A year or so ago I had this crazy idea of attempting to write down my entire relationship with sex. Here's two excerpts that explain how I came to know :)
"We had one sex education class when I was about 14 years old which lasted for one measly hour. Most of it about the risks of sex such as pregnancy and STI’s. Nothing that you could construe as positive encouragement to try it. She briefly covered masturbation and by briefly I mean she practically said “that’s when you touch yourself. Sometimes to orgasm, sometimes not” and that was it. She obviously had to hurry as she only had 55 minutes left to put the fear of god into kids about the dangers of sex!"
"I knew where babies came from and I knew they got there because of sex but the details of what sex really wasn't explained to me. With hormones raging and my body changing curiosity had taken over by the time I was 11 I found a book that most likely belonged to my father called “Bare Nell”. I was already a keen reader and this book had a cartoony if somewhat suggestive cover and set about reading it. Within the first couple of chapters the main character who was about 16 in the story had given a hand-job to a soldier not really knowing what it was she was doing and had sex with a young lad in a field. I can’t say that I have read anything else that the author has wrote but I can say that the book was descriptive enough that an 11 year old managed to grasp a lot of the basic ideas of sexual acts from it.
I was fortunate to grow up in a small town that has one of the largest second had book stores in the UK. If I wasn't at school or at the video-game store I would most likely be there. I would go every weekend to trade in books or other media get something new to read, watch or listen to. With my appetite for the world of sex already wet I wanted to know more. Actually…I wanted to know EVERYTHING! The lifestyle and relationships section wasn't very big, no more than a couple of shelves. But for me I had just uncovered a goldmine of information. I would skim through what I could while I was there but couldn't bring myself to actually buy a book. At the time I didn't think they would let me considering I was only 12 and I admit I was embarrassed. What I would do is purchase something from the store as I normally did and would “borrow” one of these books. After I had read it which never took long I would return the book and get a new one.
I wish I could remember all of the books that I read over the next two years but the ones that stand out in my memory were:
“The Good Sex Guide”“The Good Sex Guide Abroad”“The Ultimate Sex Guide/Book”“The Karma Sutra”“My Secret Garden”“Women On Top”
Along with these were any erotica I could get my hands on. Two of which I can’t remember the name of but I remember the stories and some of the scenes depicted within them vividly. One of which was BDSM based and started that whole path for me!
While most were just guides with illustrations, tips and exercises “My Secret Garden” by Nancy Friday is to this day one that I think was the most important. The reason for this is that a lot of the others were guides, telling you what to try etc but this book was a collection of female fantasies that women had given her. It provided me with an insight into female thinking from a sexual perspective but also helped me to understand that the mind is so so so important to sex and that everything stems from what goes on in your head.The more I read the more I wanted to know, my passion and love for the subject just evolved perhaps to the point certain people would say I was obsessed. I remember thinking to myself that If I was going to be having sex in my life then I was going to be f*****g good at it by learning everything I could! I knew what things were called, I knew how they worked, I knew a plethora of ways to do a plethora of different things and I loved having all that knowledge. I loved finding out how others thought about sex, how they saw it, what taboos there were, why they were considered taboo. If it was in any way related to the subject I just NEEDED TO KNOW." Apologies for the wall of text!
The sex ed when I was at school was appalling, I'm talking late 70's here. A woman came in and gave the girls only a talk about periods and gave us all a little booklet .
Our sex ed lessons consisted of a teacher , who frankly looked incredibly embarressed and spent most of the lesson trying to avoid actually telling us anything useful ! They quickly glazed over the actual mechanics of sex, then spent ages going on about condoms and showing videos of people with sexual transmitted diseases, I think they were trying to frighten us into not doing it.
We were shown a video of a baby being born but that had to be stopped early because a lad fainted and it was never shown again. I never got any kind of talk from my parents, in our house if anything sexual came on the tv the channel was changed straight away. Frankly I think I would have been mortified if they had tried to talk about it. Got pretty much all my info from magazines and friends cos in the old days we didn't have the internet !
I can remember soon after I started teaching at a sixth form college having to attend the sex education session with my tutor group as part of their general studies course. 100 students in the hall for a lecture from the local GP. He was a devout Christian and his message to these 16 year olds was essentially "wait until you are married!". Talk about too little too late.
Fast forward 25 years and it was condoms on courgettes, relationships, counselling etc from the youth worker. Very good stuff. Then budget cuts and she got the sack.
I think i just learnt things over time from other people, little by little i just picked up snipets of info and now have come to have quite a large collection :P
First learned of sex at about 5 from my dad, asking where babies came from. Got told something about an egg and a seed and left it at that.
About the end of primary school I got the period talk from my mum, which freaked me out a bit as, like a previous poster, I thought it'd be continuous bleeding.
Education at school was a joke. We were a Catholic high school, so sex was only ever discussed once as a means of reproduction in a science lesson. It was really shoddy. Some kids got shown a birthing video, others just got diagrams depending on which class you were in. We were supposed to have Sex and Relationship Education sessions each year. We got a pad to pass around in Year 7 (girls only, still don't know what they discussed in the boys' talk). Then nothing about sex whatsoever. In Year 9 our workshops were just about friendship, I kid you not. Year 10 was about the different kinds of love you can have... I mean seriously! And final year of high school was about the legal age of consent, but they did it by asking us what age we thought we could buy a fish without an adult?! We did have some external people come in and put on a skit about teen abortions. It was pretty bad as it was clearly a religious thing as they didn't mention anything other than how it was such a waste of life and how bad the kids felt after the girl got rid of the foetus. Not once did it touch on the idea that it can sometimes be in a person's best interest, for the sake of the mother's health, for instance.
