I must have been about 8 or 9. I was a “helper” to the Brownie troop, along with another friend, and the meetings were held in a local church. When we weren’t needed, we’d go into another classroom and play with the chalk and erasers on the blackboard.
Anyhoo, one day, in between games of Hangman, she goes into this long involved explanation about where babies come from. I was nonplussed, to say the least. My mother must have noticed my mopiness later that evening, because she asked me what was wrong. I told her what my friend had told me.
To my horror, my mother confirmed it. That seemed like the most icky thing in the world! :eek:
I got over my reservations eventually, to say the least.
So, like Santa Claus, when and how did you learn Where Babies Come From?
I was about four or five. My eldest brother, George, and his woman (can’t legally say wife, they never signed the papers XP) announced at a family function that they were happily expecting their first child. The next-to-eldest brother, Joe, proceeded to ask why George couldn’t keep his stork in his pants… ~.~
First Grade, Max Green bought in the book, Where Do Babies Come From? for show and tell, and proceeded to tell us a-a-a-a-all about it. My mom was well pissed.
In Fifth Grade, Larry Someone-or-other told us that babies “came from their mommy’s peach-halves.” I already knew better, thank bog.
I learned about it in church. Sunday school. I was maybe 8 or 9. What was most astounding was that I learned that each of us was once smaller than a period on a printed page. “Even you?”, I asked the guy. “Even me”, he replied. I was skeptical. The guy was like 19 feet tall.
Heh. My parents were always pretty hush-hush about sex and other stuff like that (we were Catholic). I never got much actual info out of them, but had pieced most of it together from books. The actual mechanics eluded me.
When I was in grade school, like 7th or 8th grade, I found a bag of pornos in the park while looking for aluminum cans. They weren’t Playboys, these were all very hardcore books crammed full of most of the perversions you can think of. Over the next hour I learned about lesbians, strap ons, fisting, anal sex, bdsm, gang bangs, and golden showers. It completely blew my mind.
At first I didn’t understand a lot of things. I wondered why people did things that obviously hurt, and concluded that it was like WWF Wrestling. I completely avoided adults over the next few weeks, thinking that they all did all of that stuff. I wondered where my mom kept her big pile of sex toys, and how many men she’d had at once. I would see different people talking and wonder how many times they’d done it and what they did. Through talking to other people about it, I figured out that what I had was the exception, and not the rule. I was relived, because I was quite certain that I didn’t want to do half of the things I had seen. But I really wanted to do the other half.
I kept the magazines in a hole in corner of the park. I had them for one really good summer, and then the park managers started a big project to improve the place, and filled in and turfed over any holes they could find.
In first grade I apparently made inappropriate advances upon a young man I thought was very cute so my parents sat me down and explained it to me with the help of a book and a 321-Contact video so I would understand exactly what I had said and what it meant and why it wasn’t appropriate to do so in the future.
I watched some of the older kids engaging in oral sex on the bus ride home from school one day. I was so curious I asked my mom and she ended up getting a medical book and telling me more then I wanted to know. ~8
I don’t remember ever not knowing. I mean, I’m sure I wasn’t born with the knowledge, but we never had The Talk - Mom just always answered questions as they came up. I was the kid all the other kids came to for The Straight Dope, as it were. When I was in preschool, I’d wander around the classroom with a doll stuffed under my shirt, in “labor”, and there was a spot behind the easel where we set up our “delivery room”.
I do remember being 6 years old (I know that because that was the only year my “other dad” lived with us), announcing to my friends that I thought my mother was going to have a baby soon. My evidence? I had heard her and her boyfriend “practicing” the night before - all the grunts and groans and fast breathing the two of them were doing were *obviously *a Lamaze practice session!
So I knew about Lamaze techniques and the mechanics of childbirth before I knew what sex sounded like.
Ironically enough, my first boyfriend and I couldn’t manage coitus, despite a *lot *of trying. I, uh, didn’t know you sometimes have to bend your legs up for comfortable missionary penetration. I was…oh…15. We did “everything but” for 2 years until we broke up and I dated a guy who wasn’t a virgin.
I watched a VHS porn tape at a friends house when I was probably 9 or 10 which put the pieces of playground rumor together into coherent enough order that I pretty much got it. I didn’t get why everyone was wearing rollerskates or why the guy had a bandanna around his neck though. Yay mid 80’s porno!
