because up until 5 minutes ago I never understood how that was supposed to be helpful until I just wikipedia’d it
now I finally understand why the penis is inserted into the vagina, thank u wikipedia
They never explained anything.
i still don’t know what the birds and the bees refers to
(off to wikipedia i go)
or, rephrase that, i still don’t know why it refers to that
^ yup. came home at the age of 17 to find a library book for 8 year olds called ‘your changing body’ on my dresser. threw it behind the paneling on the wall, and never heard from/talked about it again. parents probably owe a lot in fines.
yr mom gave me an interactive demonstration
oh really? what did she use
They never explained anything.
^^ this
My dad, when I was about 15 asked me if i felt I knew enough already to understand the basic process. I said yes. He said that’s good. End of discussion.
yr mom gave me an interactive demonstration
― blah blah blah (є(٥_ ٥)э), Thursday, December 8, 2011 12:33 AM (33 minutes ago)
that must have been weird cus she’s old
it wasn’t weird when she gave me one
Mama Bean really gets around, huh?
I don’t think you understand—there were lights
I don’t know what that has to do with anything, but it came up when I GISed “mama bean”
this seems like it would just add another level of confusion for kids:
“According to tradition, the birds and the bees is a metaphorical story sometimes told to children in an attempt to explain the mechanics and good consequences of sexual intercourse through reference to easily observed natural events. For instance, bees carry and deposit pollen into flowers, a visible and easy-to-explain example of male fertilisation. Another example, birds lay eggs, a similarly visible and easy-to-explain example of female ovulation.”
“so uh, you use that thing you have there and it’s kinda like you’re depositing pollen into a bird who will then lay an egg”
“the bee flies into the bird up its you-know-hole”
awkward metaphors made redundant by internet porn
my son loves to look out the window at birds and for a long time he’d call them bees. like he’d point out at one and go “BEEEE!” very insistently. i don’t know how this actually relates to the birds and bees thing but it always makes me think of it, obviously.
My dad, when I was about 15 asked me if i felt I knew enough already to understand the basic process. I said yes. He said that’s good. End of discussion.
had the same chat w/my dad at 13. later, when I was “dating” he followed up:
“Sex is nice but don’t get anybody pregnant” *glares*
My parents never explained it to me — I think they were too embarrassed. Fortunately we had HBO and Cinemax, so they did the job.
They didn’t have to explain anything to me. I was reading the encyclopedia by the time I was 7.
my dad didn’t mention anything until i was 16 or 17 or so.
then, as we were putting up a ridiculous christmas light display outside, he asked me for the male end of the cord. i hesitated because i’d never heard the term before. i’m not handy and i’m barely 1/3 of a man.
when he saw me pause, he just started yelling. “THE MALE END IS THE ONE WITH THE PRONGS!! THE FEMALE END IS THE ONE WITH THE HOLES!! THE MALE PUTS THE PRONGS INTO THE HOLES, LIKE SEX!!”. i told him that i knew that (whatever in the world “that” was), but he was sweating and we put the rest of the lights up in silence.
we had so much catholicism mixed into the sex explanation from our parents i got confused so when the woman who lived behind us was raped by an intruder i told my best friend in highly delicate terms that the rapist had tried to force her to have a baby, since there had been all this insistence that procreation was the entire purpose of the sex act, and then my friend told her mother about this shocking and bizarre near-natal event who then told my mother who then told me off for being silly, and then the same week i watched the movie ‘great expectations’ and somehow in my mind miss havisham and her spider webby wedding remnants got all mixed up in the business and i ended up feeling terrified and ashamed. i think i would have been better instructed by the spectral bold smokers behind the bike sheds who my parents, with their sensible talk about a beautiful gift from god, were trying to preempt.
honestly Z S, you are such a <3.
honestly
<3 <3
another brief anecdote related to learning about sex is that in my 7th grade health class, the teacher told us that he was going to play a short film about sex, and if we could get it through it without laughing, we would get a pizza party. we all solemnly took this oath not to laugh. but about halfway through, there was an animation of an erection swinging up, and i lost it and started laughing really hard. i couldn’t stop, and then everyone else started laughing too, before the realization that the pizza party had been lost. they were PISSED. but, plus side, we got to laugh at the rest of the film with no remorse.
haha I totally forgot about the carrot at the end of a stick that was ‘pizza parties’
I don’t recall ever hearing the birds and bees thing until I was grown up. My parents never mentioned anything about sex to me until I was 20 and they caught me spending the night with a girl (who ironically I never had sex with).
I would never have figured out pollenation had anything to do with human reproduction even if I had heard about it. I associate pollen with allergies, not sex.
caught? At your place or hers?
