I went out for some drinks with some friends last night and somehow the topic of conversation turned to the relentless awkwardness of adolescent sex education classes. I was reminded of an episode from 6th or 7th grade or so, which still makes me laugh to this day.
We were discussing STDs, and one student asked if it was possible to contract HIV from incidental contact with semen which may be just lying around somewhere. The teacher explained that it was theoretically possible but very unlikely, as the HIV virus does not survive very long once exposed to air.
“All right!” came a sudden yell from the back of the class, “GO AIR!”
This sudden outburst of appreciation was expressed with such enthusiastic sincerity that the entire class busted a gut for a good 15 minutes.
Ah, that noble Air, fighting the good fight against AIDS.
Someone asked if being circumcized as an adult hurt. The professor stopped, thought and said “I’ve never been asked that question and I’ve never thought about it before, but I guess it does.”
Guy in the class “YES IT DOES.”
After the laughter subsided, the professor said “That’s the voice of experience talking”
When I was in college, my psych class had a sex section in which some fairly explicit pictures were shown. One was a closeup of an erect penis. The professor (actually, he was a minister) said that in the previous year, a young woman was shown that picture and asked if it hurt.
In high achool we had Sex Education as part of out Physical Ed class – the part that was “Health”. we got a film on, among other things, contraception. The guy in the film illustrated condoms by unrolling one over his forefinger and middle finger held together.
In middle school Health class, we had the obligatory sex ed instruction from the lesbian gym teacher. She was writing certain terminology on the board, but when she wrote “gonads”, she left too much space between the curve and the straight line in the “d”, so it looked like “gonacles”. Which, to the 11 or 12 year old boys in the class, was the absolute epitome of humor.
For about three years, whenever any of us said “gonacles” the rest of us just about peed ourselves laughing. It’s still a pretty funny word. Go ahead, say it out loud.
See?
She was the same woman who told us that for a woman to get pregnant, she and the man had to orgasm at the same time. Not sure how many unwanted pregnancies she caused with that little nugget.
But did you pronounce it “GO-nuh-cleez” or “GO-nackles?” Or dare I suggest, “GO-nockles?!” Either way, I think I will add it to my vocabulary of odd non-existent semi-sexual neologisms, along with “re-cockulous” and “perpencockular.”
A FOAF taught sex-ed in Africa, and demonstrated condoms with a banana. A week later, a student admitted that he always had a banana with a condom on it on the nightstand.
My friends and I use re-cock-ulous to desrcibe something that is beyond rediculous.
[ignorance fightin’ hat] Well, it helps actually. It’s obviously not a requirement. But a woman’s orgasm causes her cervix to scoop down and dip into the pool of semen at the entrance and “suck” the semen up into the uterus. It’s suggested when a woman is trying to conceive that she use whatever means necessary to orgasm as or after her partner does. But I sure wouldn’t use lack of orgasm as contraception! [/ifh]
My wife told me that after the teacher had described the mechanics of how intercourse occurred, one girl said in a very loud, shocked and disgusted voice, “My father would never do anything so rude to my mother!” Another girl replied, “There are 8 of you so I don’t think he’s as polite as you want to believe.”
We pronounced it ‘GO-nacklz’, but feel free to employ your own creative interpretations.
WhyNot- point well taken and while that may be true, I think a sex ed teacher should err on the side of preventing unwanted pregnancies by pre-teens by stressing how it is absolutely not a requirement that the woman orgasm at all, much less in unison with the guy, for her to become pregnant. On the contrary, we were taught (to the puzzlement of all) that it was necessary. Otherwise, the poor misinformed girl could just conclude that she’d be safe as long as she didn’t come.
In high school, the health teacher when talking about birds and bees asked if anyone knew what an “organism” was. Someone of course answered correctly by but was told that was the wrong answer. After some dancing around the subject it eventually became clear she meant “orgasm” but couldn’t bring herself to say the word.
Which meant in other classes then that when a teacher said “organism”, there was chuckling among the students.
We didn’t have sex ed but there was one amusing moment tangentially related. Our 10-grade biology teacher Sr. Lucy was teaching us the human male reproductive organs. She explained everything else but the penis and finally got to it, as the tension and expectation in the classroom grew thicker. I don’t know if it was her nervousness or some sort of alternate scientific pronunciation, but she says “And, the payniss.” Poor thing, although we did hold in our laughter.
Fifth grade. Some kid I’ll call Teddy who a) was about as rat-faced as a person can be and avoid a full-on rodentia classification and b) would go on to date improbably hot chicks in high school:
“What happens if we pee in the girl?”
The teacher managed to keep a straight face and told us everything would be ok and nothing bad would happen. Of course, as most of us would go on to discover, peeing in the girl will definitely not result in everything being ok, and bad shit will definitely happen afterwards.
In my high school anatomy class, while discussing human reproduction, our teacher was discussing how women can measure their body temperature to determine the best part of the cycle for conception. She said the best time would be right before bed, or as she phrased it, “right when your head hits the pillow.”
One of the seniors in the class piped up, “Wouldn’t that ruin the moment?”
Our teacher had to go out into the hallway, she was laughing so hard.
My 13 year old son and I shared a moment a few weeks ago.
I asked him for ideas on what activity I could take up in the winter months to maintain the level of fitness kayaking all spring/summer/fall had achieved. We discussed that this would require an arm and cardiovascular workout.
He thought for a bit, then decided to shock me. He told me that I should masturbate three times a day. With a straight face, I replied, “How the heck would cutting back to that frequency do me any good?”.
Wow some of these are screwed up. And this is what happens when students actually get sex ed! No wonder there are so many guys who don’t know what pre-cum is and girls who think they’re safe if they stay on top. Ugh.
Can’t recall any horror stories now, except maybe the guy who thought women peed themselves every month. It may be cheaper, but I think it’s pretty horrible having a teacher talk about sex rather than a trained stranger no one will ever see again (or maybe the school nurse, though most of the ones I’ve met have been clueless about anything beyond band-aids). It’s just uncomfortable for everyone, and I’m sure it keeps important questions from being asked.
Our antiquated (1965 IIRC) English book had a section on learning where to put commas in sentences, with the following gem of an example, which was read out loud by our male teacher:
They showed us a picture of the female reproductive system. It was an anatomical illustration of all of the internal parts and stuff. There was much grumbling in the class since I guess we were all expecting pornography. One guy couldn’t contain himself and said, “It looks like the Dodge logo!”
This came up in a friend’s junior high health class at my school. During the discussion one of the girls isn’t really getting the material on male organs. Finally, the teacher pulls the misconception out of her: she thinks men have two penises, one to fuck with, one to pee with. Farm girl, too–how she could grow up around animals all her life and still not figure that one out is on me. Oddly enough, she got pregnant a couple years later when she was a sophomore, so she must have gotten it sorted out quickly enough.