The rest I picked up later that year at the Sex Ed field trip to the Robert Crown Health Center.
I obviously need to have a talk with our youngest, who is 6. He asked me recently, “So when Baby Colin is ready to be borned will you just open up your mouth or something and he’ll be there?”
I should also probably have a talk with our 11 year old but honestly, I am scared to hear what he already knows. I think he has the basics down but I’m going to make it a goal to get a book and have the talk over the summer.
Kids engaged in oral sex on the school bus! :eek: Holy shit!
I was informed in the school yard in probably grade one or two. And then confirmed it by reading the Forum section in my Dad’s Penthouses. Wow! I had no idea, I remember thinking. But it sure was interesting.
I was 5 or 6 and playing school at a friend’s house and grabbed a book to “teach” from - I had grabbed a book on how to explain sex to your child. I read aloud to the class:
“And then the man places his erect penis into - holy crap! Brett - have you read this???”
So she said “yeah, my mom showed it to me” and I sat there and read it, absolutely amazed.
Aries28 - I got more tongue tied than I thought I would, and my son asked way more questions than I thought he would. I ended up using a book that helped quite a bit. It explained not only the mechanics and logistics of sex, but the whole process of making a baby from hard-on to delivery. If you want I’ll look for the title (it was a library book).
My parents were old school and very embarrassed about talking with us on that stuff, and I went to a sub-par rural high school before Sex Ed was even thought about as part of the curriculum in the sticks (though there was no shortage of pregnant unwed 15 year old students walking the hallway in any given year). So I learned piece meal, first from growing up on a farm where dogs/cows/cats/etc. were constantly going at it (I don’t remember the first time I saw a cow being bred or dogs going at it, I was too little).
By 10 or so I had the basic facts: “a boy meets a girl and turns her over and rides around on her back with his ding dong plugged into her socket and he stays there until either somebody who doesn’t like him shoots a pistol in the air or hits him with a stick or until he’s done, then there’s a calf or a litter in a few months or weeks”.
Then around puberty I started reading sexually explicit historical romances published by PLAYBOY PRESS (an affiliate of the magazine) that were actually pretty good- I learned about cunnilingus and Jacobite uprisings of 1745 at the same time. (I’ve tried Presbyterianism and fighting an English guy but I’ve yet to do cunnilingus.)
My reading of these books, incidentally (which my mother also read and discussed with me- she thought it was important that I know the “real” facts about the Battle of Culloden) set off a sort of niche market in my high school- people reading the same passages started buying the books and passing them around! I’ve wondered if there are any girls from my high school who somehow get horny when they hear bagpipes.)
Like most autodidacts on any subject there were gaps in info, but twixt cows and clans I got the basics. And I learned that limpid pools of eyes will make men’s manhood turgid.
I must have been 7-8 years old when my father explained how a baby develops in the mother’s womb, complete with an illustrated book that gave me the impression that the baby came out the mother’s ass when it was born. He also must have explained how the baby gets in there to begin with, but this must have gone completely over my head. I was rather sheltered and I didn’t really understand the rest of the process until I was 11 or so. Up to that point I had developed many misguided notions about sex (e.g. the father inserts his limp penis into the vagina and urinates in it). I was 15 before I got my first exposure to real porn when a friend got hold of his dad’s Hustler magazine (Playboy and Penthouse don’t really count, which I had first seen when I was 12.)
I didn’t learn the mechanics of sexual intercourse until I was in the seventh grade. I knew about the sperm fertilizing the egg, I knew about menstruation, where the baby came out, and so on.
Just not how the sperm and the egg got introduced to each other.
Then, in junior high Phys Ed, we had a sex-ed course. Part of the book was a clinical description of sex, with blood vessels swelling and so on. When I finally wrapped my brain around the picture, I was aghast. But that means… I mean… Mom and Dad had to…ewwwww!!! And a lot of scenes in books I had read made a lot more sense.
Oh, sweetie, not all of had to read *Playboy Press * to love a man in a kilt. Rowr.
My daughter is grossed out by kilts…she insists the men are wearing skirts. I’ve told her they’re not, it’s a kilt, but she’s insisting it’s the same thing.
The book that got passed around our junior high was Forever by Judy Blume.