My mother was anything but reticent when it came to sex ed: we had a copy of ” what’s happening to me?” in our house ever since I can remember, and it was of much interest to me. I never got The Talk, but my mum would answer any question I asked pretty much straight-up. Like the time I yelled out to her ” what’s sodomy mean?” And she replied matter-of-factly ”it’s when a man puts his penis up someones bum”.
Also memorable: ” what’s nymphomaniac mean?”
” a lady who likes to have sex a lot” I think I was about 8 when I asked that one.
> caught? At your place or hers?
I often stayed out on weekends until 1 or 2am and my parents usually went to bed before that and I’d lock up when I got home, after they were asleep. They usually slept in ‘til 11am or so on weekends, so I thought I was safe spending the night with a girl I dated about 3 times as long as I woke up early and drove home and snuck in quietly at 9am before my folks awakened. But instead for some reason they decided to stay up until 6am waiting for me that night and I still wasn’t home. My mother went ballistic the next day asking what time I came home. “I dunno, I didn’t check the clock”. She was like, WE WERE UP TIL 6 IN THE MORNING AND YOU WERE STILL OUT. I knew I’d been caught. I thought about offering up a story about crashing at a friend’s house because I was too tired to drive home safely, but then I lost my composure and instead decided to tell her a 20-year-old is old enough to sleep with a girl. The next day my dad wanted to make sure I knew how to use a condom....
But in retrospect, 20 is too old to still be living with your parents....
Bart: What a day, eh, Milhouse? The sun is out, birds are singing,
bees are trying to have sex with them — as is my
understanding —
we had a copy of ” what’s happening to me?” in our house ever since I can remember
lol at calling a gentle sex-ed primer WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?!?!, it’s like a safeword
this is a great thread, i think how you found out & the hilarious period in which you had to fill in the gaps in your knowledge beforehand are lovely & amusing to remember
They didn’t have to explain anything to me. I was reading the encyclopedia by the time I was 7.
^^^^ completely. I felt like Matilda.
I remember looking up “Father Christmas” in the encyclopedia and learning the whole history of the myth. I was interested rather than surprised or irate, and I don’t think I blamed my parents for not telling me the truth because even at that age I remember thinking that they were just doing what parents do, it’s not their fault. Although I can’t remember, I would imagine my reaction to finding out how sex works would have been very similar.
I should be surprised (given the fields I’ve worked in) at how little sex ed stuff people get at home and yet I still am.
I read “Are you there, God? It’s me Margaret” in 3rd grade and wound up with a bunch of questions about periods so that’s when I got that talk. She was also very active in PTA stuff and campaigned heavily for them to include a lesson on STDs and HIV in our middle school health class which they eventually did.
When I was about 13 my mom made me watch a very special episode of Oprah with her about mothers and teen daughters talking about sex. I think by that point I sort of knew most stuff anyway. I remember her telling me that if I ever needed birth control I could come to her. Yeah, right. When I actually did become sexually active at 17 my parents were the last people I wanted to involve in the business but at least I knew what was going on.
My dad never said a word to me about sex until college. One Christmas my mom gave me an Anne Geddes book with babies in pots and stuff (yeah, cause that’s really my thing :/) and when I opened it my dad said, “YOU JUST KEEP TAKING THOSE PILLS SO YOU DON’T GET ONE OF THOSE”. Thanks dad, Merry Christmas!
First line should have read “shouldn’t” be surprised.
One Christmas my mom gave me an Anne Geddes book with babies in pots and stuff (yeah, cause that’s really my thing :/) and when I opened it my dad said, “YOU JUST KEEP TAKING THOSE PILLS SO YOU DON’T GET ONE OF THOSE”. Thanks dad, Merry Christmas!
lol parents sending mixed messages
In Finland the metaphor is called “bees and flowers” (there even used to be a condom brand called that), which makes a bit more sense, I guess. I’ve always kinda wondered why Americans talk about “birds and bees”, I didn’t realize they were two different metaphors, instead of being parts of the one.
My parents rented a weird video from the library to try to explain it to me: Dr. D’s Birds and Bees
iirc it didn’t even explain sex, just that your socks might not fit anymore
omg
curious orange’s dad otm
can’t believe you got sex-ed from a pierogi
whu-hoa @ Dr. D
x-posts While I didn’t know it yet at that time, when my dad was 17 he had gotten his gf pregnant and I had a secret Swiss 1/2 sister 20 years my senior so I think that explained his random outbursts about birth control. That was the first but many followed and all were equally as curt and funny.
But yeah, my parents never gave me “the talk” either; they’re not religious or particularly conservative, I guess they just found the subject awkward. I learned about that stuff pretty early on from various different sources; I guess the biggest one was this old 70s “art of sex” guidebook for adults, which I discovered (poorly) hidden in my parents’ bedroom drawer. As a tween, I found its delicate black & white pencil illustrations and info texts describing various sex acts oddly titillating.
