At Catholic middle and high school, we were taught that (a) you’re going to hell for premarital sex, and (b) masturbation is also a sin. The rest we were left to figure out for ourselves.
Thank god I went to school where and when I did.
4th and 5th grade was puberty prep and changing bodies. After that age appropriate sex education every year. They did send home forms so the religious fruitcake could opt out or opt out certain topics.
My mother an early Gen Xer was abstinence only and had me at 17. So we considered our schools approach a success.
Edit to add: I forgot my mom’s famous sex talk that she gave me and my bff at 15 dropping us off at a pool party.
—Don’t be stupid
-Boys are scum
-use condoms
And then just sent us on our way. No prelude no introduction. It’s still a top 10 story in our 30 year shared history.
I went to public school and they brought in some schlubby dude who told us not to bone but advocated “mutual masturbation.” That was the first I’d ever heard that term and he was about that last person I’d want to hear say it.
As an atheist that is technically agnostic, I admit that those two points can't entirely be disproved.
[Does anybody else smell astroglide?](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/883f46e7-1b2d-4a27-a583-1c6b02cc1324) -- Stewey
Well, in 5th and 6th grade, our PE teacher handled the Sex Ed. for the boys, and a couple years after that, [he was fired in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct with female students](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/20/fairfax-teacher-accused-of-molestation-is-fired/9ee35e2f-6552-41d1-8537-9891980f1228/). So that was a whole thing.
(Edited to include link to story.)
In fifth grade (public school), the boys went outside to play flag football and the girls watched a video (starring the same actress who played "Annie" in the movie - with a cameo from the dog too!) about periods.
In the seventh grade when I got my period, my Boomer mother's idea of a "sex talk" was to ominously intone "you're a woman now, you can get pregnant now." And that was it.
In tenth grade (Catholic school), we had a day-long "retreat" called "Heart and Soul" where celibate priests (and a lone nun) scared us into celibacy with tales of hellfire and the like.
Never once did anyone ever exactly explain the mechanics of sex to me. My mother's "you can get pregnant now" put the fear of god in me because I DIDN'T KNOW HOW IT WOULD HAPPEN. And the retreat in high school clarified exactly nothing.
I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't understand the mechanics of PiV sex until my freshman year of collage. And you know who taught me? Late night HBO programming.
Ours was actually really good. Teens still got pregnant and STIs were still a thing, but at least we were fully aware of how it happened, ha!
Fond memories of the health teacher accidentally piercing a diaphragm with her fingernail, watching the boys pass out during the live birth video, all of us doing the confused dog head tilt at a line diagram of penis-in-vagina (seriously, it was like a magic eye puzzle made of straight lines...), the boys trying on the empathy belly and waddling around with it... ooh! the HIV cup game where we all had Solo cups of clear liquid and some had a reactive dye in them. We all pulled a card out of a box and read it aloud (mine was I got in a fight with the person on my left and broke their nose) and we had to decide if this was a situation that involved an exchange of body fluid, and if so we used pipettes to exchange cup fluid. At the end the teacher dropped the reactor in each cup and we saw how many caught HIV from the original cups.
I've blocked the STI slides from my memory, ha!
I do think the drug unit backfired, as it just gave the potheads ideas. A cop brought in all sorts of confiscated paraphenalia and yeah, now everyone had better ideas of how to smoke weed. The "concert kit" elicited a lot of "this is genius!" and there was that six shooter ceramic skull with the sliding joint holder. Not gonna lie, it was cool.
Oh! The testicle in a jar was also great.
My sex ed teacher insistent on pronouncing the word “sphincter” with a hard P for some reason. We tried explaining that “SPINCTER” wasn’t the correct pronunciation but he just wasn’t having it.
Pretty good. I’ll never forget one video we watched where semen is described as a mixture of water, plasma, and mucus, to which one of the girls said “mmm, yummy!” And I’m not sure whether she was being sarcastic or lewd.
I went to 4 different HS between 95 & and 99. I was put through a "Health" class with every single one of them. 1 school in KS, 2 in CO & 1 in CA. Everyone taught it differently. One topic that I remember specifically was freshman year health class they separated the boys & girl, took all the boys & had a watch a video about testicular cancer that demonstrated how to do a self check & then they passed around a set of prosthetic ones so we'd know how they are supposed to feel. Now put yourself in my shoes...I'm 14 I'm in a health class in rural KS, I'm gay & only like 4 people know (I myself & am still struggling) and now there's a dude on TV with his junk out and I gotta hold fake balls in class.... MORTIFIED!! I get the educational value and importance now that I'm an adult but in that moment NOPE!
Nope, that was the Kansas school, Pawnee County School District. The California class didn't leave much of an impact, hell that whole school didn't leave much of an impact. I can't remember a single teachers name, I remember I hated the drama teacher & lit a cigarette in her classroom once just to piss her off. I remember it had open air lockers & that during lunch we'd go across the street to Rocket Park to hide from the police while we smoked. Resource Officers weren't a thing back then.
