Jeremy Feist’s post The Birds And The Bees And The Filthy, Filthy Bird-on-Bee Sex That Ensued has inspired us…
So how did you learn about sex?
I talked about this in a GMP piece called Riding In Pop-Pop’s Vulva: How my mother put books on the end of my bed that were covered in paper bags. The books were never spoken about or referenced. And it was a good thing she gave me that first one, called Where Did I Come From?
So how about you? Where did you think babies came from? Who had “the talk” with you?
About Joanna Schroeder
Perhaps this will surprise no one, but my parents never gave me a sex talk. I have never heard my parents say anything about sex at all. They never gave me any books to read about it. I picked up what I learned piece by piece on my own from my peers and what little I could glean from the encyclopedia and pop culture. (For a brief period, I was convinced that I had invented masturbation. I was wondering how I could market my highly original discovery.)
The magazines under my brother’s bed. One health class in high school about how reproduction happens, which covered as little about sex as humanly possible. (What, it just squirts out for no reason? No one actually enjoys the process?) Locker room talk and college social room talk and porn. The usual unreliable sources.
The worst, riskiest way to teach your kids about sex is to let everyone else do it. Thank God I didn’t have any sex until I was out of my teens.
Did your college not have any sex-positive programs then? Or…well when abouts did you go to college?
Undergrad in the 1980′s at a very progressive small liberal arts college in a blue city in a blue state. I suppose at the time it was sex-positive in a sense, but mostly in the sense of “you can go to the health clinic and grab as many condoms as you want from the bowl next to the door, no questions asked” and some pamphlets about STD’s.
Whatever sex-positivity existed there was often buried by some fairly sex-negative critiques of patriarchy, pornography, and gender inequality. I think the discourse on campus talked far more about rape than it ever did about consensual sex, which I started to doubt actually existed if there was a man involved.
I don’t think I understood the atmosphere as sex-negative at the time. I was so used to growing up with repression from the right that repression from the left felt quite reasonable. I distinctly remember thinking that as a man masturbating to Playboy I was essentially like a man who made snuff films. Lust, objectification, rape, murder, basically all the same thing.
Now that I’m middle aged I think I’m just about ready for that whole sex talk thing.
Same here, wellokaythen. I didn’t have sex till I was in my 20s because I never had a real girlfriend in high school. Only group dates to the movies or prom which didn’t go past making out. And I never wanted that desperate have-sex-with-whoever-is-willing-just-so you’re-not-a-virgin act. I waited till I was in a relationship with a girl I really liked and I don’t regret it at all. We were both in our 20s and I was her 2nd and she was my 1st. We’re now in our 30s and we’re still friends.
You’re story is very similar to most. No sex talk from my parents. Nothing. Just bits and pieces from Sex Ed, media (tv/magazines), and most of all friends. But I think the good thing about waiting till you’re a little bit older to have sex is that you have a MUCH BETTER understanding of sex and you’re much more likely to use birth control correctly and to be more responsible.
I fear that if I would have had sex in my teens I might have impregnated a girl and ruined both our lives.
The internet. Porn, erotica, how-to articles, and the like. I never had any “approved” discussion of sex with anyone until health class in the 8th grade and then again in the 11th grade in high school. Never had any such discussion with my mother or father.
Honestly I read a book in the doctor’s office about puberty. They had the boys version and girls version. I was maybe 9 or 10 years old. I was very excited to become a grown-up.
1977 my mother and I watched “My Mom’s Having A Baby” on ABC and I cried my eyes out about how awesome it all was. Totally. If I’m recalling there was a (non explicit) birth scene. Then she got me books and answered my questions about it all when I asked.
As I grew up, she answered more (as did female cousins, friends and books). All in all, I had a really good head start on school sex ed, and remain committed to being open and honest with my own kids. The questions aren’t actually all that hard to answer if you answer them calmly and accurately. Rehearse it!
Will kids who are now like 17 say they learned about sex by watching the move Knocked Up?
Doubtful. Most boys by the age of 10 are already watching porn on the internet.
Hey I read Canada study too.
Not true, Collin. I used to be a teacher (now I work in the adminsitration side) and I can tell you for a fact that a lot of parents nowadays have strict internet restrictions on their kid’s computer. Some parents have a family computer in a “public” part of the house, meaning their kids aren’t alone in their rooms on the computer.
Maybe a lot of teenagers (both male and female) might be watching porn, but it’s a HUGE exaggeration to say most 10-year-old little kids are watching.