Also, I remember everyone in our 8th grade biology class laughed hysterically, when the teacher showed as a sex ed cartoon that actually had an animated montage of a couple doing it in various different positions.
When I was 17 or 18 my dad was driving me home from school and, out of nowhere, offered to give me the sex advice talk his mom had given him on his wedding night (his dad died when he was 8 so that’s why his mom was schooling him). The thought of some ancestral Mormon sex advice from my dad was too weird, so I declined.
When I was 9 or 10, I think my parents knew that I was snooping and stealing things from them, so they left copies of “What’s Happening to My Body—A Book for Boys” and “the Joy of Sex” somewhere they presumed I would find it. At least that’s what I imagine they were thinking by leaving that around.
Also tying the stealing and the sex talk together: the one time I got caught shoplifting (a civil war bullet from a Gettysburg gift shop), the huge lecture I got about it somehow included the advice: “and if you ever need condoms, we’ll buy them for you.” Thanks but no thanks, dad!
can’t believe you got sex-ed from a pierogi
ahahahahaha
Mine did not explain, they just left some porn around.
So, basically, “when five people love each other very much, they all get pissed, snog a lot, put things into other things (before wetting those things with mouths), and when they are done, they all wee on each other”
.. subst.
Another piece is I was reading The Emerald City of Oz at age eight or nine. My usual routine for dealing with unknown vocabs was yelling across our small house to ask my dad what it meant. “HEY DAD WHAT DOES TEXTILE MEAN??” And he’d yell back “IT MEANS CLOTH” or whatever the word meant. Back to the Oz book – Baum wrote a sentence that went something like “Oh my goodness!” ejaculated Aunt Em. New word! I yelled across the house “HEY DAD WHAT DOES EJACULATED MEAN???” And instead of him yelling back the definition, he yelled, “COME HERE.” I went to the kitchen where he was, and he whispered very quietly in my ear, “it’s when sperm and other fluids come out of a penis.” I was so confused. Why would Aunt Em do that???
They never explained anything.
― Jeff, Wednesday, December 7, 2011 6:31 PM (Yesterday)
ditto
Oh, Abbott.
I think I remember looking up ejaculate for that reason, because a lot of older books use that word and I knew it was related to sex so I was really confused.
I’ve written tons about this on old old old old ILX in the p3r.net days, but I learned about sex from the Pamela Smart trial. I thought that sex involved ice cubes b/c Pame Smart seduced her husband’s killers w/ ice-cube massages. I counted the ice cube trays downstairs to see how nastay my parents were.
My only school sex-ed was from a racist octogenarian Korean war nurse who brought in an inflatable model of the ‘male genitalia’ and tried to inflate it with a sphygmometer bulb to demonstrate ‘tumescence’ and didn’t seem to realize a seam had burst on the underside of the model. All her squeezings of the bulb did was to briefly bring the model to half-mast, before it luffed a little and leaked out its air and collapsed repeatedly into her hand.
At age 10–11 I thought—since the movies I saw treated sex very elliptically, and sex scenes usually began at parties or bars—that drinking alcohol was a prelude, necessity, and vital component of sex. I asked my friend MR about this; he was two years older. He lied, told me that alcoholic drinks included some component of biological fluids—you can imagine the ones—and that there was a lot of vampiric stuff that happened during sex. I repeated this information to another friend, JD, who asked his mom if it was true. I was never allowed to visit their house again.
My only school sex-ed was from a racist octogenarian Korean war nurse who brought in an inflatable model of the ‘male genitalia’ and tried to inflate it with a sphygmometer bulb to demonstrate ‘tumescence’ and didn’t seem to realize a seam had burst on the underside of the model. All her squeezings of the bulb did was to briefly bring the model to half-mast, before it luffed a little and leaked out its air and collapsed repeatedly into her hand.
are you sure this wasn’t intended as a more realistic & pragmatic, ‘symbolic’ type of sex education
had forgotten about it until this thread but there was a great great nyt article about a kinda depressingly aberrant but really reassuring strata of sex ed (restricted to like one us school), prioritising openness & being responsive to how things actually are, etc:
“If you’re gonna have pizza with someone else, what do you have to do?” he continued. “You gotta talk about what you want. Even if you’re going to have the same pizza you always have, you say, ‘We getting the usual?’ Just a check in. And square, round, thick, thin, stuffed crust, pepperoni, stromboli, pineapple — none of those are wrong; variety in the pizza model doesn’t come with judgment,” Vernacchio hurried on. “So ideally when the pizza arrives, it smells good, looks good, it’s mouthwatering. Wouldn’t it be great if we had that kind of anticipation before sexual activity, if it stimulated all our senses, not just our genitals but this whole-body experience.” By this time, he was really moving fast; he’d had to cram his pizza metaphor into the last five minutes. “And what’s the goal of eating pizza? To be full, to be satisfied. That might be different for different people; it might be different for you on different occasions. Nobody’s like ‘You failed, you didn’t eat the whole pizza.’
seriously the extent to which the racist octogenarian korean war nurse’s sex-ed presentation is euphamistically ripe for illustrating various sexual dysfunctions is killing me
and sex scenes usually began at parties or bars—that drinking alcohol was a prelude, necessity, and vital component of sex.
