When Sex Is a Family Business Like any proud mother, I love being asked about my three grown kids. But when the conversation turns to my son Ethan, an industrial designer, I'm never sure where to go when I answer the follow-up question, "What does he design?" I've never thought of myself as particularly prudish. But in my proper-Bostonian family, we didn't talk about sex. My early lessons in male anatomy came from surreptitiously peering at Greek statues in a book at the library. As a teen in the late 1950s, I remember admitting to my best friend that I'd allowed my boyfriend to "get to first base." I would have blushed beet red if we had talked about masturbation or intercourse. The '60s loosened me up considerably, as did marriage and parenthood. Nevertheless, when it came time for a birds-and-bees talk with my kids, I gratefully passed the buck to Mr. Sperber, who taught the seventh-grade Social Living course at King Junior High in Berkeley. My son Ethan found the class embarrassing - not so much the material itself, but receiving it when he was seated next to Rebecca, his crush at the time, who also happened to be Mr. Sperber's daughter. I can only imagine how mortifying this was for Rebecca. Perhaps thanks to Mr. Sperber, each of my children passed through adolescence and young adulthood without serious sexual mishap - no pregnancies, no S.T.D.'s - so I figured I was off the hook in the sex-talk department. Nothing prepared me for the moment in 2002 when Ethan, who had recently started his own design firm in San Francisco, came out - not as gay, but with something much more shocking. Mom, I'm going to design vibrators. If I'd been drinking tea, it would have come out my nose. My mind whirled with images of bleached-blond porn stars in black bustiers, dark "Adult Only" storefronts in the sleaziest part of town, a leering Hugh Hefner surrounded by his bunnies. I couldn't reconcile my sweet, funny son with those images. Where had I gone wrong? "I know what you're thinking," he said. And that's what I thought too. But we all have sex, and we should all have access to beautiful products to support it. I'm tired of designing commodities that soon end in the landfill; I want to create something that makes a difference in people's lives. Three potential clients had approached him about developing sex toys, and he headed to Los Angeles for the annual Adult Novelty Manufacturers Expo. He told me it was a blur of gaudy color, severed anatomy, penis pumps and porn stars. He had an epiphany. "The taboos around the subject have enabled manufacturers to push out a staggering array of ineffective, poorly made and often toxic products," he said. What if we could talk about this openly, and present a new generation of accessories you could read about in Vogue or buy at Nordstrom? My mind flashed to buying a stapler at Office Depot the year before, and how I proudly told the clerk that my son had designed it. Would I be as up front buying a vibrator at Nordstrom? When Ethan is on a mission, there's no stopping him. So despite my misgivings, I offered to invest modestly in his new venture. The rest of the family pitched in too. His stepfather helped construct the conference room. His sister worked on the office systems. His younger brother did market research. This formerly proper Bostonian edited vibrator instruction sheets. Yes, I did. I also flew down from Portland to help with shipping in the first pre-Valentine's Day rush, donning cotton gloves to prevent smudging the vibrators' elegant metal shafts as I nested them in their beautiful white boxes. At Ethan's offices, like on "Sex in the City," discussions of sex and sexuality are as ordinary as weather speculation. Even the very establishment Atlantic Monthly profiled Ethan and his work. I'm proud of him. Still, when asked what my son designs, I'd feel more comfortable if I could reply, "Affordable devices that create potable water from desert sand." Meanwhile, on my 65th birthday, an unmarked package arrived in the mail. Inside was a familiar white box. I opened it to find a gold-plated vibrator engraved "Mom" within a heart, and beneath that the inscription, "Behold the golden years." In that moment, with a mixture of pride, hilarity and delight, I could only marvel that my son had managed to shock me again.