Ask Lemmy

I remember in elementary school we had a lesson on sex organs. When I turned in my test paper, I curiously asked my teacher, "If the sperm is in the male, and the egg is in the female, how does the sperm transfer over?"

All she said was, "Well, what do you think?" To which I replied, "I don't know." Then I quietly returned to my desk. Later I discussed it with my friend and we concluded that a male must pee into a female. Because at the time, pee was the only thing we knew came out of the penis.

I had an surprising one, actually: I went to a private religious school, but I had a strangely comprehensive sex education.

It started with unvarnished discussions of human anatomy and cautions about sexual abuse around age 8, and then moved on to the basics of (hetero)sexuality by the time I was a preteen. In high school that continued, though talk about birth control was postponed until the health units of later physical education courses, which not everyone took. Of course, the stress was always that sexual activity should be limited to monogamous (heterosexual) marriage, and there was no mention of anything outside of the hetero-normative.

The last wrinkle was that it was all opt-out. At every point, there was at least one person who would leave the room for the duration of the class because their parents really didn't want them learning about naughty bits.

So it ended up actually providing a pretty good foundation. It was still incomplete and biased, but a lot better than what you would expect when you hear "private religious school."

In Highschool I took health and it was the diagrams of the different junk, pictures and videos about STDs, saying most birth control doesn't actually work very well (e.g. Condoms have a 36% success rates at prevent STDs or pregnancy) so it's best to sign a card swearing you'll be abstinent until marriage. Only one person signed the card since we were, thankfully, given a choice. No talking about being gay, since it's a red state. They spent more time on a bunch of different drugs than sex.

Before high school there wasn't really "sex" ed, just showing videos about puberty and ways to check for cancer/lumps. But I went to a Catholic school before highschool. There also might have been stuff about how Masturbation is bad in the Catholics "sex ed".

I don't remember too much of it. Was probably grade 6 or 7. They split us up by boys/girls. The only thing that stuck is the teacher telling us that when people with penises sleep, their penis goes UP and DOWN and UP and DOWN and she very animatedly gestured this out.

To this day, I have never noticed anybody's penis rise and fall while they're asleep, but nobody really feels comfortable with me watching either ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

8th grade and in bio class. Focus was on abstinence being the best way to precent STDs and stuff, and also using protection like condoms.

9th grade. Public school. Teacher opens the first class with "All penises are the same size" and "I don't answer questions. That's what your handouts are for". I can't for the life of me understand how my generation had such a high teenage pregnancy rate, can you?

Watched videos with captain condom and penny penicillin

It was early 00’s in the US South and basically boiled down to don’t have sex before marriage, you WILL catch an STD (boys) or get pregnant (girls). Our science teacher though, went off script their last year teaching, and said we’d likely ignore the advice to abstain and if we did have sex, to use a condom. I always liked that teacher.

This same public high school also taught the life and death of Jesus in history class.

I think of all the education that I missed, but then my homework was never quite like this....

Grade 6. Biology classes lasted about an hour or so, every day, for a week or two.

Boys and girls were broken into their own groups. I assume this was to help avoid being embarrassed about things in front of the opposite sex.

We were told if we made jokes or giggled, we failed for the day and had to sit in the hall. We nervously and embarrassingly giggled a bit the first day but after we got into it things were fine.

The classes were very straight forward. Dry. Matter of fact. Covered everything they needed to cover for basic biology, how sex works, body parts and what they do, etc, but didn't talk about things like birth control.

Mine talked about various contraceptive methods, STDs, and accidental/teen pregnancies. It did focus more on the pregnancy part than the STD part, but they also briefly talked about how condoms are still important even if you're gay, since they prevent STDs.

I have a cousin I went to highschool with. He grew up in the south, but he finished highschool with me in Minnesota, and he told me his sex ed curriculum down south consisted of a brief talk on how sex is bad and that it is important to eat vegetables. Even though he had health class credits from down south, the school made him take their health class and he was happy to find out it's much more comprehensive than the south.

I had several classes during different years, but what I recall from the first, in middle school during the mid 90s, was our teacher, Bunny Morris. She was memorizable because her son was nationally renowned pop artist Burton Morris.

She was fine. I recall that she started her class with the statement that "we are all sexual beings", which sounded cheesey to me at the time but in hindsight seems like a very lucid mission statement for introducing preteens to sexual education.

I don't remember the specifics, but I have great sexual health as an adult, so I suppose she did her job. It definitely wasn't the shamey kind.

Me with zero knowledge of anything sexual down to even how to do sexual intercourse or the existence of oral sex, knowing what consent is, anything. No idea.

I was almost a teen and stumbled on an obscure sex forum. It wasn’t pornography, it was all informational. I started reading about stuff, it astounded me, it sounded like fiction. I learned how to masturbate correctly, I learned how to do sexual things, and I learned about consent. As a result, I waited until I was comfy with another person doing that stuff to me. I have never had a bad sexual experience, and I have had every partner tell me about how much they enjoy experiences with me.

I thank that forum for that. I’m very lucky I was taught by the best source I could imagine… and that I was curious enough to read and learn for a long while before actually doing stuff.

Maybe I had a good education? I feel like it equipped me properly to make sound decisions. Gave information of puberty, changes, hormones, STD/STI, protection, pregnancies.

In the moment, the class was just another class. Sure, it was funny (teehee weiner and boobs), but reflecting later in life, I made a few better decisions because of it.

My friend Lionel in grade school telling us that every time you thrust when you have sex that that's how many children you'll have.

According to Lionel I should have had a few million children by now.

With parental consent, we got the basic mechanics taught to us in grade 7. The very first thing was the teacher asked us what words we knew for genitalia (dick etc), wrote them all on the board, and then banned us from using them in the class. We were only to use the proper words.

