Inspired by jawotech’s thread about age-appropriate sex-ed. Girls get The Talk, usually accompanied by a film or video, while the boys have some kind of conference with a male teacher. (I think elementary schools are required to have one male on the faculty for this purpose.) What were you told?
Nocternal Emmissions.
At least that’s what I always thought. What WERE you actually told anyway?
(The secret handshake, I bet.)
Shaking hands with the unemployed is what I call it.
Wait, were you talking about masturbation?
We were never sperated in sex-ed. We all learned all of it. Later in a high school heath class the (female) teacher did take the guys to another room and told us that girls are dishonest and will pretend to be on the pill when they really aren’t.
Listening at the bathroom door while my mom and sister talked. DUH!
I was home-schooled at that time…
We changed the station on our TV to the one they were watching their movie on in the other room, so we could see it too.
I don’t understand why they exclude boys from some of the sex education - maybe we’d have less unwanted teen pregnancies if more guys understood how female anatomy worked.
Our classes were taught all together. There was a point, though, where the boys and girls were seperated to have Q&A time with a male/female instructor. I can’t remember why.
At my school while the girls had the “wonder of menstruation” talk the boys had the “go outside if you need to fart” talk.
The phrase “expel wind” was actually used, and it was a sure-fire laugh-getter in the play-ground for months later.
As a trainee teacher, years later, I realised what smelly things children are in a large group. Pee-yoo!
And our groups were large. As a baby-boomer, I had forty in my class most of my school life.
Redfart
Huh. We all had to watch the same video and got the same talk. A real eye-opener, that was, and put paid to some of the other lads’ regular attempts to avoid physical education by claiming they had rubella.
We all had sex ed together, for what it was worth. I say FWIWW because apparently the sex-ed teacher selection process was not, shall we say, rigorous. We had a teacher I shall call Mrs. R (because I can’t remember her real name), who I am sure was a fine person, kind to animals, sewed all her clothes, etc. She had just one tiny problem:
She was profoundly embarrassed by the human body.
And I am not just talking about sex here. When we talked about the digestive system, she turned bright red and stuttered. That was when I realized we were going to be in big trouble when it was time for the sex stuff.
She solved her problem, though.
a) She never, ever took any questions for any reason - a girl named Kayla once raised her hand during class to ask if she could go to the bathroom. She left it up for more than ten minutes, but Mrs. R simply ignored her out of fear she’d ask a real question.
b) She did not actually lecture during the ‘naughty bits’ portion of the class. She gave us handouts and showed videos.
c) The videos were old and extremely cheesy. I doubt anyone in the class really believed, for example, that sperm wore little capes. At least I hope no one did.
d) Many of the handouts were mystifying in the extreme. I remember staring in horror at what I now know was a stylized drawing of a uterus et al. It looked like a triangle with pointy ears and a big mouth. I could not imagine having such a thing inside me.
e) The handouts on external genitalia were even more incomprehensible. The vulva, in Mrs. R’s handout, looked like an almond. With only one hole in it, smack in the middle of the almond. This worried some of the female members of the class; I had to reassure my tablemate that babies did not come out of the pee hole. (“But how do you pee when you’re having a baby?”) God only knows what the boys thought. I just hope they didn’t rely too heavily on said drawings when they started actually having sex.
f) The handouts on male external genitalia were beyond odd. The penis looked like a slinky with two(!) holes on one end, and was strangely out of proportion to the rest of the body - about twice the normal size. The testicles were MIA.
g) Mrs. R’s advice on dating, relationships, etc.: “Girls, you have to be very careful never to be alone with boys. You don’t know what they could have in mind.” (This said to a classroom half full of girls, virtually all of whom already had been alone with boys. I assume the boys in the class were wondering what, exactly, they were supposed to have in mind.) “There’s nothing you should do down there but wash.” Not even peeing, Mrs. R? “When you need to know the rest of it, you will.” Gee, thanks, Mrs. R. Then why do we have to have this special class with you?
