Ann-Marlene Henning gives a sad shake of her head and rolls her eyes as she recalls her attempts to talk to her teenage son about sex. “I tried – but he didn’t want me to!” she exclaims. “James reached puberty and I thought, I’ve got to tell him something, haven’t I? He’d say, ‘No! I don’t want to hear this!’ He’d say, ‘Mum! I’m a boy! I don’t talk!’”
Henning laughs, then looks wistful. “Maybe a daughter would have asked me more …”
Henning, 50, is a sex therapist and the author of Sex & Lovers, an explicit new sex education book that is storming the bestseller list in Germany, where she lives. Recently published here and aimed at the teenage market, it covers every imaginable aspect of sex – slang, STDs, positions, percentages, pie charts, “planet porn” – plus plenty of images of real young couples (of every sexual persuasion) naked, in colour, up close and doing it.
James may have sometimes seemed a little awkward to his mother – well, perhaps sex therapists have different standards to the rest of us – because, minutes later, she is recounting the kind of mother and son conversations that don’t happen in the average household.
“One time, James had friends over watching a movie and I was tapping away on the computer with headphones on,” she recalls. “They were 15 or 16 and I suddenly thought, ‘Gosh! I can ask them about porn!’
“I took my headphones off and raised my voice, ‘Listen! There’s a mummy question coming! A sexological mummy question ... What do you think about porn? What does it do to you?’ I didn’t even bother to ask if they watched it. We had a pretty good 30-minute talk.”
Then there was the time Henning asked James if he had a problem with premature ejaculation. “I said, ‘I see so many young guys raised on porn who are coming too early and I just want to know if you’re one of them, because I can tell you things you can do to help …’ James listened before adding that it wasn’t a huge problem for him. “He said he could be loaded sometimes, it could be difficult but he pretty much had it covered.”
Add to that James’s appearance on national television with his mother, talking about the first time he had sex (Henning has her own TV show), or the fact that his ex-girlfriend Florentine is thanked in the book for being a mine of information, and it becomes apparent that James is a good deal more open with his mother than pretty much every other young man on the planet.
Now 21, James has left the family home in Frankfurt to study business in Vienna. He remembers many “odd moments” growing up as the son of a well-known sex expert.
“I remember bringing a girl back to my place for the first time. We were in the living room when Mum came in and asked her – not me – a question about penises! She was a really nice girl and luckily she just answered it.”
Henning trained as a sex therapist when James was 11. She was newly divorced from James’s father and working as a psychologist in trauma and rehabilitation, and as a model. The career change was a friend’s suggestion. “We were talking about what we could do as models, getting older,” she says. “She said sex therapy was the perfect job for me. I’d always been very open. Other models used to come to me with their problems.”
Once she was qualified and running her own practice, Henning’s profile rose rapidly. A journalist recognised her from her modelling days and wrote about her new career. The TV show soon followed. “It took off really fast,” remembers James. “I was pretty surprised when she started training – she’d done so many jobs in the past – but very soon she was successful, becoming known. I have to admit, it was pretty cool. My friends and I would get together to watch her on TV. I was really proud – I loved it. I still do.”
The success of Sex & Lovers points to a more liberal, laid-back attitude among German parents in general. They are buying the book in droves for their teens. School libraries are stocking it. It’s hard to imagine UK parents feeling quite so keen. (It’s not the words – it’s the pictures. They are explicit.)
“In Germany, people are open and interested in the message,” says Henning, “but the coverage here is all about those photos. It has made me ask myself if there was any other way of doing this – but I keep coming back to the same question. What would we be saying if we hadn’t included them? That these things are so shocking we don’t want to show you? This book is for the internet generation and it’s showing people having real sex, not ‘porn sex’. The pictures are about love and feeling and stroking and enjoyment. The hands are soft, it’s not staged. We need young people to see that kind of sex.”