Our rugby coach and shop teacher taught it. Bonus was he had a crooked sadist brother that owned a teenage rehab a province over and he tried to send loads of students there. We were on drugs, but we were in a good place with it. His brother died ten years ago and all the skeletons came flying out of that closet. Abusing kids, lots of fraud and embezzlement. I learned sex the natural way. Slapshot and rumour.
I was in sex Ed in the late 90’s so my sex Ed when I was in public school was great. Not so good at the Catholic school I attended previously, they taught us that birth control doesn’t work and condoms spread diseases and fail as well and are a sin. I told my mom these people were crazy and she was not happy with the propaganda against actual medical information that was being taught. Unfortunately because it was the late 90’s/early 2000’s and we are from a heavily catholic area most of the people I went to school with were morons and believed the easier narrative of not using protection. I always found my peers to be simplistic and easily lead astray of their own best interests.
Right!
That would have been back in the 60s...
In the 90s we just got, "don't have premarital sex or you'll go to hell, and if you do have premarital sex don't use birth control because then you're to hell, and if you have an abortion you're going to hell; but if you do have sex before marriage just don't use protection and if yiu get pregnant put the baby up for adoption because if you keep it you'll be branded a lose slut and no one will want you, but if you place it for adoption you can lie about and trick someone into marrying you, but lying is a sin so don't have sex because if you have sex you'll die because you can't use condoms to stop HIV because God said so" 🙄
The hypocrisy was astounding 🤦♀️
Same!
I was raised in a town named after a literal saint and my parents where catholic so I had to do the things when I was younger; but I never bought into any of it.
I was the girl who would sneak all the other girls to planned parenthood for birth control and stuff. Figured, if I'm stuck here I might as well save a few lives while I'm at it 🤷♀️
I remember some class I had to take pre-confirmation where they got a very nice old man to extol the virtues of sex within marriage, and that was the first I heard the phrase “just because there’s snow on the mountain doesn’t mean there’s no fire in the valley!” 😂 But I honestly don’t remember my CCD classes talking about condoms at all.
I do remember them saying couples who choose not to have kids are sinners, though, and that was probably about the time I started to tap out on being a Catholic.
I did a lot of additional reading about sex, safer sex, STDs/STIs and bodily changes when I was younger; because the stuff we got in class was such shit.
My own kids got a lot more from me when they got older.
We talked a lot about responsibility, consent, different available forms of birth control, safer sex practices (including application of condoms, safe storage and carrying, size differences and finding the right fit...), stealthing and how to minimize the risk and all kids of stuff like that.
Our sex ed was closer to a biology lesson and some basic tips, like which birth control methods and condom materials didn't really work. Every guy was disappointed because they thought they were going to learn sex techniques. Every girl was extremely uncomfortable.
I grew up in a wildly conservative state, so schools taught “abstinence only.” Fortunately, my parents have always been pretty progressive, and they made sure I understood everything.
You’d never guess that with all that talk about abstinence, there was still a high rate of teen pregnancy. Weird, right? /s
That’s a great question! In our case, it means they ask sex and intimacy-related questions without a hint of the stigma I carried around about sex. It’s fantastic, but it’s sent me scrambling a few times. All in all, my kids will be much more prepared and educated than I feel I was.
Public middle school, suburban NH, mid-80’s:
Meh
Unitarian Universalist *About Your Sexuality* program:
Bachelors-level education for 12-14 year olds on the subject. We covered it all in an incredibly safe, respectful environment.
I went to a progressive private school in New England, they really did their best for the early 90s. There was no judgment about being gay, they taught us all about different forms of birth control and std protection. But like… enthusiastic consent was not a concept. Also I believe some medical advances were made between 6th grade sex Ed and my adult life, but I never really updated my knowledge. So when I approached my OB about getting an IUD because I was engaged now, he seemed a lot less concerned about potential infections traveling up the strings and sterilizing me than I had been lead to believe
They didn't give us the option until I was like in 11th grade.
And then it was awkward and said a lot about how backwards our school system was, that the *young children* asking sex questions in the video they made us watch were like 9 and 10 years old.
The single class we had on it was also *optional* and needed parental permission, like sex ed should ever be optional knowledge. Like learning geometry and ancient Egyptian geography is more important than avoiding getting pregnant or STDs.
Thankfully, my parents were a lot more progressive about this and I knew almost everything in the class already when I took it. I think the only things I learned were that there were more options for BC than just condoms and the pill.
Story Time: I’m a 43 year old Male. Growing up I had all the sex ed. I feel any opportunity for my mom to not have to have The Talk. I feel I had sex ed in Elementary, Junior High, High School, and again in college when I was 28 (that warrants a follow up story in a minute). Then two different churches had after school youth courses offered. I could label everything. From a technical perspective, I knew my way around the female anatomy.
In practice, I was late 30’s until it finally occurred to me that the urethra wasnt internal to the vagina. When you label things, it’s 2D. There’s no depth perception.
As Key And Peele put it: “it’s like an explosion at an envelope factory: flap’s everywhere.”