So that was my first experience with sex ed: triangles, slinkies, and caped sperm.
And now I’m a lesbian. I figure if anyone’s to blame, it’s Mrs. R.
LOL!!
I can’t remember ever having sex education at all. Attended a private school until eighth grade, then public HS, so maybe it just slipped through the cracks.
I knew almost nothing until I read “Everything you always wanted to know about sex but were afraid to ask” . . .
which I didn’t get up the nerve to do until age 21!!
The entire class got the “break wind only out-of-doors, children” talk in fourth grade, when the teacher also told us that we needed to start wearing deodorant, as we were “on the magical road to adulthood, which will cause many changes”.
You mean like that magical change where I got a heavy beard (like, shaving twice a day) and rampant acne at the same time? Magical, my ass.
The girls got the sex-and-menstruation talk in sixth grade-the boys got an extra recess, which we spent trying to peek inthe windows and speculating as to what was up. The next year, the boys got the talk from the basketball coach, who had been in the Navy, and was ostensibly therefore qualified.
It consisted of half an hour of watching porno.
BAD seventies porno he made us swear not to tell anyone he’d shown us. And he gave running commentary. Of cunnilingus, he said “It’s like soaking the ground with a hose when you want to plant a tree.”
Then he told us that while jacking off was normal, if he ever caught us doing it in his classroom or on school grounds, he’d make us do laps until we puked.
Best year in school ever.
IIRC, we had sex ed in 5th grade. The girls had our female teacher, and we (the boys) had the vice-principal. I remember watching a movie, and when the narrator was talking about underarm hair, it showed a boy talking on the phone while holding his arms up in the air.
While we were having our “ask the VP about anything to do with sex session,” I realized that I knew how to raise one eyebrow at a time. Talk about great timing! Also heard about deodorant, but nothing about breaking wind.
Now that is funny
I think we have teacher of the year nominee right here.
For the official “sex ed” instruction, we weren’t separated. Our teacher was our (male) biology teacher and he did seem a little uncomfortable.
That wasn’t the first time we’d had that stuff, though. We covered the reproductive system just like any other bodily system in classes called “Health” from grade 3 on.
Most of it was just plumbing and hormones. Almost no coverage of lusts, courtship procedures, how things feel, etc.
That is exactly the opposite of what I remember. I remember thinking that I must be a freak because the one in the picture was so small. Or maybe it was just a matter of perspective 
The only other thing I remember was the film “Johnny will grow hair here, here, and here.”
Well, I was high school class of 1983, first two years in Seminole, FL and last two years in Denver, CO, and I didn’t get any sex education in school, aside from a little basic anatomy in biology class.
I got all of my teen sex education from Penthouse Forum. So I don’t think I need to say what I was doing while you were getting “the talk.”
And you know, looking back on it, aside from a few exaggerated misconceptions about the size of the average penis and the quantity of lubricant produced by female genitalia, I think I got a better education than the kids who saw the caped sperm videos.
I got in serious trouble in high school for writing an editorial in the school newspaper excoriating the Obligatory Health Class and its sex-ed curriculum for being totally, thoroughly useless. It wasn’t that what I wrote was incorrect; it’s that the instructor who was teaching the class had political connections in the district.
Doesn’t relate directly to the topic at hand, but it shows that while we were all getting The Talk, I was scribbling away in my revolutionary notebook. Later, I donned my beret and went to the cafe to rally the proles while suavely stroking my goatee.
In 6th grade they had the guys and gals watch a movie together, then they sent us guys out to the playground for an hour and a half while the girls learned about whatever they learn about.
In high school they never separated us for the week of sex ed they gave us. And every year we had a speaker come and tell us not to have sex because we might contract HIV.
It was always good fun to get out of class for such things.
Even more fun proving my teachers were providing us with false information, though in hindsight its a little disturbing.