Also, porn is no longer considered a “guy thing”. In fact, there are now famous make pornstars such as James Deen who is extremely popular with girls in their teens and 20s and has a huge following of female fans on his Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. He’s cute but has like a typical guy-next-door cuteness rather than movie star hotness which I guess makes his average-looking girl fans feel like he’s someone they could actually have sex with in real life (if he weren’t a pornstar).
For fans of Latin rapper/singer Pitbull, there’s his porn lookalike named Mick Blue. Johnny Castle has a jock look. Danny Wylde has a punk/rocker college student look. And not to mention GAY PORN (men with men) is very popular with straight women. And every year, there are new male porn stars that are younger and hotter looking than the ones from the year before. This is a recent change in the adult industry. Before it used to be that they were nothing more than penises with a body attached and it was all about the female porn star. Now the attractiveness level of the male porn star is becoming just as important because of all of the women watching porn.
When I was 5-years-old my mother’s best friend was pregnant, and curious child that I was I kept pestering her to explain “how the baby got into her tummy.” Being a pretty good Catholic, my mom’s best friend gave me an answer about how God created a special place for Mommy’s to have babies, or something. I wasn’t having any of it and I demanded details. So she promptly told me to ask my mother.
So I did, and my mom explained it to me in rather clinical and matter-of-fact terms. It was just the basics, literally just an explanation of the reproductive aspects of sex. So I went out and told all my friends, and sure enough she had angry mothers calling her. Really they should have been grateful; I’d done their jobs for them. lol.
Anyway then in like 5th grade we had a basic class on puberty, and in 7th & 8th there were basic classes on sex. And then we got a more comprehensive class about sex, practising safe-sex, and communicating about sex when I was a junior in high school. Somewhere between 6th and 8th grade my mother and I had another discussion where she explained more and answered any questions I had.
So all in all it was pretty good and pretty comprehensive. Unfortunately through all those discussions there was still a sense of shame, or at least embarrassment about the topic, which wasn’t very good. My biggest complaint, though, is that through all of those classes and discussions no one ever mentioned anything outside of heterosexual sex. Oh, in the class I had in high school we eventually got around to talking about oral sex (which, that was years too late for that discussion, frankly). But it was still always discussed in terms of men having sex with women.
Being from Ireland , in true Irish catholic style my parents ignored the subject and we had some nuns teach us. it went something like this….. Sex is bad end of lesson.
Nobody had the talk with me. I had to piece it together from what friends told me and what I could find to read. This was the 70′s so there wasn’t Google to turn to.
I have a teenage son, and years ago when he asked me where babies came from, I told him that “woman have an extra opening in their body, called a vagina. There’s a special place inside the woman called a uterus where the baby grows, and then when it’s born it comes out through the vagina.” His reply was something like, “Oh, okay. Can we have pancakes for dinner?” I didn’t treat it like any big deal, so neither did he. Whenever the chance arose I would feed him little pieces of the puzzle in matter-of-fact tones, and small doses. By the time he got to middle school and the sex movies in health, he knew all of it already. Doing it that way was so much easier than having “the big talk”.
I honestly don’t remember. I do remember when I was little I did learn about rape and adultery from a bible story book. I also remember when I was little some of my cousins had the same dad, but not the same mom.
I learnt from growing up on a farm with cows, horses and pigs. Nobody explained anything but I kind of got the message. the book Where Did I Come From? years later continues to be a great book for parents to use.
After an awkward conversation after a rather sexy movie on TV whose title I forget, my mom pointed to the bookcase, whereon sat The Encyclopedia of Sex and said, “Let me know if you have any questions.”
Best info was from stealing my older Brother’s Planned Parenthood Birth control pamphlet @ 8. Parental sex ed was limited to Don’t, that’s evil/nasty, If you bring someone home preggers your out on your ear. That one was best as my step sister found a ton of parental support when16 and pregnant . Even then it was explicitly stated that that any level of support was totally unavailable ever to sons. Oh the joys of having a 2nd gen feminist Mom…….nothing like always being bad/wrong based upon your genitalia.
Up until the big day when I finally learned about the birds and bees, I only knew that babies came from “Mum’s tummy” and that for some reason your father was your Dad, and that was it.
The big day came in 1982 when I was 10 or 11, when one morning during a school holiday my mother handed me a copy of ‘Where Did I Come From?’, asked me to read it and, if I had any questions afterwards, don’t hesitate to ask her for answers.
I read ‘Where Did I Come From?’ and was somewhat stunned…and life, of course, would never be the same again.
The only questions I remember asking my mother afterwards was if my best friend had already read the book (he had) and what was rape, because it was a term I often read and saw in the news.