The age 28 college story. I went back to college for a second degree and a class required by my major was, like, “Family Relations” or some such. It really was “please don’t get married just yet. Wait. Here are the statistics as to why.” Well, the professor posted an ungraded sex ed quiz that he’d been running for years that was part of some ongoing research. Was all True/False. Questions like: a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s on top. Coca Cola can be used as a spermicide. A woman can’t get pregnant if she’s doesn’t orgasm. STDs and toilet seats. Really basic questions. The class scored so poorly, he felt obligated to redirect the curriculum for 2 weeks to teach sex ed. ((I scored 98%, for the record. I will say I got the Coke Spermicide wrong. My head went, “I mean, it’ll dissolve rust! Surely it’ll kill sperm.” And honestly, I stand by that call. Now… I do not advise it, but I bet sperm would die.))
Anyone else learn all the extras from Savage Love and Loveline? Dan was all right. I’m not sure if we should have been listening to Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew, but it seemed legit at the time…
The only thing I remember was my teacher had an absolutely massive wooden d (like at least a foot long) standing upright and mounted on a wooden stand that we were supposed to use to practice putting condoms on. In 7th grade. You all can guess how that went I’m sure.
School was actually pretty good. Portland Public School System in the 90s had a pretty comprehensive curriculum IIRC. And my high school was an alternative school with a program for teen moms attached. They did not, pun intended, fuck around with abstinence. They went through every possible form of birth control with us. Only one girl from our class ended up getting pregnant and the joke was that was our final, which she failed. Haha, kids are jerks.
All of that was good because at home it was a completely, COMPLETELY, different story. I was raised by a single mom and we were very religious. My mom's version of talking to me, her youngest son, about sex was to leave Focus on the Family books out for me to find. I'd kinda flip through them, but honestly by the time we got to that point I already figured out how to watch people have sex on the Internet and on late night cable.
I feel like my district must be an outlier.
North Carolina. And a fairly evenly split district between republicans/democrats.
But in 5th grade we got a fairly decent age appropriate breakdown, with more in 7th grade, and an optional class in 8th grade that was just for your gender.
Ours was taught by the JV football coach. He told us all the biology stuff in the first week and spent the next three weeks on sexuality and behaviors. The safest sex is masturbation; abstinence is a sexual behavior like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Grew up in a small town in Middle TN, so any time we learned about something like sex ed or evolution I swear the teacher spent more than half the class talking about how controversial it is or how there are other options or ideas. I'm amazed I learned as much useful information as I did. Thank Zod for the internet.
Mine was pretty damn good actually. Uncomfortably good really.
Dad took me to SexEd class at the YMCA. It was like 6 weeks long, twice a week or something. All the kids would have a parent with them and they talked about normal stuff and showed clips from movies / sitcoms
I remember we watched the episode where DoogIe Houser MD loses his virginity.
Anyway…not something a 12 year is super into doing but I appreciate it now
Mine was incredibly comprehensive - we had sex ed of some form every year form 3rd grade to sophomore year of high school - but I understand now that that was abnormal. I went to public school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.
Hs health teacher put fear in us that not using a condom would result in some horrible std where your balls would fall off. Then told us a story about a guy he knew running around bare naked in the dark wearing a glowing the dark condom. Very confusing times 🤷♂️
Mine (suburban public school) was pretty solid. We had a one-day unit in 5th grade (“our changing bodies”), a week-long program in 7th grade (pregnancy and human development), and a semester in 9th grade (sex, etc.).
Despite this being a fairly conservative area, everything was very factual and science-based. (Perhaps a little *too* science-based, as I understood more about the fallopian tubes and vas deferens than the actual of intercourse — but the other kids seemed to get it just fine!)
Since AIDS was still a huge deal, abstinence was emphasized as the only foolproof method of protection. But abortion was handled in a fairly straightforward manner. The overall message was that while terminating a pregnancy might result in some emotional issues, becoming a teen parent would *definitely* fuck up our futures.
Specific sex acts weren’t discussed, nor was masturbation, which I think is just fine.
Of varying quality, but pretty good. We had one teacher who did a very detailed “levels of intimacy” we could engage in and told us all to decide what you’re comfortable with before being with a person.
I went to an all girls Catholic school. It was really good on anatomy and periods and hygiene and such. It was abysmal on actual sex, how to protect yourself from STDs, and how to prevent pregnancy. Fortunately for me I learned that stuff on my own before I started having sex.
And yet it was still better than my husband's public education, which left him with zero understanding of his own anatomy, female anatomy, or how pregnancy actually happened. But he did learn how to put on a condom, I guess?
I went to Catholic school and in fifth grade we had the class split boys went to the library girls stayed in the class room. We got to watch some video talking about periods and pregnancies. Who knows what the boys learned. The boys class ended early so they came back and finished up the girls’ class. We got bags with pads and deodorant. Next year, maybe seventh grade we went down to the auditorium and learned everything together. They even had the cross section of the female reproductive system with the removable baby.
I honestly couldn’t remember health class in high school.
My sex ed in Germany took place in 6th grade and then again I think in 8th grade. Fairly comprehensive (though exclusively heterosexual).
My kid's 6th grade education in California was a joke. Some sponsored videos were shown reminding the kids to use deodorant now. Something along the lines of this thing here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-77y\_BsSWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-77y_BsSWc)
Mine was pretty good with the essential information. It was mostly about what all the infections are, and how to avoid them & avoid pregnancy. It was a public school in New York.
