No talk whatsoever, but one day a book showed up among my other books. I can’t remember the name, but it was somewhat more informative about the changes that come with puberty than it was about sex. Intercourse, for example, was illustrated with a picture of a man and a woman hugging each other while wearing pajamas.
In hindsight, I wish I had been a lot more prepared. Up until my first serious boyfriend, my idea of what naked men looked like came nearly exclusively from pictures of ancient Greek statuary in my mother’s art history books. I was, to put it mildly, surprised. Of course to my parents pre-marital sex was, and is, a Shameful thing, and it wouldn’t have occurred to my mother that I could have any need of such knowledge unless I was actually about to get married. They nearly disowned my sister when she got pregnant without being married – at the age of 24, when she was completely independent! And that was in the late 90s, not 1950.
My mom, a very devout Christian, read the Bible to my sister and me every night before bed. One night - I was 7 or 8, and my sister was 9 or 10 - we came to the part about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Lot and his wife and daughters escaping, and his wife being turned into a pillar of salt. After that, as you may recall, Lot’s daughters want to have children, but since there are no other men around, they naturally decide to get their father drunk and “lie with him”.
At this point, my mom paused, turned to my sister and me, and said in a nervous voice, “Do you know what it means when it says ‘she lay with him’?” We didn’t - although I had a feeling it was something bad. She said it meant they had sex, and then went on to explain in very matter-of-fact terms what that meant. My response was simply, “Gross!” My mom said no, it wasn’t gross, it was the most beautiful thing that could happen between a man and a woman - but was only okay if they were married.
And around that time - I don’t know exactly when - my father started molesting my sister.
I’ve always wondered if my mom inadvertently gave her the impression that it was okay because she chose to use that story to explain sex. Regardless, it was a spectacularly bad idea.
Oh, and later, she also gave me a little book called “A Doctor Talks to 9- to 12-Year-Olds” to explain puberty and so forth. As I recall, it was very straightforward and didn’t talk down or oversimplify. It had no religious or moral tone - I’m pretty sure it said masturbation was perfectly normal and healthy - so I don’t think my mother read it fully, if at all. But it was very helpful.
Oddly enough, no. And I had very progressive parents.
But I did get several rounds of sex ed in school and plundered dumpsters for old Playboys and Penthouses at the dawn of my pubescence. So somehow I worked thing out ;).
Sort of, but basically we’d had a very comprehensive Talk in 5th grade, which made further talks at home more a matter of detail than anything else.
5th grade sex-ed was a single day, but let me put it this way: it was comprehensive enough that some parents complained to the nuns about “too much info”; the nuns answered “would you rather your son find out about STDs when his dick starts itching? Would you rather your daughter get from a street dealer something which she thinks is The Pill(1) but which may or may not be? No? Then it was not too much information.”
1: There wasn’t exactly such a thing as an ongoing black market on The Pill, but there was such a thing as people passing around “The Pill” and making it sound like, if you took one before having sex, you wouldn’t get pregnant - which is absolutely false, plus given how smart some of those people were about other medications and drugs, they could easily have taken their mothers’ Xanax instead of her Pill.
This was in 1979: HIV was already around but hadn’t been discovered yet. My school was the only one in the area where STDs were explained and the only one where the main pregnancy prevention methods, their advantages and disadvantages and the importance of never using a single one were explained; the second one was recommended to be condoms because of their limited STD-transmission prevention - it turned out to be an amazingly good method to sort out the morons, too: no rubber, no fuck’er!
“The other nuns” talked only about abstinence while churning out (for two years, but the scars from the scandal walk around and are now college age) girls who were convinced they “had to have a man!”; the government-owned schools didn’t bother teach SexEd to the boys and told the girls to “take the Pill”.
My school has long had the lowest teen pregnancy and unmarried pregnancy numbers for the area; as my grandmother put it when my mother was huffing and puffing about “TMI!” “well, it is a hot area: people will have premarital sex. May as well tell them how to go about doing it right!”
No, I never received the talk but one day I found a book that mysteriously appeared in my room about teenagers and sex. It dealt mainly with masturbation but I had already home schooled myself on that subject.
Are you kidding? In a fucked up, ultraconservative Mormon household where my mother hid any of her nursing magazines which were too “racy,” but where my father molested my sisters and my older brother raped me and my younger brother, mixed messages were the norm and not the exception.
My mother would rather die than discuss anything physiological, and my father was screwed up so badly that not only did he molest my sisters, but he told me what he did and how he did it. Not what a twelve-year-old boy needs to know.
Well I had a very comprehensive talk with my mother at around age 11 when I asked what sex was, and I turned out gay so I have to challenge your logic there.
Not a word. But I found a copy of “Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex” in their room (Ewwww, but I shouldn’t have been sneaking around) and read it cover-to-cover. Was it left there on purpose? I’ll never ask.
