My best friend is valedictorian of her high school class. She got a perfect score on her ACT, and near-perfect on her SAT. She got an A in heath class, which implies that she passed the sex-ed test.
And the other night, when a guy told her he was sterile so he didn’t need a condom, she believed him.
::bangs head::
I believe the word you’re looking for is “vulva”. 
And FWIW lorinada, it is possible to see at least part of the vagina with just a mirror. If you had a speculum and a mirror I imagine you could see about all there is to see.
Hmmm… I suppose all the people confused about “the REAL Mickey Mouse” could be mitigated by claiming to be under the impression that there is one actor (whom they picture as a short, high-voiced, male) that is the “official” Mickey and that somehow does both costumed appearances and voiceovers. Sorta like saying Bill Shatner is the Captain Kirk.
OTOH just not realizing it’s an actor inside that big head is just weird.
On other subjects, like the distance to the moon, lots of people just remembered their science class long enough to pass their tests and promptly forgot (it doesn’t help that most science is taught in school as a mere recitation of facts and formulae you’ll be quizzed about). Not that unimaginable, specially if most of your later intellectual effort was in other subjects (not unimaginable – has happened to me with some pieces of information). Some other information may never even come up.
I just thought of another one. A friend of mine in high school (Upstate NY) had never been to the ocean and when she visited the family summer home in Long Island - which is in the same state as the one in which she lived- asked if the water was the Atlantic or Pacific. Also, she had been to Spain on a Spanish club trip, but denied ever having been to Europe.
I went into the garage to have my car serviced and while there met up with my neighbour, the surgeon.
It seems that he had a flat tire and told me how impressed he was that he was able to have changed it all by himself. I made a note to myself right then to never have this guy come close to me with anything sharp.
My english teacher and I got into a heated argument once because she was insistent that humans were not mammals because mammals were animals. I am sure she also thought that we called her “Mam” as a form of respect too.
Errrr… I KNOW the difference between RAM and disk space… yet I continually confuse them when speaking. Ditto with Megs and Gigs. I don’t understand why my brain shorts out when speaking about these things, I know what I mean but I always say it wrong. :
In college, a Muslim friend of mine (I’m Jewish) and I were having one of our frequent comparative religion chats. In walks our Catholic co-worker, a straight-A student who has gone on to complete an MBA and work his tail off, eventually becoming a Director of a Fortune 100 financial services company by the age of 32.
Mr. Jesuit High School Graduate cocks his ear to our conversation for a minute, and then exclaims, “Wait a minute: isn’t Islam a sect of Judaism?”
I guess in the same way that Christianity is a sect of Judaism…
This has reminded me that I was a senior in college when I found out the Austria was not a member of the Eastern Bloc.
I had a coworker who is normally a fairly intelligent individual. Last year just before the Tour de France, I was talking with some other coworkers about Lance Armstrong. She said she never heard of Lance (that’s fair enough, I guess) so we tried explaining to her that he was the cancer survivor who won the Tour (at the time) twice in a row. He got a lot of media exposure for that and we thought that would jog her memory. No such luck.
She then informed us that she never heard of the Tour de France (!), nor did she believe us when we told her that there are grown adults who race bicycles professionally (“only kids and fitness nuts ride bikes”).
Another coworker is a major forwarder of email glurge, despite the fact that she would never believe any of it if it came from any source other than an anonymous email. I generally debunk the stuff she sends me, but all that has accomplished is getting me off her distribution list.