When it comes to casual sex, it often is!
Schlump, her last name was “Grimm” and she had a beehive hairdo. It was v. traumatic, and definitely effective as a deterrent.
They didn’t have to explain anything to me. I was reading the encyclopedia by the time I was 7.
haha yeah we had some 1985 World Book encyclopedias and damned if every time you pulled the ‘S’ volume off the shelf it didn’t just magically flop open to “SEX”.
i think i first got the talk in 2nd grade. all of my town friends had HBO, Cinemax etc (we lived ‘in the country’ back when cable television didn’t come out that far), and they would come to school talking about things that were kind of horrifying. one of my 7 year old male classmates tried to explain it to me, which i’m sure was *hilarious*. i remember going home feeling grossed out and slightly... betrayed? (lol) like, NO WAY did my parents engage in such base activities, right?! my mom confirmed it in the most gentle but straightforward manner possible.
to this day, i can’t recall my dad ever once mentioning sex to me. which is also hilarious.
Nobody’s like ‘You failed, you didn’t eat the whole pizza.’
Thanks, education system.
omg Abb that video!
“ADOLESCENCE ACTIVATES THE EQUIPMENT”
my experience was p much the same as smoove operator’s — any questions were answered with straight-up science, which was cool if not particularly enlightening at age six or whatever.
like jeez, how many holes have girls got? and why on earth would you put your Penis in any of them?
i think i only learned this in the context of babby-making; the idea that ppl would engage in such docking for fun would have only further boggled my wee mind.
oh, i also learned about actual sex at the age of 6 or 7, thanks to the huuuuge porn collection my creepy gross uncle had (he was living with us for a while).
Not a single word from them. I had read the reproductive heath chapter in the family medical guide at 8 or so I initially learned about sex in conjunction with yeast infections, prolapses, and erectile dysfunction.
Around the same time my mother worked in the administrative side at the local cancer hospital, and I’d await the drive home in a lobby filled with informational brochures. I remember distinctly crying in school one day because I’d picked up a urinary tract infection and had bloody urine. I was convinced that I had a bladder carcinoma and was going to die.
As you can imagine, this does impact one’s later sex life, but mostly in little ways like having to explain to every lover what a perineum is.
totally amazed at all the stories of people’s parents never discussing the mechanics of sex with their children. By the time I was 6 or 7 my parents had already given me a book (“How Babies Are Made”) and made things very clear. and then there was sex ed in 6th grade and they talked to me about that too. This did not strike me as unusual.
this book:
I guess my dad helped with my education a bit by owning a deck of sexy playing cards that I found when I was seven.
I found a couple of Penthouses (including the infamous Vanessa Williams one) in my Dad’s nightstand when I was a young teenager and the forum letters really helped supplement the basics I already knew from aforementioned Orprah sex show/school sex ed/Mom.
babies are made from cut paper
my parents said nothing. not a word—they just silently demonstrated the act in front of my horrified eyes.
Are you there, God? It’s me Margaret is the worst way to learn about puberty bcz NAPKINS and BELTS no longer exist in that form. I imagined having to get hooked into this weird trapeze harness in order to safely menstruate & I kept wondering why I never saw any of those weird, complicated belts under any woman’s pants.
Carrie is probably worse IMO
WHAT THE FUCK
FUCK
NO
That’s true!
When I asked my mom about it she had to explain the belts to me but reassured me that i wouldn’t have to deal with them.
I am trying to remember how I first learned about sex, I know that at some point someone told me and I suspect it was my parents or my older brothers but all I know is that by the time I was 10 I knew how sex worked well enough to make gross jokes about how The Incredible Hulk’s girlfriend shouldn’t make him angry during sex.
DEENIE also confused me because somehow I thought the ‘touching yourself’ parts and the ‘wearing a humiliating back brace’ parts were related.
THEN AGAIN, MAYBE I WON’T had that totally confusing wet dream scene
thanks JUDY BLUME
Oh man I forgot about those!!
actually it’s more likely I read about sex in some random book, considering I was reading shit like Watership Down and And Then There Were None by second grade
I remember when I learned that masturbation was a thing with a name. It was on Sally Jesse. Sean Young and a bunch of other actresses were on and SY started talking about using the shower head to get off. It was a very candid appearance and, if I’m being totally honest, pretty life-changing for me.
