incident, my son was sitting in his bedroom with a couple of friends, sharing dirty magazines, while I was around the corner, out of sight, putting laundry away. "We should close the door so your mom won't catch us," one guilty-sounding kid said while ogling the centerfold.

"Oh, it's no big deal," my son responded, with a matter-of-fact confidence that concerned me. "My mother reads Penthouse."

I didn't stick around for the response, slinking away to reconsider my parenting skills for a moment. I am a soccer mom and a PTA parent, but I also read and write smut with a serious passion. No matter how liberal and open I think I am, there's still a fine line to walk as a parent. I believe in the idea that when kids are ready to know something, it should be made available to them, in a smart and honest way. It's just hard to keep hiding my own stuff.

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