If you learned about sex on the playground…

[CareIessWispa]

… did you pick up any inaccuracies that stayed with you?

Long before the internet, I grew up in a strict Catholic household where sex was a dirty word so I didn’t have a clue until I was 9 and my 10 year old best friend decided to tell me all I needed to know.

Her parents were quite liberal and had given her a book. She described everything in gleeful detail including a very graphic overview of male genitalia.

All good until about 7 years later and 16 year old me was face-to-face with the real thing for the first time and very confused about why the testicles were located below the penis and not flopping around on top like the hair of some 90s boybander.

No idea how I got that one so very, very wrong.

I was given a book, it was the late 80's and the book was at least 10 years old. It explained everything but also included things like not being able to go swimming on your period. And your boyfriend may notice you are more moody/emotional at 'certain times of the month' it also reminded you of the need to be married before engaging in sexual activity.

I also read a lot of Judy Blume books around 8/10 so got a lot from them I thought a wet dream was wetting the bed.

Not so much school playground, and to be fair mum would answer any questions, but my elder sister was my leading light with telling it as it was, including orgasms and oral.

Mum’s guidance was “if something is not making you feel extra nice, stop doing it”.

My first time was organised like a military operation when we knew the boy’s parents would be out. Sister drove me over there, ensured we had condoms and sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee while the boy and l went to his room for our little celebration.

Afterwards, she just looked at me and said are you done or something similarly practical. She drove me home later.

Oh god, I have so many. I was a very naive kid.

On the subject of Judy Blume, there’s one story where the main character used to ‘touch herself in her special place’ then fall asleep. Having no idea what the hell that meant I somehow drew the conclusion she was touching the back of her knee.

I remember as well when I was about 10 a joke going around the class - what do you do if you come across a lion? Wipe it off and say sorry. Well, I just did not get it. At all. I kept asking people to explain it to me and they’d look at me in horror like the moron I was, then just repeat the joke slowly and loudly, like I was a foreigner. Looking back I suspect no one else understood it either but I was the only one who actually admitted it out loud.

We were shown a sex ed video at the same time that wasn’t helpful, they would talk about things without actually explaining what certain words meant. What makes it worse was that the core of it was about how certain myths spread when kids are entering puberty and don’t really know what they were talking about. In one scene our American heroes were discussing in awestruck tones how they’d heard of a guy who had such a big erection that two people sat on it and it snapped off. Boy was I confused, seeing as how nobody had explained what an erection was. My teacher was laughing so hysterically throughout this insane video that he had to excuse himself and stand outside the classroom, whereupon he laughed so much he couldn’t breathe.

I also had a friend explain that a condom was something a man put on the end of his willy so I imagined it was some sort of coin (with Aztec inscriptions) that got tucked under the foreskin. I really don’t know where the Aztec inscriptions came from.

At about 8 or 9 classmate told a rapt group of us a story about her friend (“you wouldn’t know her, she goes to a different school”), who found condoms (“comdoms”) in her dad’s car and thought they were sweets and ate one. From this and the explanation given so authoritatively to the group I surmised that a “condom” looked something like a Smartie and the man had to very carefully balance it on the end of his penis for sex like Baldrick and the slug as Charlie Chaplin.

This thread is really funny.
When I was about 7 or 8, I had a friend who was quite worldly wise and when she came round to play she asked me if I knew what having sex was. I professed my innocence and she said she’d show me. She made me lie on my parents’ bathroom floor (this really sticks in my memory) and lay on top of me and jigged up and down. However, in showing me, she never actually told me and I was still none the wiser but assumed it was a game of some sorts. I didn’t really see the appeal, my parents floor was hard and it didn’t seem like a lot of fun.
It was only a good few years later when I reflected on this bizarre episode and it weirded me out a bit. My parents never really liked this friend and didn’t really like me going round there. Now I sort of understand why and I do think this child had a bit too much knowledge for her age (and no older siblings) which is alarming in hindsight.

I remember a conversation me and some friends had on primary school - we would have been about 9 or 10 - about how long sex took. We were all of the opinion that it took at least a couple of hours, maybe all night!

I was aware of the mechanics from a fairly early age thanks to a book called "how the body works" which showed all bodily functions as machines. However, I didn't realise it was supposed to be pleasurable until about 14. When we learned about contraception in school I was thoroughly confused - surely you only did sex if you wanted a baby?!? 😂

My Year 6 boyfriend proposed because he really wanted to try sex. He promised to wear a tampon.

This followed an intense week of sex ed at a Church school in the 90s.

Yes, me too 😂 Like plugging in a kettle. It wasn’t until I mistakenly caught sight of a dodgy ITV period drama (think it might have been Moll Flanders?) that I realised movement was involved!

Also condoms. I remember a very earnest discussion in primary school about these and I was under the impression that they looked like doughnuts or those rings you make pom-poms with - it wasn’t clear to me that they unravelled until I got a proper look at one several years later.

I definitely thought a blow job involved actual blowing 😁

I asked my mum what cunnilingus was once and she said, look it up in the dictionary. So I did and it said oral sex. So I concluded it meant passionate tongue kissing.

When I was in year 3, my mum had told me the basics of how women get pregnant but not the full story and a boy kicked me (not hard or on purpose) and his foot went up my skirt and touched my knickers and I was terrified I was pregnant.

My best friend told me the man puts his willy in the woman's belly button and that's how the baby comes out. She never said how the baby got there in the first place, as if that bit just happened, and this ungodly act is what you had to do to get the baby out. I was about 9 and never questioned it 😆

I thought both boys and girls got periods after learning their existence in yr 3, when a boy was singing about them. I also didn’t know I had a vagina until the first year of secondary in a sex Ed lesson, I came home most adamant that I only had a wee and poo hole until my SIL showed me on my baby neice…

I remember my year 4 sex ed teacher distinctly telling us 'the penis goes erect which is when it goes hard and crusty'.

To this day I always wonder in high insight where the crust element came from.

It's as if she explained it that once the deed is done, you'd have breadcrumbs all over the bed. Or like plaster cracking.

Just an aside but I bought my daughter a 3D sex education book and thought there was a free bookmark when I opened one page…it was an erect penis 🤣😂 (giggling like a schoolgirl)

I remember at primary school wondering how did you know when to finish DTD (I knew the basics)
I thought that you must have to 'do it' for 10 minutes but if you wanted twins then it would be 20 minutes

I had exactly the same misconception, based on a page from How Your Body Works (Usbourne)

Hybw

I thought oral sex meant kissing

And someone told me that lesbians loved women. I loved my mum, so I thought I must be a lesbian

I was a kid in the 70s. There was a hippy family down the road from us and an older girl from that family was given a little book and she showed it to me. I understood not a bit and recall none of it, however it must have gone in as sex ed didn't hold any surprises for me!

Sorry, proper image...

I remember at secondary being told that sloshing out with a can of coke would stop pregnancy. Strangely one of her friends was a teen mum........

[Weeps] at the Aztec inscriptions

My mum gave me a little book all about periods when I was about 10. No sex information, just practicalities of menstruation. School was about to embark on sex ed but we moved several hundred miles away and my new school who had already covered sex ed so I missed out there.

I was at home, unwell, aged about 13 and watched one of those TV programmes they had on during the day that were educational. It was all about sex - the shock!! I was feeling ill but not as ill as I felt after watching that!

I often wonder how I would have known had I not been poorly that day...!

I thought that you had sex once after you got married and you then had a baby every 2 years depending on what God decided to bless you with.

I could not get my head around anyone wanting sex more than once.