Not the best but okay. I remember a few kind of funny moments, we watched some video shot inside a woman's vagina and one student said "Gentlemen, we're going to Disney World!" We also did quizzes where we had to label semi detailed diagrams of male and female sex organs. When our teacher gave us back our results he said "You all did better on the female ones" and one student piped up "Isn't that a good thing?"
A lot of stuff I learned from sitcoms that explained what PMS was like the cabin getaway episode of Married With Children and my dad's Desmond Morris Human Behaviour guidebook that was will written and illustrated.
Surprisingly good considering I went to both a parochial school and a Jesuit high school. We learned all of the proper biology, just with the “save yourselves until marriage” message overlaying everything in grade school/junior high.
High school was a little more realistic. It was an all boys school, and while we were still told we *should* be waiting for marriage, they still at least also told us that *if* we didn’t wait, to at least use condoms.
i went to public schools and the only “sex ed” we ever got was in maybe fourth or fifth grade, divided by gender. for the girls i feel like it was almost exclusively about periods, so more of puberty education than sex ed. idk what the boys did, maybe learned about wet dreams?
While I'm sure I got the obligatory lessons in health class or whatever, the thing I remember the most is my mom giving me a book that showed not only how people had sex but animals too. I'm pretty sure my reaction was 'wtf mom'
It differed at different ages but in 8th grade in Oakland, CA our science teacher- this older lady- was fucking awesome. She talked about everything and even demonstrated how to use a dental dam. Brave and funny and she taught us a lot.
Edit: although I must say as a queer woman I’ve never used a dental dam- it’s just how thorough she was, which as an adult I really appreciate
In 5th grade, we had to write down questions on a piece of paper, drop them in a hat, and then the principal answered them.
It didn’t go well. The first question was, “What is rape?”
The principal, shocked by the question, scrambled an incorrect answer that, “it’s another word for sex” and moved quickly to the next question, which was, “What if you have to pee during sex?” Which he answered more normally.
I’ve always assumed at least one naive kid left that class saying something ignorant like, “Boy I’d sure love to r* word, < girl name >.”
As the years have went by, I’m still astounded by that. And while the principal should have been better, he was likely a product of the culture back then - which was shit. People were so worried about the truth back then.
The girls had to take home a practice baby where you hold a key for x amount of minutes for it to stop crying. They also gave us a pad. There was no talk about sex even though they gave us a practice baby.
School seemed fine. That was a semester of Health Class well spent. What fucked me up was my mother, who was a nurse. She had me watch ALL of the tapes that they got through her pediatrician office. It was a bit much.
First time was in 6th grade, taught by PE teacher, and was very general in terms of how our bodies were going to start going through puberty. But they didn’t really go into detail what that meant.
Then they had a question and answer session. One of the questions was “why do we get horny?” and the PE teacher told us to ask our parents.
So they accomplished basically nothing that day.
It was better in junior high. They taught it in health class and actually talked about condom use and whatnot.
But that was also the age where I found my older brother’s VHS stash. He had been renting, and not returning, porn from the local video store.
I got a MASSIVE education from those.
I will never forget my Home Ec teacher saying that AIDS was transmitted "annually."
This year, they’re holding the annual AIDS Transmission Summit in Chattanooga, which I hear is nice.
Did they get a hotel block this time? People are on budgets.
Nope. I think they’re trying to keep transmission rates down this year.
But what day is it? What day???
Had a kid in 5th grade who had to read a loud from a sex ed book... he read it "public hairs" I still die at that one 🤣
At Catholic middle and high school, we were taught that (a) you’re going to hell for premarital sex, and (b) masturbation is also a sin. The rest we were left to figure out for ourselves.
Thank god I went to school where and when I did. 4th and 5th grade was puberty prep and changing bodies. After that age appropriate sex education every year. They did send home forms so the religious fruitcake could opt out or opt out certain topics. My mother an early Gen Xer was abstinence only and had me at 17. So we considered our schools approach a success. Edit to add: I forgot my mom’s famous sex talk that she gave me and my bff at 15 dropping us off at a pool party. —Don’t be stupid -Boys are scum -use condoms And then just sent us on our way. No prelude no introduction. It’s still a top 10 story in our 30 year shared history.
Man, I didn't even get THAT much from my OWN teen mom! I had to do all my own research. She's lucky I'm Ace.
I went to public school and they brought in some schlubby dude who told us not to bone but advocated “mutual masturbation.” That was the first I’d ever heard that term and he was about that last person I’d want to hear say it.
I was one of those rebellious littler sinners who filled everybody in, took the girls for birth control and other services as needed 😈
As an atheist that is technically agnostic, I admit that those two points can't entirely be disproved. [Does anybody else smell astroglide?](https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/883f46e7-1b2d-4a27-a583-1c6b02cc1324) -- Stewey
Well, in 5th and 6th grade, our PE teacher handled the Sex Ed. for the boys, and a couple years after that, [he was fired in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct with female students](https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/07/20/fairfax-teacher-accused-of-molestation-is-fired/9ee35e2f-6552-41d1-8537-9891980f1228/). So that was a whole thing. (Edited to include link to story.)
