Somehow I knew there was thrusting involved, however my misconception came with what the vagina looked like. I pictured it looking kind of like a butt-- but not as fleshy and deep-- with a tiny hole in the middle for peeing. I thought the guy rubbed his penis inside the slit until he squirted something on the girl-- I never pictured the penis actually going inside anything-- then maybe some of the boy-stuff would make its way into the little hole and then make a baby.
My other misconception was where the baby came out. I thought it came out of the butt, and was unsure how a lady would know when she had to poop or if she was going to have a baby. In fact I was worried for a long time that my mom would poop a little brother or sister into the toilet and it would drown. I wasn’t sure how to approach her about the subject though.
at the age of about 8 I figured out the whole sex thing.Before that ,I just sort of had the image Man,woman,Nudity,Bed,and I never really understood how they went together,the we got skinimax and HBO,I began to figure things out and tell all my friends,I was one of those all knowing kids who everyone got their sex info from.
My mother is an OB nurse and she always made it very clear about how babies were made. In fact I used to get in a lot of trouble for telling the younger neighbor children about the facts of life. Hey, at least I was accurate. One thing that I do remember getting wrong though, is that I used to think the baby came out the Belly Button.
My parent were a doctor and a nurse, so I knew the basics pretty early, but I misunderstood the phrase “The penis moves in the vagina”. I was assuming that you just layed there and moved the penis around. I was really scared that mine was broken because I couldn’t move it around at all. I was really hoping that someday my penis would become prehensile(although I didn’t know that word back then) so I could get married some day.
My best friend when I was five told me very matter-of-factly that you get to China by putting your head (and then the rest of your body would follow) through your vagina. Thank goodness I never tried, though maybe if I’d had the flexibility, I would have. I was very curious.
Also, I didn’t realize there was one big ejaculation during sex - I thought fluids were just flowing back and forth the entire time.
I didn’t really know what a clitoris was until I was 17. I thought there was something wrong with me because if I masturbated, my “urethra” felt better than my vagina. I am positive they never mentioned the word clitoris once during sex ed.
When I learned about menstruation, the teacher must have said something about how it takes a couple years once you begin for your cycles to calm down and become regular. I misunderstood and thought she meant that you would have one period, then go another two years before they started up again. And I spent a few years wondering if I would tell my mom after the first one or would wait the two years.
I also thought that babies were born wearing clothes because nudity was so indescent. I thought that they had to stuff baby clothes up the mama’s vagina and the baby would eventually wriggle into them. My dad set me straight when I asked how they knew whether to put boy or girl clothes up there.
Oh, I also used to always say that I was nine months older than I really was because I had to count the months in utero.
Also, I didn’t realize that the vagina secretes lubrication when the girl is turned on until I heard a joke when I was 16 -
What do a washing machine and a woman have in common?
They both drip when ****ed.
Huh? Oh, of course… ha ha ha, I guess.
And, I used to think that my vagina was my only hole, and that I’d have to take my tampon out every time I peed. (figured this one out long before I got my period though, so it wasn’t a problem).
Mum was a nurse and dad was a doctor so I had the basics covered fairly early. I also had a copy of the book “Where did I come from” with the cute cartoons.
What I got wrong was french kissing, I thought it was when a man kissed a womans hand. This I blame on the Adams Family and Gomez talking french when he kissed Morticia.
I think I knew the rules of Mendelian genetics before I knew about sex. It was clear to me that those male and female chromosomes got together somehow, but damned if I could figure out how.
Later on I learned a bit about sex, and figured that it must be something that you had to do in a doctor’s office. As someone else noted above, nobody ever mentioned that sex was something that was fun.
Travel back to the mid-60s with me - an uptight mother, and embarrassed daughter, a “starter kit” from Kotex… My mom explained the pending periods and how to use the belt and napkins. She said something about bleeding and babies. She said something about babies being a gift from God to married people. I had a gazillion questions that I was too scared to ask. As a result:
When the girl next door told me her mother had blood clots, I informed her that her mother was pregnant.