Yeah I really wish I’d have encountered something that explained the mechanics of it in better detail. For example, try and think about someone you have a crush on, instead of thumbing through this week’s copy of U.S. News and World Reports. That’s the kind of advice I could have used.
hahahahahaha
I remember hearing something about a stork delivering a new baby. But by that time I knew babies came from women’s bodies, and I didn’t know what a stork was, so I assumed a stork must be some part of the female reproductive system, or maybe it was someone who worked in the delivery room who helped deliver the baby, like an obstetrician.
awwwwwww
x-post I learned a lot from that show. Forever indebted to SJR and SY. Thanks, ladies!
See that sort of thing is why euphemisms and fake names and stories just end up confusing kids a lot of the time.
You all are so lucky. I knew how to do that myself only because it had been demonstrated on me by the time I was 4—maybe earlier, who knows? My parents put me in the path of so many child molesters I’ve lost count.
My dad, when I was about 15 asked me if i felt I knew enough already to understand the basic process. I said yes. He said that’s good. End of discussion.
Pretty much—except it was my mom who asked me. I think she then asked if I wanted some Nice toast with nice homemade jam.
The first thing I ever heard from either of my parents was when I was away at college and dating a guy. My mom asked if we were “romantic” and if so did he “wear a hat.”
Everything else I learned from the internet and my dad’s under-the-mattress hustler. Ok, and this kid in my 9th grade gym class who always talked about masturbating.
You all are so lucky. I knew how to do that myself only because it had been demonstrated on me by the time I was 4—maybe earlier, who knows? My parents put me in the path of so many child molesters I’ve lost count.
― Everything else is secondary, Thursday, December 8, 2011 3:16 PM (31 seconds ago) Bookmark Permalink
:[
Are you there, God? It’s me Margaret is the worst way to learn about puberty bcz NAPKINS and BELTS no longer exist in that form. I imagined having to get hooked into this weird trapeze harness in order to safely menstruate & I kept wondering why I never saw any of those weird, complicated belts under any woman’s pants.
The belt part of this completely confused and terrified me, it sounded so horrible. It made menstruation sound like a disability, what with having to wear special contraptions and all.
x-post—Oh and don’t get me wrong, I knew how to do it from a very young age. Most children do regardless of what they’ve been exposed to—it’s natural. It was just that that show sort of cemented things for me and gave me some new creative ideas.
an observation: so far today ilx has gone crazy talking about tube socks and sex
sex while wearing tube socks is next
xp—Handheld showerheads are awesome for that purpose, and even better when bathing together, one holding the showerhead underwater and aiming at the sweet spot, the other making surprise sudden temperature adjustments—we called them “hot shots” and “cold shots”.
at one point my mom was really into mysteries and i started reading a lot of the same mystery books she was and got into this more kind of hard-boiled series and my mom had a talk with me about how the male-female relationships in those books were unrealistic.
My mom did too. I was amazed at how explicit they were.
crazily, my first *real* knowledge of doin’ it really came from this book. how could a seven-year-old resist a book called THE NINJA
But it’s filled with really graphic sex.
LOL
which one is the girl
i don’t think it was the explicitness so much as the fact that he would meet women and they would fall into bed 10 minutes later—she wanted to stress that this isn’t how sexual relationships happen.
i was probably like “GOD MOM I KNOW LEAVE ME ALONE”
when the ninja meets women they fall into bed 10 minutes later, same with the white ninja
lol
lol
that book, though. i should probably read it now just because...
crazily, my first *real* knowledge of doin’ it really came from this book. how could a seven-year-old resist a book called THE NINJA
omg I had a book like that: http://glorioustrash.blogspot.com/2010/07/tnt-3-spiral-of-death.html
this one alternated between ridiculous sex scenes and an entire setpiece that was ripped off for the plot to “Cube”
I didn’t discover that until I was maybe 12–13 tho
my mom didn’t read sci-fi so i was never told that sex wasn’t how piers anthony described it
I wish I learned from This German kid’s book.
Or maybe I don’t.
I’m not even gonna click on that but it HAS to be the one where the lady is spread eagle and the baby is coming out of the vadge like “SURPRISE”, right?
about halfway through, there was an animation of an erection swinging up, and i lost it and started laughing really hard.
Don’t feel bad. I just cracked up laughing just from reading that.
yesssssssssssss
omg
SURPRISE!
an observation: so far today ilx has gone crazy talking about tube socks and sex
― league of women voters, Thursday, December 8, 2011 3:20 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink
sex while wearing tube socks is next
― mookieproof, Thursday, December 8, 2011 3:21 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Permalink
calling Jesse
oh who am i kidding, calling me
calling 911
calling 999, or is it 112?
(emergency phone numbers are like electrical outlets—different in every country)
and electrical outlets are like soccer shorts
they make your butt look good?
that didn’t really work did it
Tackle from behind upthread
My friend told me about the sex ed video he saw at his private Christian school in sixth grade – it explained that the penis is not a bone. As they explained this, they showed the word BONE with a big strikethrough NO symbol over it.