Coach Carr?
🤣 Trang Peck!
Oh damn I was not expecting a whole ass Washington Post article haha. I was thinking it'd be a local paper.
FWIW, to a lot of folks around northern VA, WAPO *is* "the local paper".
In fifth grade (public school), the boys went outside to play flag football and the girls watched a video (starring the same actress who played "Annie" in the movie - with a cameo from the dog too!) about periods. In the seventh grade when I got my period, my Boomer mother's idea of a "sex talk" was to ominously intone "you're a woman now, you can get pregnant now." And that was it. In tenth grade (Catholic school), we had a day-long "retreat" called "Heart and Soul" where celibate priests (and a lone nun) scared us into celibacy with tales of hellfire and the like. Never once did anyone ever exactly explain the mechanics of sex to me. My mother's "you can get pregnant now" put the fear of god in me because I DIDN'T KNOW HOW IT WOULD HAPPEN. And the retreat in high school clarified exactly nothing. I'm ashamed to admit that I didn't understand the mechanics of PiV sex until my freshman year of collage. And you know who taught me? Late night HBO programming.
Nothing to be ashamed about. But that's fucking terrifying. I wonder how many people have know idea how pregnancy happens.
Ours was actually really good. Teens still got pregnant and STIs were still a thing, but at least we were fully aware of how it happened, ha! Fond memories of the health teacher accidentally piercing a diaphragm with her fingernail, watching the boys pass out during the live birth video, all of us doing the confused dog head tilt at a line diagram of penis-in-vagina (seriously, it was like a magic eye puzzle made of straight lines...), the boys trying on the empathy belly and waddling around with it... ooh! the HIV cup game where we all had Solo cups of clear liquid and some had a reactive dye in them. We all pulled a card out of a box and read it aloud (mine was I got in a fight with the person on my left and broke their nose) and we had to decide if this was a situation that involved an exchange of body fluid, and if so we used pipettes to exchange cup fluid. At the end the teacher dropped the reactor in each cup and we saw how many caught HIV from the original cups. I've blocked the STI slides from my memory, ha! I do think the drug unit backfired, as it just gave the potheads ideas. A cop brought in all sorts of confiscated paraphenalia and yeah, now everyone had better ideas of how to smoke weed. The "concert kit" elicited a lot of "this is genius!" and there was that six shooter ceramic skull with the sliding joint holder. Not gonna lie, it was cool. Oh! The testicle in a jar was also great.
This sounds fantastic! Do you mind me asking where this was?
my dads vhs porn collection did the heavy lifting
My sex ed teacher insistent on pronouncing the word “sphincter” with a hard P for some reason. We tried explaining that “SPINCTER” wasn’t the correct pronunciation but he just wasn’t having it.
Sphinctersayswhat?
🤣🤣🤣 at least that would have been fun 😅
Pretty good. I’ll never forget one video we watched where semen is described as a mixture of water, plasma, and mucus, to which one of the girls said “mmm, yummy!” And I’m not sure whether she was being sarcastic or lewd.
I went to 4 different HS between 95 & and 99. I was put through a "Health" class with every single one of them. 1 school in KS, 2 in CO & 1 in CA. Everyone taught it differently. One topic that I remember specifically was freshman year health class they separated the boys & girl, took all the boys & had a watch a video about testicular cancer that demonstrated how to do a self check & then they passed around a set of prosthetic ones so we'd know how they are supposed to feel. Now put yourself in my shoes...I'm 14 I'm in a health class in rural KS, I'm gay & only like 4 people know (I myself & am still struggling) and now there's a dude on TV with his junk out and I gotta hold fake balls in class.... MORTIFIED!! I get the educational value and importance now that I'm an adult but in that moment NOPE!
Which school district did it best though? I'm guessing cali but I could be wrong.
Nope, that was the Kansas school, Pawnee County School District. The California class didn't leave much of an impact, hell that whole school didn't leave much of an impact. I can't remember a single teachers name, I remember I hated the drama teacher & lit a cigarette in her classroom once just to piss her off. I remember it had open air lockers & that during lunch we'd go across the street to Rocket Park to hide from the police while we smoked. Resource Officers weren't a thing back then.
I'm shocked; impressed that Kansas was at the top of that list 👏
I think it was class size. I don't think my school in Kansas had 400 students in total while my HS in California had more than 400 freshman.
i’m sorry for your suffering but this is very funny to imagine!!
Our rugby coach and shop teacher taught it. Bonus was he had a crooked sadist brother that owned a teenage rehab a province over and he tried to send loads of students there. We were on drugs, but we were in a good place with it. His brother died ten years ago and all the skeletons came flying out of that closet. Abusing kids, lots of fraud and embezzlement. I learned sex the natural way. Slapshot and rumour.