Henning attributes her own relaxed attitude to her upbringing. Born and brought up in Denmark – she moved to Germany when she was 20 – her father was a police commissioner and her mother a nurse (medical books were everywhere and all things related to bodily functions were matter of fact.) “They didn’t sit me down and tell me about the birds and the flowers – I don’t even remember talking about it to them as a child – but there was a relaxedness about the body,” she says.
“I remember watching them dance at parties when I was seven or eight. They’d kiss and hug and just be sexual with one another. I saw them moving and touching and that looked nice. That was the first message and the one I remembered.”
When Henning had James, she and her husband, a doctor, took the same approach. “You don’t tongue kiss in front of your kid but if maybe you are tongue-kissing in the kitchen and he happens to walk in, you just stop – you don’t get red or flustered or act like something embarrassing happened.
“There was no ‘special nudity’ but I would be topless on the beach or naked walking from the bathroom. When I was nine months pregnant with James, I posed naked for the cover of Stern magazine to illustrate a news story. James saw the Polaroids and we talked about that. When he was two or three and came running into the room pulling his penis right out saying how big it was, I reacted normally. ‘Yes, it’s really big!’ It was just lots of little conversations – a general relaxedness.”
As James entered adolescence, almost inevitably he had his awkward moments and resisted in-depth conversations.
“I wanted to talk about masturbation, just to say that it was normal,” says Henning.
“Some boys can get a little bit afraid with the first ejaculations but no, he didn’t want to talk about it to his mum. Actually, that’s partly why I wrote the book. Even my son didn’t want to talk to me! Lots of teenagers don’t want to talk to their parents, however open you are. I’d have been very happy to give him the book and say: if you have any questions, ask.”
Despite having a sex therapist for a mother, James thinks he learned the facts of life from friends. But he’s still grateful for the atmosphere she created at home. “I knew that if I had any questions, I could go to her and I sometimes did,” he says. “Everyone liked coming to my house and talking to my mum, especially girls. They could talk to her about things they couldn’t tell or ask their own parents. Actually, it made me more popular with girls and probably won me a few girlfriends. In her last birthday card, I specifically thanked her for that!”
According to Henning, it doesn’t have to be the parents that tell their children the basics. “Penises, hydraulics, menstruation – that can be done in school or from books,” she says. “But there are some conversations we do need to have.
“James never had a computer in his room – access is too easy now. The internet is the one and only topic I’d take care of and I would not give a damn if my child wanted to hear or not. It’s so big, so important. If boys are watching it from the age of 12, on a daily basis, building it up, maybe three hours – years before they ever have sex. It’s too much, too early, they can’t get rid of it, they internalise it. I see so many young people now who can’t even have real sex because they are too used to sitting there on their own, with their fantasy.
“It’s awkward for parents, I can see how it would be difficult, but I urge them to talk about it with their teenagers, look it up, watch it together and say, ‘This is not how I have sex!’ Talk about the differences!”
For daughters, Henning says the key message wouldn’t be about pregnancy and STDs. “If I had a girl, I’d want her to know you’re allowed to say no,” she says. “I’d want to really teach her to feel into her body so that she does what she wants to do – not what she thinks she ought to do. That starts early. If maybe she’s one or two, she wants to keep those clothes on, wear a dress to bed, you let her. You even say it: ‘Yes, this is your body so you can decide.’
“The important part of sex education isn’t the sex – it’s the emotional stuff. “It’s about negotiation, communication, the loving, how to talk to your partner about what she wants, what you want, how to listen.
“Many times over the years I’ve said to James, ‘You say you want a woman who is intelligent, who understands humour, who you can talk to, who you connect with? Well, if you want a good woman, you’ve got to be a good man.’ That’s the important message to teach, and you know what? I did that. You remind me. I actually did it!”
• Sex & Lovers by Ann-Marlene Henning is published by Cameron & Hollis, £18.99. To order a copy for £15, visit bookshop.guardian.co.uk or call 0330 333 6846