Then in grade 10, without parental consent, we started getting weekly classes during our homeroom class. There were about five classes in total. It was conducted by someone from outside the school (from a group like planned parenthood I guess), but our teacher was present.

There were many discussions, different forms of contraception were introduced, and literally passed around for us to look at. The pill, dental dams, condoms, female condoms, (I'm probably forgetting some). We practiced putting condoms onto plastic bananas, and were all given one (some?) to take home.

There was an anonymous question box which the instructor answered. Sex for pleasure, including masturbation was discussed. I don't remember anything about LGBT as it was a different time then. After high school, though many classmates came out.

I do remember one of these lessons was about STDs, and the instructor was going to show those horrific pictures as others have described. But our (cool) teacher stopped them. Overall, it was a great experience for us.

My sex ed was pretty thorough I feel. It was part of our health units in school from grades 5-9. In the earlier grades, the class would be split into boys and girls, but as I got older the entire class was part of the lesson.

Most sex ed classes involved: -Showing diagrams of female and male reproductive organs (we had to label each one which I hated doing) -Students being able to ask questions about sex or puberty -Learning about consent -STI and safe sex -Birth control methods

There was also a LGBT/gender portion that was added to the curriculum later on. It covered things like: -Differences between gender and sex -Sexual vs romantic attraction (also covered ace/Aro people I believe)

• What makes a person binary trans people or non binary -Defining different sexualities (gay, lesbians, bi, etc) -Differences between gender identity and gender expression

Overall, I'm pretty satisfied with how all this was taught to me.

Soccer coach told us it would hurt to push a baby from his vagina then some boy behind me asked “you have a vagina?” Bad teacher and no one cared in middle school

I’m from the UK and in my 40s. I got shown a video about genitalia at primary school when I was about 10. Then we got taught it several times until we left school, often about masturbation or safe sex. All from a pretty serious educational kind of perspective, not demonising it or anything. Largely saying that masturbation is normal and that you should have sex safely. I remember some weird video where they talked about masturbating by twisting your penis rather than the usual motion.

Religious school taught me nothing, but religious parents gave a surprisingly detailed and good explanation of sex, including mention of gay people. Then they got me a private tutor for biology so I would know the material to pass the exam.

A handy VHS tape that I spotted under the couch when lying on the floor after school.

Made a copy and put it back.

Still don't know which parent did it.

Got gifted a biology encyclopedia left open on my table opened on the page about reproduction

A mysterious brown paper bag was tossed out of a car window aimed to land near me playing in the front yard...

Like god intended.

Sitting around a table in the school library and trying not to giggle while a catholic priest told us about the dangers of sex, that it was for procreation only and that abortion was evil.

This priest had left that parish a few years earlier but they brought him back to teach sex ed.

It was later learned that he had been molesting children while at the parish.

Over flowery words from my mother, as soon as I started asking.

Catholic school in the UK in the early 00s - basically "here's what a condom is because the government says we have to show you, now wait till you're married and don't be gay"

mostly just internet

parents are conservative and don't teach shit, not that I want to talk to them anyways

school teach it in terms of biology. Eggs, Sperms, that stuff, they don't teach you how to fuck, but I think they mentioned condoms a few times, but I doubt it was even that clear. I don't think they explicitly mentioned how sexual intetcourse is supposed to work.

internet is a wonderful thing, its just sad people these days use it for tik toks instead of reading Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is love, Wikipedia is life. (Yes I know to double check the stuff)

I can't recall if it was on the second or third year of high school, but it was a single Biology class. The teacher was comfortable with it, but she was very clearly biased towards abstinence and insisted the only way to be 100% sure was to just not have sex.

Despite that, she still talked about basics of sex and genitalia, a few common STDs, and basic preventive measures, both for pregnancy and STDs - even if they weren't particularly effective. Both coitus interruptus and sodomy (we had a loooot of fun repeating that word for a week or so) were mentioned as ways to avoid pregnancy, but condoms and IUDs were the real recommendations.

As a class, we weren't too rowdy, though there was a kid or two that made a few too many jokes - and the teacher cut them off fairly quickly. I also recall she handled pamphlets with each of the methods talked during class and their approximate efficacy.

This was in 2005-ish and I'm Brazilian.

Also of note this was the second time, the first attempt happened in middle school (and in a different school altogether) and we had to do a presentation on STDs and the like. The teacher decided to cancel at the last minute because we were clearly too embarrassed to actually talk about the subject in front of our classmates.

standard 7th grade or so biology class stuff. 1990ish. A week or two of classes. that’s it.

Watching a 60y/o blind woman put a condom on a wooden banana waaaaaay bigger than any penis I've ever seen.

I did the practicum before the theory. It helped.

Christian teachers showing us pictures of STI infections that had been left alone for probably years before the patient went to/was able to go to a doctor in an effort to scare us into celibacy. Generally a scarring experience that didn't really teach us anything other than to practice safe sex.

*This was in the early 2000s IIRC.

Reading through the comments I remembered about a really great sex-positive TV show I would always watch late at night at around the same time my public education failed in teaching me about sex. The hosts were a really attractive Asian-looking guy with flowy hair and always wore a silk shirt with the top 2-3 buttons undone and a really attractive white girl that always wore a lot of tight clothes. They went over a lot of topics regarding attraction, safe-sex, how to deal with STIs; however, I don't think there were any specific segments on anything LGBTQ+, but IIRC they didn't need to because they way they presented things were easily applied to any sexual orientation. As in they talked about anal sex and how to do it safely and whatnot without specifically saying gex. I would love to read more about it, so if you know what it was called please lmk.