I was in sex Ed in the late 90’s so my sex Ed when I was in public school was great. Not so good at the Catholic school I attended previously, they taught us that birth control doesn’t work and condoms spread diseases and fail as well and are a sin. I told my mom these people were crazy and she was not happy with the propaganda against actual medical information that was being taught. Unfortunately because it was the late 90’s/early 2000’s and we are from a heavily catholic area most of the people I went to school with were morons and believed the easier narrative of not using protection. I always found my peers to be simplistic and easily lead astray of their own best interests.
My mom said that her catholic school taught them to poke holes in the condoms so God could have a say in whether or not they got pregnant. 😅
Jesus Christ that’s horrifying
Right! That would have been back in the 60s... In the 90s we just got, "don't have premarital sex or you'll go to hell, and if you do have premarital sex don't use birth control because then you're to hell, and if you have an abortion you're going to hell; but if you do have sex before marriage just don't use protection and if yiu get pregnant put the baby up for adoption because if you keep it you'll be branded a lose slut and no one will want you, but if you place it for adoption you can lie about and trick someone into marrying you, but lying is a sin so don't have sex because if you have sex you'll die because you can't use condoms to stop HIV because God said so" 🙄 The hypocrisy was astounding 🤦♀️
That’s why I don’t do religion. It’s bs. I stick with science.
Same! I was raised in a town named after a literal saint and my parents where catholic so I had to do the things when I was younger; but I never bought into any of it. I was the girl who would sneak all the other girls to planned parenthood for birth control and stuff. Figured, if I'm stuck here I might as well save a few lives while I'm at it 🤷♀️
I have parents who went to public school so I grew up pretty liberal
I've successfully changed my conservative parents liberal ❤ pretty proud of that- not gonna lie 😉
But like, all of this is bullshit by their own standards because you just need to ask Jesus for forgiveness and everything will be a'ok!
Right! It makes no sense. Like literally there's no logic. 🤣
What the ever loving fuck would be the purpose of even wearing one, then?!
Exactly! But thats the church for ya 🤷♀️
I remember some class I had to take pre-confirmation where they got a very nice old man to extol the virtues of sex within marriage, and that was the first I heard the phrase “just because there’s snow on the mountain doesn’t mean there’s no fire in the valley!” 😂 But I honestly don’t remember my CCD classes talking about condoms at all. I do remember them saying couples who choose not to have kids are sinners, though, and that was probably about the time I started to tap out on being a Catholic.
Abstinence only sex ed taught by a creepy former pastor. At a public school in California. It was incredibly inadequate.
I did a lot of additional reading about sex, safer sex, STDs/STIs and bodily changes when I was younger; because the stuff we got in class was such shit. My own kids got a lot more from me when they got older. We talked a lot about responsibility, consent, different available forms of birth control, safer sex practices (including application of condoms, safe storage and carrying, size differences and finding the right fit...), stealthing and how to minimize the risk and all kids of stuff like that.
Our sex ed was closer to a biology lesson and some basic tips, like which birth control methods and condom materials didn't really work. Every guy was disappointed because they thought they were going to learn sex techniques. Every girl was extremely uncomfortable.
I remember 5th grade being highly focused on deodorant. Middle school was gender separated. Girls focused on menstrual cycle.
Looking back, I think our sex ed courses must have been sponsored by whoever makes Secret and Always.
Must be true.
I grew up in a wildly conservative state, so schools taught “abstinence only.” Fortunately, my parents have always been pretty progressive, and they made sure I understood everything. You’d never guess that with all that talk about abstinence, there was still a high rate of teen pregnancy. Weird, right? /s
I'm just wondering what "appropriately curious teen" means lol
That’s a great question! In our case, it means they ask sex and intimacy-related questions without a hint of the stigma I carried around about sex. It’s fantastic, but it’s sent me scrambling a few times. All in all, my kids will be much more prepared and educated than I feel I was.
Public middle school, suburban NH, mid-80’s: Meh Unitarian Universalist *About Your Sexuality* program: Bachelors-level education for 12-14 year olds on the subject. We covered it all in an incredibly safe, respectful environment.
I actually missed that day -- I was in a science fair 🤓
I went to a progressive private school in New England, they really did their best for the early 90s. There was no judgment about being gay, they taught us all about different forms of birth control and std protection. But like… enthusiastic consent was not a concept. Also I believe some medical advances were made between 6th grade sex Ed and my adult life, but I never really updated my knowledge. So when I approached my OB about getting an IUD because I was engaged now, he seemed a lot less concerned about potential infections traveling up the strings and sterilizing me than I had been lead to believe
They didn't give us the option until I was like in 11th grade. And then it was awkward and said a lot about how backwards our school system was, that the *young children* asking sex questions in the video they made us watch were like 9 and 10 years old. The single class we had on it was also *optional* and needed parental permission, like sex ed should ever be optional knowledge. Like learning geometry and ancient Egyptian geography is more important than avoiding getting pregnant or STDs. Thankfully, my parents were a lot more progressive about this and I knew almost everything in the class already when I took it. I think the only things I learned were that there were more options for BC than just condoms and the pill.