I have had the talk with my son, who insisted the whole time that he already knew it all. “Please, can we stop now!” He probably does, the schools cover the technical details pretty well and there is this thing called the internet… So we talked about being respectful toward girls.
Yeah I was taught the mechanics of sex in 4th grade by my nurse mom (on the same day that we had the big classwide gender-segregated discussion of periods and nocturnal emissions, or whatever else boys talk about). She also impressed upon me the importance of abstinence because I could not afford to get pregnant (because she didn’t want me to “waste my life”). She also impressed upon me the belief that girls who had sex before 18 were immoral lawless sluts, like when her coworker helped her 16 year old daughter get on the pill (I wish that lady had been my mom!! lol). That plus sexual abuse I endured from my father scared me away from trying sex until I was 20. Shame, that. I was quite a hottie in my teen years. So much wasted time!
But there was no religious shame inherent in my upbringing, so I’m thankful for that. I masturbating starting around age 8 iirc (the same time I started reading romance novels on a daily basis). And I bought my first sex toy the same week I moved out of the house for my freshman year of college. So I had a healthy solo sexuality, at least.
They never spoke to me about sex. My family isn’t prudish, necessarily, but we tend to avoid potentially awkward or uncomfortable discussions. I basically, sorta, kinda osmotically picked up the basics; at fourteen I finally looked up the detail in an encyclopedia. It doesn’t appear to have screwed me up too badly (insert joke about bizarre sexual deviance).
I am a big enough deve as it is, had they further muddied the waters I can scarcely imagine the damage that would have done.
I did find a brochure from some tampon company titled “How do I tell Her” that apparently was for my sister. Since I do not have a vagina or uterus, I found the tract confusing and disturbing.
I didn’t get enough (or any) info pre-1st period, so yeah, while I didn’t think I was dying I didn’t exactly know WTF was going on for a day or so. I think initially I thought I’d shit myself or something. Plus we were on vacation, so it was in a strange place, strange bathroom, strange food and daily schedule, etc. so nothing was right already. When I told my mom she immediately told my dad, who was I think even more mortified than I was!
Then, when I was IIRC fifteen, and I was trapped in the car with her, my mother said, “So, is there anything you want to know about sex?” I calmly informed her that I’d had sex ed already, three grades in a row, so, no.
Note to parents out there: don’t wait 'till 15 to have The Talk. Way, waaaaayyyyyy too late.
No. The Talk was covered in school in 5th grade (I went to a Catholic school; there was a book series which we used in religion class called “Becoming a Person”, and sex was covered in the 5th-grade book).
We would always have religion class together (boys and girls), but one day in 5th grade, Mrs. Scholtz took all the girls away for an hour, and the boys got study hall. When the girls got back, most of them were looking at us boys oddly. The next day, Mrs. Scholtz took us boys off for our “talk”. It was our turn to come back and look at the girls oddly.
I’m fairly certain that the parents had been briefed that the topic was going to be covered, because I remember my parents, soon after, encouraging me to come to them if I had any questions (either I didn’t have any questions, or I was too weirded out to approach my parents to ask).
I got sent off to a 2 day Catholic “parents of some of your friends talk about sex” thing one awful weekend when I was about 13 or 14. I just thank God my parents weren’t one of the parents there.
My parents never mentioned anything about sex, EVER. Literally not once. They never even got me a book. Eventually I had sex ed in school but before then I had to learn about it through the encyclopedia and the…uh…mechanics from watching a documentary about monkeys on TV. I know that’s a cliche joke like the one upthread, but I swear it’s true. The encyclopedia makes it sound like you’re picking out bathroom linens, so it was something of a shock watching those monkeys going at it. Thankfully, with easy access to online porn, kids will never have to learn from lower primates ever again.
My parents, meanwhile, remained willfully and stupidly ignorant well into my adulthood. I remember my sophomore year in college I came home for Thanksgiving break and while we were watching some sitcom, a couple of the characters started kissing and my mom flipped the TV off because I “shouldn’t be watching things like that.” I mean, ffs, I was 20! If she knew where my mouth had been…
I had “How Did I Get here,” “A Child is Born” (which I did and do find completely disgusting! Maybe that’s when I started not wanting kids…) and “What’s Happening To My Body.” Somewhat surprisingly, I didn’t have “Our Bodies Ourselves” until later.
I had comprehensive Sex Ed (several hours a week, for a semester) in 5th grade and again in 7th (and again in 10th).
I got my first period at 9 - I knew exactly what was happening and was unconcerned.
I can’t remember a specific talk, or ever having any questions not covered fully by my reading material. My parents, either one, would have answered any questions, if I had any. I wasn’t sexually active in HS, and took myself to my first PAP in college.