NOT A BONE
Every time I think about this it cracks me up.
well tbf it’s NOT A BONE, it’s a BONER
crucial difference
NOT A BONE
It reminds me of the time my three-year-old brother pointed to a Tyrannosaur pelvis at a museum and asked, “Is that his pee-pee bone?”
no talk. parents bought me a book with cartoon drawings. all i remember is that in the part about breasts, it was like “breasts come in all shapes and sizes, so the next time you’re out and about, look at all the different types of breasts there are” and i was like “ok.”
Oh wow, my grandma bought me that book. It was even weirder for us boys. There’s a section on circumcision wherein they say that it had no effect on penis size, and as reinforcement they went on to encourage us to take a look at other guys junk the next time we were in a showerroom. Which I guess would have been okay back when the book was first published in the 70s, but by the late 90s was about the worst advice ever.
omg @ “Lustbader”
my parents never talked about it w/ me. there are two distinct episodes I remember:
-in 3rd or 4th grade, reading ‘jumper’ or w/e (got turned into a movie) and there being a scene early on in the book where truckers get ready to rape the kid and he jumps/teleports to safety. later on in that book he gets a girlfriend and they make out. there’s a passage about her forcing her tongue into his mouth against his firm teeth or something. I shared the naughty passages w/ my schoolmates.
-finding my dad’s collection of playboys/hustlers etc. which were hidden, uh, in my bedroom, underneath a bunch of other magazines on the shelf (spine in). this was also in 3rd or 4th grade. one day my best friend at the time came over and we looked at them together. then we went to the cornerstore and bought lemonheads.
btw dayo my hats off to your screename.
; )
My dad awkwardly tried to talk to me about stuff as we were sitting on the porch (might have been a stoop by NYer standards) when I was a kid but I was all embarrassed when he was all like “uh, so do you know what goes where?” and I really didn’t because I thought that fellatio had something to do with making a baby and didn’t understand the whole bit. I gathered more details but my parents grabbed a book from the library that was probably aimed at even younger kids, and I was like “oh, that makes a lot more sense even if I don’t get the anatomy” and then was scared of girls for the next decade.
from my dad when I was about 14—don’t get any girls into trouble, ok?—and that was it.
my own daughter the other day ( age 10 ):
- dad you know that operation you had so you don’t have any more babies
- here we go...
- dad, did you get it done for free?
- yes
- dad, how did you ask for it? did you just say “my family is complete and now I just want to ENJOY SEX without worrying about it”?
my parents, god love em, waited until the last minute (a week before the ‘sex education’ courses started in my 5th grade class).
by then, I’d already learned about sex on the street. my best friend informed me that sex was sticking your finger in a woman’s vahayhay (he apparently thought that magical pregnancy juice emanated through your fingers).
he also once said Billy Corgan was Chinese and thought that sperm was concentrated in your stomach (yeah i know what you’re thinking, sick bastards)
and to be honest all my parents said was “did you find out what goes where”
My mom laid out the basic facts with no metaphors or cutesy names for body parts the first time I asked where babies came from. I forget how old I was when she told me about menstrual cycles, but we were riding in her orange VW Rabbit and I remember already knowing a lot of what she was telling me, but not listening anyway because I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.
Other useful and entirely accidental educational tools encountered at a young age: Clan of the Cave Bear (my grandmother kept this in the bathroom and I swear every time I went in there, I opened this book to a sex scene), my parents’ Joy of Sex (the old one with the hairy arm pits), a book about “How to Give a Blow Job” that my best friend and I found at her mom’s house, Judy Blume, piles of smutty horror novels my aunt read and left lying around and thought would be cute for me to read because I was like eight.
Omg clan of the cave bear! Those cave men did it constantly!
my parents’ Joy of Sex (the old one with the hairy arm pits)
Oh yeah, turns out the sex guide I mentioned above that I found in my parents’ drawer was a Finnish edition of this. You can see some of the pencil illustrations I mentioned here, contrasted with colour illustrations in a newer edition:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2009/01/05/slideshow_090105_joyofsex
The Clan of the Cave Bear books squicked me out even at a young age b/c IT IS SO RAPEY and also racist in a creepy although maybe not outright way. Gross.