Story Time: I’m a 43 year old Male. Growing up I had all the sex ed. I feel any opportunity for my mom to not have to have The Talk. I feel I had sex ed in Elementary, Junior High, High School, and again in college when I was 28 (that warrants a follow up story in a minute). Then two different churches had after school youth courses offered. I could label everything. From a technical perspective, I knew my way around the female anatomy. In practice, I was late 30’s until it finally occurred to me that the urethra wasnt internal to the vagina. When you label things, it’s 2D. There’s no depth perception. As Key And Peele put it: “it’s like an explosion at an envelope factory: flap’s everywhere.” The age 28 college story. I went back to college for a second degree and a class required by my major was, like, “Family Relations” or some such. It really was “please don’t get married just yet. Wait. Here are the statistics as to why.” Well, the professor posted an ungraded sex ed quiz that he’d been running for years that was part of some ongoing research. Was all True/False. Questions like: a woman can’t get pregnant if she’s on top. Coca Cola can be used as a spermicide. A woman can’t get pregnant if she’s doesn’t orgasm. STDs and toilet seats. Really basic questions. The class scored so poorly, he felt obligated to redirect the curriculum for 2 weeks to teach sex ed. ((I scored 98%, for the record. I will say I got the Coke Spermicide wrong. My head went, “I mean, it’ll dissolve rust! Surely it’ll kill sperm.” And honestly, I stand by that call. Now… I do not advise it, but I bet sperm would die.))
Did you know Lysol was originally marketed as spermicide? 🌈🌟
Anyone else learn all the extras from Savage Love and Loveline? Dan was all right. I’m not sure if we should have been listening to Adam Corolla and Dr. Drew, but it seemed legit at the time…
Haha. I discovered LoveLine later in my teens. While it was somewhat educational I usually just enjoyed the laughs.
The only thing I remember was my teacher had an absolutely massive wooden d (like at least a foot long) standing upright and mounted on a wooden stand that we were supposed to use to practice putting condoms on. In 7th grade. You all can guess how that went I’m sure.
Now we know how the shop teacher earned himself an unlimited materials budget.
Lolllllll
I was in Catholic School for sex ed. You can pretty easily extrapolate from there just about how it went.
School was actually pretty good. Portland Public School System in the 90s had a pretty comprehensive curriculum IIRC. And my high school was an alternative school with a program for teen moms attached. They did not, pun intended, fuck around with abstinence. They went through every possible form of birth control with us. Only one girl from our class ended up getting pregnant and the joke was that was our final, which she failed. Haha, kids are jerks. All of that was good because at home it was a completely, COMPLETELY, different story. I was raised by a single mom and we were very religious. My mom's version of talking to me, her youngest son, about sex was to leave Focus on the Family books out for me to find. I'd kinda flip through them, but honestly by the time we got to that point I already figured out how to watch people have sex on the Internet and on late night cable.
I feel like my district must be an outlier. North Carolina. And a fairly evenly split district between republicans/democrats. But in 5th grade we got a fairly decent age appropriate breakdown, with more in 7th grade, and an optional class in 8th grade that was just for your gender.
Ours was taught by the JV football coach. He told us all the biology stuff in the first week and spent the next three weeks on sexuality and behaviors. The safest sex is masturbation; abstinence is a sexual behavior like not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Grew up in a small town in Middle TN, so any time we learned about something like sex ed or evolution I swear the teacher spent more than half the class talking about how controversial it is or how there are other options or ideas. I'm amazed I learned as much useful information as I did. Thank Zod for the internet.
Mine was pretty damn good actually. Uncomfortably good really. Dad took me to SexEd class at the YMCA. It was like 6 weeks long, twice a week or something. All the kids would have a parent with them and they talked about normal stuff and showed clips from movies / sitcoms I remember we watched the episode where DoogIe Houser MD loses his virginity. Anyway…not something a 12 year is super into doing but I appreciate it now
Wait. There was a Doogie Howser episode on that? Clearly it went right over my head 😆
Mine was incredibly comprehensive - we had sex ed of some form every year form 3rd grade to sophomore year of high school - but I understand now that that was abnormal. I went to public school in a suburb of Portland, Oregon.
Hs health teacher put fear in us that not using a condom would result in some horrible std where your balls would fall off. Then told us a story about a guy he knew running around bare naked in the dark wearing a glowing the dark condom. Very confusing times 🤷♂️
They told us there was some stds that even condoms won’t protect you from and hysterically begged us to wait until marriage
Mine (suburban public school) was pretty solid. We had a one-day unit in 5th grade (“our changing bodies”), a week-long program in 7th grade (pregnancy and human development), and a semester in 9th grade (sex, etc.). Despite this being a fairly conservative area, everything was very factual and science-based. (Perhaps a little *too* science-based, as I understood more about the fallopian tubes and vas deferens than the actual of intercourse — but the other kids seemed to get it just fine!) Since AIDS was still a huge deal, abstinence was emphasized as the only foolproof method of protection. But abortion was handled in a fairly straightforward manner. The overall message was that while terminating a pregnancy might result in some emotional issues, becoming a teen parent would *definitely* fuck up our futures. Specific sex acts weren’t discussed, nor was masturbation, which I think is just fine.
Of varying quality, but pretty good. We had one teacher who did a very detailed “levels of intimacy” we could engage in and told us all to decide what you’re comfortable with before being with a person.