I puzzled for years how unmarried girls tricked God into giving them a baby.
I didn’t know what a vagina was - so I was perplexed by the tampon/peeing issue.
I was in my 20s before I got it all figured out. Sadly, sex ed in school was almost as confusing as my mother was.
Needless to say, my own daughter has gotten age-appropriate instruction since she was old enough to ask questions. And contrary to alarmists of my day, having the facts hasn’t made her inclined to put the theory into practice. Any decisions she makes will be based on reality and not the bizarre factoids that come out of locker room conversations.
Actually, I was never really grossed out by the whole idea, for some reason. Strangely enough, I kind of grew up with the concept that sex is wrong before marriage, however. This is strange because my parents were always really open about it, and my mother even gave me the lecture about birth control, and how sex before marriage was ok, so long as proper protection was used. I’m still getting over the sex-is-wrong conception, and still haven’t really gone very far at all sexually (nothing, as of yet, below the waist)
What bothers me, however, is the way they teach sex-ed (now called family-life) in Virginia. This is a very conservative state, and they teach basically that abstinance is the only way. The teachers aren’t allowed to teach birth control or masterbation at all. This is a big problem because many people are sexually active, yet ignorant of some of the things they should be using.
In 1961, when I was born, almost all American boys were circumcised, as a matter of routine, and so was I. But I didn’t know that, and neither did any of the guys I knew when I was growing up.
I went to a Catholic grammar school and a Catholic high school, and all of us guys were circumcised… but we all thought we weren’t! See, we’d all HEARD of circumcision, but thought of it as something only Jews did. And since we never interacted with Jewish boys (let alone showered with them!), we never got to see that we were all the same.
We all knew that circumcision involved cutting off the “foreskin,” but didn’t really know what that was. We pretty much all assumed that the glans must be the foreskin, and winced at the idea that Jews cut THAT off!
I was almost 18 before I finally grasped what circumcision really was. Until then, if you’d asked me, I’d have said I WASN’T circumcised, even though I (like all the guys I knew) was.
My experience, too (as I’ve related before on the Board). I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the heck a “foreskin” was – it looked as if anything you tried to cut off the penis was vital (and painful). It wasn’t until I ran across a heavily-illustrated article on circumcision in a medical encyclopedia that I tumbled to the fact that I – and everyone I’d ever seen in the locker rooms – already was circumcized.
You’d think they’d explain things better in a Catholic school. After all, we celebrate the Feast of the Circumcision every January 1!
Boy did I have misconceptions about sex when I was young. I come from a very tight-lipped Catholic family and anything I learned about sex came from 5th grade sex ed or the locker room. When I asked my mom where babies came from at about age 6 she said you wish really, really hard and you get a baby in your stomach. Yikes, I had to keep my mind off of that for a long time.
When it came time to think on my own about where the babies came from, I figured it was something to do with nakedness, kissing, etc. But I didn’t like the fact that your bottom half would be so exposed, so I decided if I got married I’d wear underwear all the time or do something to tape up “that area”. When I was 15 I still had no idea what a blow job was or how sex actually happened, like others I thought the boy inserted his penis in the woman and just laid there without moving until he was “done.”
See, when I was younger I didn’t even grasp the whole insertion bit. I remember having a visual in my head of a man and a woman, sitting on the floor across from each other with their legs spread, and only their feet touching (forming somewhat of a diamond with the two pairs of legs). From there, I somehow assumed that the man used his penis to shoot urine across into the woman’s vagina. I don’t know how this made its way into my head, just that I used to think that it must be very hard for the man to aim so precisely…
From around twelve on, I learned a lot.
I just found out that my sixteen year old friend didn’t know that there was any motion involved when someone gave a guy oral sex. Almost like the whole “no motion during sex” idea, but orally. We informed her of the basics.
Oh for a long time, I used to get “castrated” and “circumsized” confused constantly. Whenever I heard that someone was circumsized I just got really quiet, mumbled something and walked away.
