h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I don't recall being told any untruths, nor can I remember when I was first enlightened about the facts. Perhaps I was an uncurious child - in my family & social circle there weren't many younger children being born that might have sparked questions.
My mother had several discussions with me in my early teens - I think I was usually more embarrassed than she was, other than the time I asked her what contraception she used.
Sex education at school (late 60s) comprised a few biology lessons at age 14 & the showing of a film that left me a bit confused about various aspects of sex until I experienced it for real. We were in the sixth form when a radical new programme was introduced, giving us information about contraception. For some, this was probably a bit late.

Strange how you can be fairly well informed, yet miss out certain points. As a teenager, I remember a classmate asking if I was a virgin & having to give a cryptic reply because I wasn't quite certain what constituted a virgin. Once I'd looked it up in a dictionary, I felt very foolish.

My parents were a bit rubbish with sex education. I was handed a book when I was about 10, which covered periods n puberty n pretty much left to it!. I remember believing that a condom was something you tied round your leg n when i asked my mum she helpfully told me it was balloon for men

I kind of found it out myself. My parents always encouraged me to do a bit of legwork myself if I did not understand something, and so that's what I did. So it was mostly books for the biology of it, augmented by a couple of biology and PSE lessons in school.

I remember a sex education lesson with some nurses from somewhere or other who came to visit the school. They brought a load of wooden penises with them for us to practise putting condoms on them. One of them spent a long time talking about the types of lubricant to use, and we were then thoroughly scared by pictures of genital warts. I was probably 14 at the time, and, like the rest of my class, was trying to be grown-up about the whole thing but failing miserably. Still, I learned that I definitely *do not* want a wart on my penis .

When I was about five years old (1924), one evening I was shut in the front room, and given some things to play with that until then I had never been allowed to touch. A few hours later, well past my usual bed-time, I was sent straight up to bed. My brother Reg, seven years older, slept in the same room. In the morning I heard a strange new sound that was to become all to familiar later on. Having asked Reg what the sound was, he told me that the doctor had brought me a brand new baby brother, which I was later allowed to see.
Sex was never mentioned in our home, but I remember when I was six or seven, walking past 'The Cat' pub (in Cat Hill, East Barnet), with two aquaintances; we three were discussing where babies came from. One said "They come out yer mum's belly." The second replied "Nah, they comes out yer mum's bum." There was a dray standing outside the pub, its huge horse eating and snorting with its head in a nosebag.
I said that I'd have a look, "'cos horses must be born the same way;" so underneath it I crawled and looked up. Since its belly hair was parted in the middle it looked as though it could easily conceal a crack, while the hole under its tale looked nowhere near big enough to produce a baby horse.
After crawling out from under, in my wisdom I declared that the belly theory must be the correct one; and so I believed until I moved to Margaret Road 'big boy's' School, where I quickly learned all sorts of other theories!

Len Baynes

When I was about five years old (1924), one evening I was shut in the front room, and given some things to play with that until then I had never been allowed to touch. A few hours later, well past my usual bed-time, I was sent straight up to bed. My brother Reg, seven years older, slept in the same room. In the morning I heard a strange new sound that was to become all to familiar later on. Having asked Reg what the sound was, he told me that the doctor had brought me a brand new baby brother, which I was later allowed to see.
Sex was never mentioned in our home, but I remember when I was six or seven, walking past 'The Cat' pub (in Cat Hill, East Barnet), with two aquaintances; we three were discussing where babies came from. One said "They come out yer mum's belly." The second replied "Nah, they comes out yer mum's bum." There was a dray standing outside the pub, its huge horse eating and snorting with its head in a nosebag.
I said that I'd have a look, "cos horses must be born the same way;" so underneath it I crawled and looked up. Since its belly hair was parted in the middle it looked as though it could easily conceal a crack, while the hole under its tale looked nowhere near big enough to produce a baby horse.
After crawling out from under, in my wisdom I declared that the belly theory must be the correct one; and so I believed until I moved to Margaret Road 'big boy's' School, where I quickly learned all sorts of other theories!

Len Baynes

My mother was perfectly willing to share with me age-appropriate information, but I just wasn't terribly curious as a small child. I remember one incident where my mother, by asking leading questions, led me to the conclusion that since sperm came out of the penis (I was a little vague on how) and it had to get to the vagina, the man's and the woman's reproductive organs would have to touch. For the next several years my image of sex consisted of a man and woman, with all their clothes on, standing up and doing a "special hug". In sixth grade, when I was around 11, we watched The Film and I was disabused of that notion.

