We extracted DNA from bananas in 11th grade Biotechnology class. (Why yes, it is a pretty unusual high school, why’d you ask?) A fellow student and I couldn’t help but exclaim almost simultaneously upon finding out that it was white, goopy and stringy,
“IT LOOKS LIKE MAN JUICE!”
How dare John Mellencamp lie to the world like that.
I remember having a hilarious conversation years ago with a friend of mine in which I was talking about male anatomy and heterosexual sex. She’s a San Francisco-raised “Closet? What closet?” lesbian who had never seen a penis or even considered one. She tuned out most of what sex ed she got as a kid because it wasn’t relevant. She was peppering me with questions like I was telling her about space aliens. It’s odd to have someone fascinated with your sex life in a totally distant, objective way.
When I was in Catholic junior high back in Jersey, sex ed was taught by a nun. She had this thing about the whole class reciting the body part names, properly pronounced. I still remember her standing there saying, “PEEE-nis. PEEE-nis,” to gales of laughter as the class struggled to respond. She’d yell at us for not being mature, and we’d have to say penis (and vagina and testicles and uterus) over and over and over until we could do it in perfect unison. It was. . . weird.
When we were in fifth grade, we got called down individually to the school nurse, who gave us a short, not-so-well-thought-out talk (“Sit down. …What do you know about periods?” “…blink…”) and a pamphlet entitled “From Girl To Woman” or “From Boy To Man”. These pamphlets, which contained very simple comic illustrations, became the subject of a very lively trade industry for a few weeks, as we clamored for the sordid details pertaining to The Opposite Sex. I think I still have mine somewhere.
In sixth grade, after bringing in signed permission slips from our parents (this wouldn’t have happened normally in Finland, but again, this was the International School), we nervously set out on the way to the full monty. Our teacher made us read sections of the book out loud in front of the class so that we would all get used to people talking about penises and vaginas. She taught in the most awesome way, though; I still remember fondly the day we went over sperm production, which started with “Okay, here’s our sperm cell, we’re gonna call him Steven…so Steven’s hanging around in the testicles here with all his buddies”, moved on through “Okay, now at this point Steven and his buddies are kind of getting into the whole ‘Heeey LAAADIEEEES’ thing” and which culminated in a full-blackboard-sized drawing of male genitalia, with little happy smily-faced sperm cells shooting out from the tip of the erect penis.
The girls got separated into their own class one day and got handed pamphlets, which were about menstruation. They didn’t talk about sex. I hid mine but my brother must have figured it out because it was gone next time I looked.
In fifth grade our gym teacher talked to the boys about sex. At the end we were asked if we had any questions. I asked him if it was normal to have an erection for about a third of the day. He said, “Well, that would be eight hours.” And I said, “I know.” There were a few titters about that.
I attended high school in the '70s when things were a bit… crazier than is usually the case in school. Anyway, we were in Health class and the teacher (we called him Chiclets, because he had the hugest front teeth ever seen in a human, I swear!) was giving us the scare tactic presentation on STDs. He passed around a bunch of really lurid color pictures of vicious second and third stage syphilis lesions and when it got to my friend (who was out of her gourd on mescaline that day) she took one look and loudly blurted out “Oh God, I REALLY want some pizza now!” Much hilarity ensued, which Chiclets tried his damnedest to quell with very little luck. Y’all don’t want to know how my group handled the “Blood On The Highway” filmstrips for Driver Ed…
My own “Well, fancy THAT!” moment occurred the first time I had hands on contact with an erect penis. I knew they got hard and all, but I had no idea that the skin would still slip around so much–I gave that poor boy quite the Penis Stress Test™ before I had my curiosity completely dispelled.
There are a surprising number of women who don’t know that they themselves have three holes. (In their defense, it’s kinda hard to see.)
In our sex ed. class aged around 11 the poor sex educator asked us to write questions on a piece of paper anonymously and hand them up. I asked a whole load of questions about HIV/AIDS being at the time terrified of the prospect of getting it. “If you kiss someone with AIDS will you catch it?” etc. The sex educator was reading out each question and giving her best answer. One of the questions was “What is a blowjo…” and she trailed off and got really embarrassed. We never laughed so much.
I saw a kitten a few years ago with a birth defect consisting of an absent anus/rectum. A fistula existed between the terminal colon and the vulva, allowing stool to pass, but leading to horrible infection of the vagina/urethra/bladder.
The owner couldn’t understand why her kitten was abnormal. After trying to explain, repeatedly, with ever more simplistic terms, I finally said, “there aren’t enough holes”. She asked how many a cat should have. I told her they were anatomically similar to human women. Her next question, of course, was, “how many do they have?”. :dubious:
I was thinking the same thing. Just take a look for yourself.
Gives new meaning to the Dodge tagline on their ads: “Hit it!”
My confirmation class had a not-insignificant amount of Sex Education material in it. Well, not anatomical details, or methods of birth control, but information about Date Rape and Gender-based roles for life and such.
One night, we were talking about whether people who get married after living together are more or less likely to get divorced than those who don’t live together first.
We had been divided into two groups, and a boy from the other group came over to our group, because his mother was leading it.
“Mom, did you live with Dad before you got married?”
(That he needed to ask the question–especially at that time–amused us.)
“No, son. We didn’t even live together after we got married.”
They got married while students in college. When they came back from the break, their apartment in married student housing was not yet ready. So they lived separately for a few weeks after they got married.
A friend of mine once had a most pitifully, extraordinarily and incredibly spectacularly stupid girlfriend (believe me, she was as dense as a white dwarf). She was in her mid 30s at the time. One day he said something about her vulva. Her response (I shit you not): “Isn’t that the name of a car?” :smack: Good Lord Jesus Christ Almighty, how can an adult woman get that far in life and not know what her own damn anatomy is called?!
I had to explain this one–and everything else–to the guy I dated in high school. He was 18 at the time, and it came out that his best friend (who was in fact sleeping with his girlfriend, so you’d think he would have figured it out) had told him that girls came equipped with several holes–8 or 9. (At this point I started trying to imagine just what his mental image of female anatomy was like–a sieve, perhaps?) So I explained the actual state of things, and then explained menstruation, which he knew almost nothing about either. It was a little exasperating to have to explain these incredibly basic things that he should have known by then, and come to think of it, until his senior year he was going to school in San Francisco, so how the heck did he wind up so ignorant?
Urethra, same as yours. (Well, a bit shorter, actually.)
That was my guess, but I didn’t want to go out on a clit. I mean, a limb.
Was that just a slip of the tongue there? :dubious:
When I started college, among our freshman orientation materials was a booklet called “Straight Facts About Sex.”
Said booklet contained the immortal sentence: “Never put anything in your vagina that you would not put in your mouth.”