For a better experience, read this first.

It all began as things on the web do. I clicked on a shiny thing.

I'd stumbled across a piece she'd written a year ago for The Pacific Standard innocently entitled "One mother makes up for the gaps in sex education." I'd found it linked here on Snapzu.

After reading it, I flung the link into reddit so I could see if it had been linked there - and what was being said about it. It had hit /r/truereddit hard and the discussion was fun.

It has all the usual features - the clueless, the overenlightened, the sex positive, the adorably confused Europeans...

I was in the throes of a near-crippling snickerfit as I logged into Twitter so that I could follow Alice Dreger. At that moment, I still had no idea about this!

I had logged in just so I could find out what other heyoka tricks she might have gotten up to.

I'm going to quote a big chunk because - [cue dramatic music] - foreshadowing!

A couple of months ago, the sex education notice came home in my nine-year-old son's backpack. I didn't realize that, in our district, sex ed starts in the fourth grade. Another sign of the state having more access to my baby than I sometimes wish.

When I handed the note to my mate at the dinner table, our son said with something of a proud smile, "I told Mrs. Reverby we've already talked about it at home."

The mate and I looked at each other and obviously had the same thought. Two weeks before, the class had been learning about electricity. The teacher had gotten stuck on some questions about batteries, so she had turned to our son, who was able to explain to the class exactly how batteries charge, recharge, and discharge. He's learned a lot about electricity at home.

And quite a lot about sex.

"You know," my mate said to our son, "this is one of those times when you have to not help the teacher even if you know how something works."

I busted out laughing at the admonition. "Your dad is right," I said, composing myself. "It's entirely possibly you know more about sex than they do, but there's some stuff some parents might not want their kids to know, so you have to keep a lid on it."

This leads me back to the TrueReddit discussion, where there was much confusion about how Alice refers to ... well, her Mate. Someone posted a link. It starts off like this:

After an essay of mine on talking to kids about sex went viral last week, someone tweeted me an unexpected question: “Just read an article in which you refer to your partner as Mate. Are you furry?”

Redditors. We can be awkwardly endearing, can we not?

The answer is a solid answer, it's funny and avoids being precious on a topic where that's really hard. That's why I ran on over to twitter.

And that's where I found out how Alice Rushes In Where Angels Fear To Tread.

You know, as I had hoped. Go read the link.

Ok, so what happened?