Quite a lot of people have quite a lot of much worse misconceptions that I did, though. I've since become a volunteer sex educator to try to right some wrongs.

I forgot to mention another anecdote. I think I must have been around six or seven, when during school I got into an argument with another girl as to whether the word "sex" was "a swear word". I went to a Montessori school, where there's a lot of freedom and no set lesson at any particular point in the day, so we had the opportunity to debate this subject at length while doing our work. Eventually, in an attempt to resolve the issue, I went to look the word up in the dictionary, assuming that it would say whether it was "a swear word", if it was. It didn't, so I therefore concluded that it wasn't and that I had won the argument.

What many parents seem to be unaware of is that they can easily fall into the trap of talking over the kids' heads. This - mixed up with the odd bits of information kids pick up here and there - can lead to the misconceptions (pun intended) that many of us have until we're as old as 12 or 13.

I think my father once gave me a talk on the moral aspect of things. But I didn't understand a word he said (I was 12 at the time), wasn't interested, and didn't really even catch the general gist of what he was saying.

An important rule seems to be to broach the subject only when asked - or the child will just not listen or not understand. Another important rule is not to blind them with science.

The worst thing must be when a child doesn't feel able to ask its parents questions. Inhibitions and hangups are probably the main cause of unsavoury perversions, and the breeding ground (Ha! another pun!) for these is quite likely the environment you live in during your formative years.

When I was 11 or 12, I saw a classmate write "Why have homework when you can have SEX?" in his homework notebook in yellow highlighter. At that age, I was under the impression that 'sex' just meant 'male or female,' so I went and asked my dad what this boy could have meant. That evening, we worked through a book all about The Facts Of Life (tm).

I was mostly told the science of it, which was fine by me because I was into biology in general (and still am). However, we also had a long talk about the emotions involved, and how sex outside of marriage was not a good idea.

For some reason, though gayness came up, we never talked about gay sex .

This approach had a couple of fun, though unintended, side effects. Namely, about a year later, my classmates began to wonder where babies came from, and I was able to give graphic descriptions of just what went into the making of little ones. It was great! I became a schoolyard hero.

This is a really good idea! I hope it leads to a great guide entry! Here's my story, if anyone's interested;

I remember my mother, when she realised I was approaching puberty, explained to me all the facts, very frankly, with the aid of a book. I'd probably not have coped with the beginnings of menstruation, and the associated horrors of towels and tampons very well (the Mooncup probably hadn't been invented then) without all this background.

However, she didn't do so well with the emotional side of sex (to be fair, though, this probably wouldn't have been appropriate at age ten, the age of the first 'talk'). In fact, I remember her telling me that it was a good idea to try different boyfriends until I found one that I wanted to be with. I'm afraid I took this advice literally during my late teens and early twenties...

From my own experiences, then, I'd say it probably helps kids to explain both the biological facts AND things like a sensible attitude to relationships. And I agree with Trillian's Child that the most important thing is probably to provide an opportunity for kids to ask questions and receive honest answers. And also a non-judgemental shoulder to cry on when it all goes Pete Tong.

Also, my school was very good at providing both factual lessons, and question and answer sessions to ask about things that pure biology didn't touch on. (This would have been in the early nineties.) However, my kid sister's religious school didn't do sex education until GCSE age. Half way through secondary school, she swapped to the school I had been at, where she had missed the sex education classes that had been covered in Year Seven. It worries me slightly that kids can miss out on formal, factual sex education, as not all kids will get the opportunity to hear this at home.

As for giggling when people said "sex", I was still at it at Uni. We had been compiling questionnaires, and the course tutor said, "What did you get for 'sex'?" I had to leave the room...

My :

I think I was introduced to the subject rather gradually as a child, certainly I don't remember sitting down and having 'the talk'.
I must have had some idea of the concept of embryos by the time I was five though, because that was when my mum became pregnant with my sister.
From what I can remember, I was totally aware that that was my baby sister growing inside my mother's tummy (or 'the bump' as we refered to it.), and that when she was big enough she'd come out. I assume this understanding came from my parents sitting down and carefully explaining that 'that's your sister in there.' probably aided by picture books on the subject. If there ever was some kind of talk I think it must have started somthing like: 'When a man and a woman love each other very much, and decide to start a family..' because the first thing I tend to associate having a baby with is family. The sex part came much later.

By the time I was 10 I think I understood the basic biology. This was again down to books I'd been given, my parents being relatively easy going about the subject, and maybe we touched on it in school. I knew vaugely that sex existed, but was never that interested in knowing more.