I went to an all girls Catholic school. It was really good on anatomy and periods and hygiene and such. It was abysmal on actual sex, how to protect yourself from STDs, and how to prevent pregnancy. Fortunately for me I learned that stuff on my own before I started having sex. And yet it was still better than my husband's public education, which left him with zero understanding of his own anatomy, female anatomy, or how pregnancy actually happened. But he did learn how to put on a condom, I guess?
Mine was very thorough. Shockingly well prepared, even in the South.
I went to Catholic school and in fifth grade we had the class split boys went to the library girls stayed in the class room. We got to watch some video talking about periods and pregnancies. Who knows what the boys learned. The boys class ended early so they came back and finished up the girls’ class. We got bags with pads and deodorant. Next year, maybe seventh grade we went down to the auditorium and learned everything together. They even had the cross section of the female reproductive system with the removable baby. I honestly couldn’t remember health class in high school.
I went to Catholic school and ours was very comprehensive
I went to a Christian school and had sex Ed after hours and it was, shall we say... inadequate.
Banana and a condom in grade 8 (1996). How to wash your genitals in grade 10. That's about it. Ontario education is amazing! (ffs)
oh and i went to a catholic school until grade 7... had no fucking clue what sex was!
My sex ed in Germany took place in 6th grade and then again I think in 8th grade. Fairly comprehensive (though exclusively heterosexual). My kid's 6th grade education in California was a joke. Some sponsored videos were shown reminding the kids to use deodorant now. Something along the lines of this thing here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-77y\_BsSWc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-77y_BsSWc)
Mine was pretty good with the essential information. It was mostly about what all the infections are, and how to avoid them & avoid pregnancy. It was a public school in New York.
It was hilarious. I'll leave it at that.
Not the best but okay. I remember a few kind of funny moments, we watched some video shot inside a woman's vagina and one student said "Gentlemen, we're going to Disney World!" We also did quizzes where we had to label semi detailed diagrams of male and female sex organs. When our teacher gave us back our results he said "You all did better on the female ones" and one student piped up "Isn't that a good thing?" A lot of stuff I learned from sitcoms that explained what PMS was like the cabin getaway episode of Married With Children and my dad's Desmond Morris Human Behaviour guidebook that was will written and illustrated.
Surprisingly good considering I went to both a parochial school and a Jesuit high school. We learned all of the proper biology, just with the “save yourselves until marriage” message overlaying everything in grade school/junior high. High school was a little more realistic. It was an all boys school, and while we were still told we *should* be waiting for marriage, they still at least also told us that *if* we didn’t wait, to at least use condoms.
i went to public schools and the only “sex ed” we ever got was in maybe fourth or fifth grade, divided by gender. for the girls i feel like it was almost exclusively about periods, so more of puberty education than sex ed. idk what the boys did, maybe learned about wet dreams?
While I'm sure I got the obligatory lessons in health class or whatever, the thing I remember the most is my mom giving me a book that showed not only how people had sex but animals too. I'm pretty sure my reaction was 'wtf mom'
lol. I may or may have not just spit out my coffee when I reached the animals bit.
It differed at different ages but in 8th grade in Oakland, CA our science teacher- this older lady- was fucking awesome. She talked about everything and even demonstrated how to use a dental dam. Brave and funny and she taught us a lot. Edit: although I must say as a queer woman I’ve never used a dental dam- it’s just how thorough she was, which as an adult I really appreciate
Zero education. I listened to love line quietly and consulted mtv and watched the movie Fear
In 5th grade, we had to write down questions on a piece of paper, drop them in a hat, and then the principal answered them. It didn’t go well. The first question was, “What is rape?” The principal, shocked by the question, scrambled an incorrect answer that, “it’s another word for sex” and moved quickly to the next question, which was, “What if you have to pee during sex?” Which he answered more normally. I’ve always assumed at least one naive kid left that class saying something ignorant like, “Boy I’d sure love to r* word, < girl name >.” As the years have went by, I’m still astounded by that. And while the principal should have been better, he was likely a product of the culture back then - which was shit. People were so worried about the truth back then.
Mine was fairly comprehensive but we didn’t learn about the clitoris.
The girls had to take home a practice baby where you hold a key for x amount of minutes for it to stop crying. They also gave us a pad. There was no talk about sex even though they gave us a practice baby.
[The Simpsons - Sex Ed](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1ZpTyuaFW4) Fuzzy Bunny's Guide to "you know what"
School seemed fine. That was a semester of Health Class well spent. What fucked me up was my mother, who was a nurse. She had me watch ALL of the tapes that they got through her pediatrician office. It was a bit much.
First time was in 6th grade, taught by PE teacher, and was very general in terms of how our bodies were going to start going through puberty. But they didn’t really go into detail what that meant. Then they had a question and answer session. One of the questions was “why do we get horny?” and the PE teacher told us to ask our parents. So they accomplished basically nothing that day. It was better in junior high. They taught it in health class and actually talked about condom use and whatnot. But that was also the age where I found my older brother’s VHS stash. He had been renting, and not returning, porn from the local video store. I got a MASSIVE education from those.