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.

When I was kid I thought when you became an adult you got fat and you either "popped" or had a baby! 🤔😅

Haha I had the bj debate with a friend. She was adamant it was called a bj because you're supposed to blow seductively on it first 😅

I never had the talks or books I learnt everything on the playground. My friends skipped an important step though, they told me the basics but didn't say men could get hard. I thought they must..um.. kinda thumb it in soft 🤭🤭🤭

I thought i was disabled because i didn't have a hole - all the diagrams make it look like a gaping tunnel and i definitely didn't have that.

And i was very surprised to learn graffiti isn't anatomically accurate - i was expecting individual bollocks either side of the willy, not hanging down packaged together.

I’m glad you liked the Aztec inscriptions 😂I really wish I could remember what made me think that.

I also remember reading in a bumper book of facts that ‘Chinese people think having sex at night produces blind babies’ which absolutely wrecked my mind because when else could you ever possibly have sex??? 30-odd years later and I’m starting to doubt the accuracy of that book.

I remember having a heated argument with my best friend when I was about 10. I thought rape was just a man forcibly taking a woman's clothes off- she said "No, no, it's more than that", but didn't elaborate- probably didn't want to fill me in on the horrible truth.

I thought it did for a very long time

Remember a gang of us insisting to our mothers - loudly in the street walking home from school - that it was definitely pronounced "pennis" not "peenus" !!!

When we were kids in the 70s we used to visit an old victorian rubbish dump looking for old bottles. I would have been about 12. One day we found a flytipped bag of porno magazines. A few pictures in, of men in their full glory (so to speak) scared me for years. I never did, nor have, spoken about it.

At lunchtime it was the thing to read the J17 problem page out loud at school. I had no good sex and relationships education (was at school 1982-1994) so J17 & Judy Blume were pretty much our only resources.

I didn't know about periods until I was 10. My friend had to fill me in. And that was because the headteacher clumsily and with a LOT of metaphors announced a sanitary bin was being installed in the girls toilet. This was junior school.

My parents were, and still are, prudes. I was not the same with my daughter.

My friend told me that you had to have sex for precisely 38 mins for your first time.

have no idea why 🤣🤣

Sadly in a lot of educational diagrams the clitoris is still not labelled/identified. It’s a great pity because it is the prime female sex organ and quite frankly performs magic.

😂
So many good responses. The aztec coin under the foreskin is amazing... it must have come from somewhere but those unexplained childhood half-memories are so interesting!
Definitely had the thinking sex was lying motionless one. And my puberty book said oral sex was people 'stimulating each other with their mouths' which although now seems very clearly put I thought it meant as in dirty talk!

My education was playground and Judy bloom!
I read forever a million times!!

BUT I didn't realise till about 19/20 that my vagina was inside, I thought sex was putting the penis between my vulva.

Never told anyone that before

i was given all the details, left in no doubt by my dear mother. No shame or embarrassment all the facts, she’s very proud of it and looks down on mothers who think they can’t. She rolled it all into one, including the specifics of rape and sexual assault and ended with the immortal words “just remember every time you have sex you can get AIDS and die”. So funnily enough it never occurred to me it was something to look forward too. made worse than when my older friend at Guides told me that if your boyfriend really fancied you he’d “clap his hands inside of you”. Just occurs to me now she might have been bullshitting.

As a teen, I remember having sex after dark just behind the school playground. Does that count? 😂

My ingant school friend told me in the lunch queue, in sober confirmation from her much older sister, that before your first time, both partners had to inspect each other’s privates for anatomical information. I remember wondering how that was at all romantic and dreading it hugely.

Infant! * come on mumsnet give us an effing edit button 🙄

My youngest brother came in from school one day when he was about seven or eight and announced that he knew what sex was. When question he explained that a man and a lady would go to the bathroom, take their clothes off and rub their bums and willies together. Sort or accurate. Must remember to let his fiance know...

An older girl at school explained to a group of us when we were about 10 that giving a boy a hand job was just like thumping the end of a ketchup bottle 🤣

My neighbour insisted his baby brother had been born through their Mam's belly button he was horrified when I told him the truth!