Most of what I learnt about sex and contraception I learnt from biology and PSHE (which stands for personal and social education, or summat like that.) in secondary school. The teachers seemed pretty careful to explain things to us properly, and some rather funny question and answer sessions resulted.

Giggling about the word sex? I never really did, I was more silently embarrsed or a little bemused. I do remember once however coming into class(I was about 9) and finding everyone around the table passing around a dictionary and giggling...guess which word they'd looked up.

I wasn't told anything at all either by the school or by my parents. When much later I asked my mum why she didn't discuss the subject with me (she didn't even discuss menstruation - I remember someone saying that when that happened, you had to sit over a bucket, although I didn't believe it), she said that by the time she was ready to tell me, I seemed to know already. Trouble was, I didn't - well not properly.

Thinking about it, I didn't really know the 'facts of life' until university, when there was a series of lectures given at Aston University called 'Know Thyself'. As I remember it, there were loads of pictures of naked men and women, all sorts of shapes and sizes and lots of pictures of diseased organs. Try as I might, I can't remember the lecturer's name (he was a doctor), except that at the time, his name was synonymous with sex.

Ah, it was 'Sex King Cole' - Dr Martin Cole.

I don't remember ever having been specifically given "the talk", but I didn't have much of a chance to *not* learn the facts of life. Both my parents are biologists, and I spent part of my childhood on a farm... Plus, there was a rather good book that stood in the bottom shelf. A popup book After a certain age, my father (or probably his wife) would "happen" to leave The Big Sex Book lying around on the table in our room when my sister and I came to visit

One more thing that I recall was my mother's ingenious way of getting me to never say "f---". My youngest sister was just learning to talk, and picking up a lot of "swear words" from her father, my stepdad, who cursed all the time. She was reciting them happily at the dinner table, and we bigger girls realised she was missing just one we heard him say all the time - "f---!"

We encouraged her to say it (we were nine and eleven, I thinkm, or ten and twelve) and our mother asked us whether we even knew what that meant. We admitted we didn't, and she said "That's when you have sex without caring for eachother - like Ramses (our ram ) with the ewes"

This image impressed and disgusted us both so much that we don't ever use the word to this day

I don't remember ever actually being told anything at all; I've known the basic mechanics for pretty much as long as I can remember, although I also recall having a book about both the basic 'facts of life' and growing up (physically speaking) taken out from the library for me. I don't think my parents ever had The Talk with me, and I'm still not sure when I learned what 'the f-word' meant, but I did learn its meaning at some point.

The other big infodump - mainly stuff about menstruation, sexually transmitted diseases and how not to get them, birth control and puberty - came in school when I was either eleven or twelve, and it was followed shortly after by making the whole class take care of water-balloon 'babies'. At around the same time, my parents got some more books about puberty for me.

The few gaps in my knowledge that remained after that were filled in by Wikipedia, although this was mainly over the last few years rather than after the stuff from school.

My parents were both virgins when they got married, and their wedding night and the succeeding two months were such a disaster that my mother resolved that when her children grew up and got married they were NOT going to suffer from such abysmal ignorance. She also had a room mate at college whom she and her other two room mates found hysterical in the bath room when she got her period for the first time (yes, a very late onset of menses, that was) because she was sure she was dying. So she also wanted to be sure that all her girls knew what was happening to their bodies.

I was born in 1953, and unlike most of my friends and classmates, I knew exactly where babies came from. We were taught the proper names for our body parts. Unlike most of our peers, we not only knew that we had vaginas, we had labia and clitoruses, and anuses, and urethral openings. We knew our brother had a penis and a scrotum. Knowing these terms makes it much easier to discuss any problems you might have with your physician. We knew that a man's penis had to get into your vagina and have sperm come out of it that had to swim up and find the egg, and that this process was supposed to be a lot of fun. It was truly presented as a wonderful miracle. Since I am infertile, I am more aware than most people just HOW big of a miracle it is.

We also had cats that had kittens. We had one in particular, whom we named the Black Mama Cat, who felt that it was necessary to have an audience when she was kittening. She would wander around talking and complaining and demanding when she was in labor until someone came to sit with her. If this event was happening in the middle of the night she would come and park herself on someone's bed to have her kittens. As a result, by the time I was 10 I had seen numerous kittens born, and the process of birth was no mystery. I was concerned about how this would affect me later in my life, because I had seen what size babies were and I knew about how big my vagina was, and I brought this problem up with my Mama. She reassured me that our bodies are designed wonderfully to stretch and allow the passage of the infant. She allowed as how this was not the most comfortable thing, but it wasn't all that bad. Since she had had 5 kids, I trusted her on this point. She had all her children naturally, no drugs, no medical interference, no episiotomy, during the 50s when the prevailing method was to drug the mother and deliver the child while she was unaware of her travail.