Oh no wait, i forgot about the time i was 11, i was playing hide and seek at my friends house, i was hiding in my friends dads room that he shared with her 5 year old brother, went to hide under her brothers mattress (yeah, dumb, like it wouldn't be obvious) and found her dads stash of porn mags that his daughter and my other friend then decided to look through. I was a bitt too shy to really look, and thank god i didn't touch them knowing now what he likely did while looking at them.
When my older sister was pregnant, my dad told me about men planting seeds, then a couple years later at school we had a couple of lessons, but one teacher thought they were crap, so tried to do it again the following year, but gave up when all the lads took the p**s out of her.
I asked my mum where babies came from when I was 5 years old, and she told me in quite a straight forward way. She says she decided when I was born that she would always give an honest answer to any questions I asked because being lied to or fobbed off with "child friendly" versions when she was little just left her confused, misinformed and even more curious about the truth. Her method was pretty effective - I knew the truth, and having it presented in a matter of fact way made it all seem a bit boring.
The sex education I received at high school was abysmal, though. When I was 13, I remember they took all the girls into one room, and all the boys into another. We girls were told about our periods, given a demonstration of how to use sanitary towels and tampons, and then given a little gift pack of tampons to take home. They said that having unprotected sex could mean you get pregnant or contract diseases, and said "you should always use protection", but didn't elaborate beyond that. They didn't explain what sex was, how to have sex, what protection options were available or how to use them. Then they showed a graphic video of a woman giving birth. That was it. That was our sex education.
I wasn't very curious about my body at that point - I hadn't done any exploration, and I didn't realise that girls didn't urinate out of their vaginas. So when they asked if anyone had any questions, I asked how I would be able to pee while using a tampon. They two women running the class stared at me for about five seconds and then said "You'll be fine. Just use the tampon like we showed you." That answered that, then! When I learned more about my body, I was really annoyed that they didn't just explain vaginal anatomy a little better.
I don't know what the boys were told, but their gift bags were condoms, so that's something at least. A younger acquaintance once told me that her 22 year old boyfriend didn't really know what condoms were - what they protected you from, or how to put them on. He went to a fiercely religious school that simply didn't mention them at all - pretended they didn't exist. It wasn't until he met her that a girl even asked him to wear a condom, and he then had to admit he didn't really know what it was all about.
Learnt the difference between a man and a woman at 6 and how babies were made at 7, the reason for both was having an older brother. My brother even started telling me when we were in the car with my mum and she just said that it was true. One of the funny parts was when kids at school went up to me in a smug manner asking me what I vagina was, I could shut them up straight away.
The problem was as I started secondary school (all boys school) there were other kids who had already had exposure to porn and at 12 we were compared sexual acts and sexual playground talk and our (blatantly non existent) sexual experiences. My brother also kept on telling me things like not to wank too much or I run out of sperm and others said things like the frenulum is like a woman's hymen and breaks when a man loses his virginity.
I eventually had 2 stages of sex education at 14 and 15, first one was the theory, STIs putting a condom on a test tube and a boiling tube etc and the second one was most graphic pictures of STIs and how to check for testicular cancer etc.
I think the biggest mistake was the blanket statement of use a condom every time in all circumstances themed sex education, and I was taught very little about realtionship and how non being promiscuous is important in preventing the spread of STIs.
I don't think my education was ideal, but no real obvious life changing disasters as a result yet.
My mother is a labor and delivery nurse, she had a very "no nonsense" way of talking about sex. No metaphors, no dancing around the bush. She showed me pictures from her nursing texts and described what sex was and how pregnancy worked. When I got older we had other talks about sex toys, safe sex, etc. By the time I got to Sex Ed in school I was "that kid" who knew more than everyone else...oops.
I remember two sex ed talks in my junior school and the only reason why I remember them is because an outside company/service came to our playground in what was affectionately known as the sex van. We went in with our classmates and were told how the body changes during puberty and then we watched a video with naked family throwing a beach ball at eachother. It was confusing at the time but looking back it was hilarious.
I forget the sex ed we had in secondary school - but I've blanked out most of those years. I guess they probably just explained the mechanics of sex and how to put a condom on (I mean, what more do we need to know?)
I didn't talk about sex with my family because I was adopted and I think it was a painful issue, because my parents had a very Victorian-attitude upbringing so sex was seen as a means for reproduction.
I never really cared much about finding out about sex because I disliked people so much that the thought of being intimate with them was horrific. Over the following decades I just learnt through on-the-job training as it were.
So my mother was terrible at discussing anything openly. I tried to ask about sex, pregnancy, periods but she would say she didn't want to talk about it at all as it was gross - not the approach I have been taking with my own children, thankfully!!!
I had the usual sex education at school but never really took much of an interest in it. By the time I was **REMOVED BY MODERATOR - PRE 18** , I had already had an older boyfriend and had sex because that was just what I thought I was meant to do. After losing my virginity I asked my mum to go on the pill but she was useless so I made the doctors appointment myself!
I guess I taught myself all about it really, as others have said, by having older friends, practicing, reading magazine, internet, oh and a good old bit of Dear Dierdre in The Sun newspaper when I was younger!
At 26 now, in a very loving and healthy sexual relationship, I'd say it's only now I really know about sex, what I like, what I don't like, what feels good and appeals to be, how to be safe and have the confidence to know who I am sexually and what teases my appetite!