My parents didn’t explain sex to me at all, I don’t think, but I was reading adult books for many years so they probably assumed I knew, except books don’t REALLY TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENS, so
obv you weren’t reading Piers Anthony
Wait, that’s odd, because I was. Maybe not until later, like 12 and up. Someone else introduced me to his books, I didn’t find them on my own.
once you venture outside of Xanth, he starts getting pretty explicit (esp. parts of the Apprentice Adept series and the pr0n section in Anthonology, which includes stories about a human cattle farm and a dude who fucks an interdimensional Barbie doll)
I managed about 1/3 of a Piers Anthony book, but when the bad guy stripped the heroine to the waist and started torturing her for information with a cattle prod to the breasts, I put it down, washed my hands and reread a Larry Niven novel.
lol I had to google to see which book that was (Bearing An Hourglass) because I didn’t remember that at all
On A Pale Horse is still the best of that series IMO
wait actually I read a little bit more, apparently it wasn’t that book so now I have no idea what you were reading
sounds horrifying anyway
ha, had forgotten about the old joy of sex, but um, yes. that was around too. as were some of those clan of the cave bear books! eesh.
Oh wow, my grandma bought me that book. It was even weirder for us boys. There’s a section on circumcision wherein they say that it had no effect on penis size, and as reinforcement they went on to encourage us to take a look at other guys junk the next time we were in a showerroom. Which I guess would have been okay back when the book was first published in the 70s, but by the late 90s was about the worst advice ever.
― Tumblr Whites Off Earth Now!! (Sandbox Grisso-McCain), Friday, December 9, 2011 12:46 AM (15 hours ago) Bookmark Perm
yep that was the book
The old Joy of Sex was really hetero and obviously not for children, but as far as learning about sex from a parental porn-stash goes, I could have done much worse (one bit I still remember is the advice not to put on deodorant before you have sex because you don’t want your lover to end up with a mouthful of deodorant should your lover decide to lick your (hairy) armpit, so I at least learned that there was potentially a lot more to sex than penis-in-vagina-ejaculation-baby).
Clan of the Cave Bear was definitely o_O, even to my young self.
Frankly I think I may have learned about sex from one of those “How to keep your husband happy at home” books. I don’t think it was the Saran-wrap one but it wasn’t far off. There were instructions for learning to walk in a more seductive way (like your hips are a basketball that hangs on a string from your spine), to do your hair the way he likes it (long), to charm his business associates, to use candles instead of the overhead if you were insecure about your appearance under your clothes.
haha I thought you meant overhead projector
your appearance under your clothes
what a weird way to talk about nudity!
My parents never told me anything. In 4th grade, though, the school nurse came into our classroom and the boys were separated from the girls and we were told about sex. She had a life-size replica of the female reproductive system, with a clear plastic overlay so you could see the inside. She kept sticking a pencil into the vagina to simulate sex. We were all pretty much horrified.
THEN when I turned 13 someone brought over a porno VHS to my party... that was truly horrific to my 13 year old eyes. It was a 70’s porn and full of sweaty pubic hair.
What is is about “porno” that’s so funny. It makes me laugh. The abbreviation no porn in general although some does for sure. “Porno” just sounds so funny. Hey, wanna watch a porno?
all of the didactic examples that horrified people itt sound so depressingly accurate to me, it’s v sad
a porno? grebt! we can play it on my pornograph.
haha
my mum gave me a book called which was fairly uncool but generally good really, obv you’ve heard a certain amount but it did fill in some blanks.
oops, it was called BOYS TALK
Speaking of filling in blanks
Oh wow, the clumsiness of the phrase “a porno” has always been an innocuous thing that makes me irrationally angry.
In Germany and Holland at least (Sweden too?) it’s called a “porno”, countries that all were pioneers in the art of porn. Maybe it seeped through to English that way?
(one bit I still remember is the advice not to put on deodorant before you have sex because you don’t want your lover to end up with a mouthful of deodorant should your lover decide to lick your (hairy) armpit,
This is the one that stuck with me as well.
It just occurred to me that I spent many autumns in my childhood seeing deer rutting in our yard so birds and bees may have seemed relatively inapt
I have a certain fondness for TJoS for making sex seem less harrowing and more natural—but then I grew up amongst hippies and evangelicals and the excesses of both kind of terrified me as a child.
Porno was a ‘thing’ though. It was for me, at least, a videocasette and thus a discrete thing.
Man, cervine sex really bummed me out as a kid; the harts would chase the does about for days and when the does finally consented, would get shagged for all of a minute or two. Ah, venery...
there are like 5 vocabulary words in that post
whoa!
I recently had vivid recollections of making out with my girlfriends at like 8 or 9 during sleep overs while playing bf/gf. I’m pretty sure a lot of girls do this but it doesn’t really get talked about much? idk. Maybe it doesn’t happen that often.
yeah this is def not just a girls thing
> recently had vivid recollections of making out with my girlfriends at like 8 or 9 during sleep overs while playing bf/gf. I’m pretty sure a lot of girls do this but it doesn’t really get talked about much? idk. Maybe it doesn’t happen that often.
> ― (~curious orange~), Thursday, December 8, 2011 3:25 PM
This is such a “d’oh” moment for me.....