My mother's policy was, if the child is old enough to ask the question, (s)he is old enough to get a factual answer. Not only were we encouraged to ask questions, we were also encouraged to do our own research in the Encyclopedia, the extensive library of books my folks had. We had a manual written for young marrieds called "How to Have a Better and Happier Sex Life" When The Joy of Sex was published, my folks acquired that book too. Around the time I was about 12 I came across my folks copy of Fanny Hill, and read it avidly. By the time we were shown "The Film" at school, I knew a lot more than that silly farce explained to us. It was really just an ad for Kotex, I thought. And by the time I had my first sexual encounter, I was an accomplished masturbator and knew exactly what an orgasm was like, and was quite annoyed with the young man because in his clumsy and fumbling haste to get off his own ejaculation, I did not get to have an orgasm.

In addition to being informed of the important anatomical facts, Mama frequently discussed relationship aspects with us. She was way ahead of her time, admitting freely that sex was fun and that she knew we were going to want to practice it before we got married, and that although there were people who disapproved of this, she felt that it was a big mistake to marry someone you had never had sex with, or lived with for some time. It was from her I heard the analogy that you don't buy shoes without trying them on, and you are only wear them for a few years at best. Why would you pick a lifetime partner without trying them on first?

I firmly believe that open communication and the truth about EVERYTHING is the best policy. It has certainly kept me out of trouble, for the most part, and has made it possible for me to deal with the necessary health exams, etc. without being embarrassed or reduced to using euphemisms. Because of the level of comfort I have with my body, I was recently allowed to remain mostly undrugged during my colonoscopy, and so I had the privilege of getting a guided tour of my colon, which was actually pretty darn cool and the doctor probably enjoyed the procedure more than he usually did. I mean, "There is your iliocecal valve, looks good. That little crack below it is the opening of your appendix" etc etc.

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First times - by definition they can't be good, can they? Best to get it over with before settling down with one particular partner.

magichealinghands - I'm of the same generation and got exactly the other side of sex education that you describe - my Victorian parents had no idea about how things went on. They had - and have - a stable relationship (probably based on infinite sacrifice in my mother's case, but it works). But my mother had a general anaesthetic at both births, so, while she can talk about it to us to some extent (and only since I've become a mother myself), she wasn't really "there".

You certainly had the perfect introduction to it all - as you don't have children yourself, can you say that your neices and nephews have benefitted from this? It would be interesting to see how it goes into the next generation.

UNtil I was about 6, I knew certain facts. The man has the seed and gives it to the woman so she can grow the baby. The baby is in the mummy's tummy. Grown ups like kissing in ways that 6 year olds don't.

Therefore, it's obvious where babies come from. When the grown ups are kissing, like they do at the ends of films, the seed runs up the mans throat, jumps into the woman's mouth, and goes down into her stomach, where it grows a baby. That was as far as I thought about it, I wasn't concerned with where or how it came out of the tummy.

"as you don't have children yourself"

Actually, that is not true. I never birthed a child. But my husband and I have an adopted son, we adopted him when he was 16. He was given to us as a foster child when he was 14.

How did the openness translate? Well, I carried on the "tradition" instilled in me by my mother and father. One day, after a particularly wonderful (and pretty vocal) encounter between me and my significant other, I was washing dishes when my dear son came to me and asked "How do you make a woman have an orgasm?" I about choked, did not drop the wine glass I was washing, and replied, "Jesse, you do not Make a woman have an orgasm. YOu help her have one. What you do is find out what she likes and do that until she is able to make it over the top of that energy barrier." Then I went out and bought the book "The Joy of Sex" and gave it to him, and told him that if he had any questions I would be happy to discuss them with him. He immediately became the most popular boy on the football team, all his buddies had to visit him and look at that book. I guess I singlehandedly educated half the boys of our town.

Sorry - I assumed that because you had said you were infertile. With step/foster/adopted children it is just the same in that respect. - well done for helping the other kids along, too!

Were there any "complaints" from other parents? Or did they not find out?

And a question to all - is it instinct to know that certain things aren't mentionable in all situations and if not, why do 9-year-olds feel they have to giggle about "sex".