I just now realized what you meant here, and why you thought my experience was completely a different thing because I was male. I was thinking your sleepovers were mixed-gender, and by “playing bf/gf” you were practicing kissing the boys even though you didn’t really have feelings for each other; you were just pretending you were an actual couple by kissing, so you’d be a good kisser by the time you actually met a guy you were into. Oh, it was an all-girl sleepover, and one of you would pretend to be the boy (I somehow missed that the first time I read it). I definitely can’t imagine this happening at an all-boy sleepover.
I recall sleepovers generally being more popular with girls, or maybe it was just that the parents of girls were more inclined to host a sleepover. The few sleepovers I remember were almost all co-ed though.
??? I never had a coed sleepover, and I can’t imagine my parents allowing me to attend one.
x-post—Yeah, you’re reading it right now.
I never had an co-ed sleepover either. LOL as if my parents would have allowed that anyway. Oh, I mean I guess after prom we all stayed at my friends house but that’s sort of different. Anyway, my parents would have laughed if anyone had suggested a co-ed sleepover in middle school and I went to an all-girls HS so we didn’t know many boys then.
I really don’t see why parents should object with a co-ed sleepover for 8-year-olds, for whom boy/girl friendships are typically innocuous and completely nonsexual. And I assume that regardless of gender, there would be some sort of adult supervision at these things. I attended a summer day camp when i was 7 and there were a few times we had overnight stays, where we all brought our sleeping bags and slept either outdoors or in a big room inside if the weather wasn’t good. I always wanted to cuddle up with a girl but they wouldn’t let me. But nothing could have happened that 30 other people wouldn’t have seen.
I think my dad tried to teach me about sex when I was ~10 years old by having me help load our mare into a trailer and take her to a farm where a gentleman horse reared up and jumped on her back as his great and terrible penis flopped at her hind quarters. I rooted for her, thinking it was some kind of wrestling.
Later, when I was about 15, we went into a Christian book store and he asked for a copy of a book called “God Invented Sex,” but they didn’t have it, so we left and didn’t talk about sex again until many years later when he found out I was calling gay chat lines.
I guess I’ll never understand sex.
you could say it was a kind of wrestling, actually
It was very confusing.
And she never got pregnant.
I only realized a year or two ago that our trip to the stud farm was supposed to be educational.
as his great and terrible penis flopped at her hind quarters
I could not let this bit of prose go unremarked.
dad caught me making out with a girl when i was maybe 16 and the next day while i fixed up a ham sandwich he fiercely blurted out ‘you don’t have to come in a girl to make her pregnant’ then fled, i nearly died
jesus even now i’m traumatised thinkin bout it
I’d known since i was about ten that you could prod a girl’s bellybutton and if she loved you you’d get babies i mean cmon dad we’re both men of the world here
i was waiting for the ham sandwich to become a figure of speech ;_; xp
as metaphors go, it’d be laboured
When I was a little kid, up through maybe first grade, I had coed sleepovers with my next-door neighbor. Most of my sleepover activity was from 4th-8th grade though and it was all dudes, horror movies, music, and cheetos.
Then in high school, there were a handful of times when through patient, reasoned lobbying and persuasion of our parents, we pulled off a few epic coed sleepovers. Mostly, they didn’t turn out to be very sexy.
Drama/threater people always managed coed sleepover cast parties after their shows wrapped though, and from what I heard, those turned out crazy gross sexy.
Yes, this is true. But I had a gf by the time I was involved with this, so I had to say no. But thanks.
as metaphors go, it’d be laboured
I could not let this bit of prose go unremarked.
So it seems about 95% of us didn’t get any straight talk from either our parents or our schools. How sad...
Also, strange that what little sex ed that is taught focuses on the biology of reproduction, which is not what’s most pertinent to teenagers. Why so little (or nothing) about the social or aspects of mating as it applies to real-life relationships, or some acknowledgement that most sexual activity by teens (or adults for that matter) does not occur because they’re trying to make a baby?
Oh, we got taught that in school. There were two differents kinds of sex ed, one in biology class about reproduction, and one in “health education” (don’t know what it’s called in English, do you Anglos have this?) class about dating/puberty/safe sex/etc.
We had health class and we were supposed to cover some of the social aspects of sex, but instead my health teacher showed us infamous anti-abortion film The Silent Scream. I would say I hope she was eventually fired, but she was pretty old in 1988 so she’s probably dead now.
xp Also, there’s evidence that what teenagers want to learn in sex ed classes is the hard biological facts. I think they realize that whatever adults would be willing to teach them about the social aspects of sex would be wrong, anyway.
Damn, it’s not that hard. Take her down to the 5 and dime, buy her a malted, she gives you her hand in marriage. There. You’ve had sex!
*pictures kids arriving at Dollar General, looking for the soda fountain counter, getting all confused*
r.i.p. the good old days
There was a soda fountain in the drug store by my jr high and we would hang out there after school sometimes. They also sold cheesesteaks.