A recent thread on reddit asked folks to chime in with “the worst sex-ed advice you received at school?”
A lot of comments shared how little sex education was actually offered in their schools with many hailing the saving grace of the Google – “Thank God for the internet, seriously I don’t know what I would have done.”
Abstinence made several appearances in the thread:
• “Don’t have sex or your penis will fall off.”
• “If you have sex, you will get gonorrhea, and you will die.”
• “Haha, we had an hour and a half long lecture about abstinence, in high school.”
• “Virginity is like a handkerchief. If you let some boy sneeze in it, do you think anyone else would want to use it?”
Of course, masturbation was a big topic:
• “Masturbation elongates your penis. Half of my class was just tugging their slugs for the rest of that afternoon.”
• “When I was homeschooled, my mom told me that masturbating caused cancer because you’d be too aggressive to your ballsack due to ‘the motion.’ I feel bad for my father now.”
• “In seventh grade we had a speaker come talk to the whole school in the auditorium. This motherf**ker told us that if we pleasured ourselves, we were statistically much more likely to be rapists and pedophiles. Every guy in that room including myself felt instantly ashamed. F**k that guy.”
Condom use was addressed from several angles:
• “Condoms are worthless so don’t bother.”
• “Wrap it twice, just as nice.”
• “What you do is you put one on and then ad hot-sauce and then put on the other one. You will notice if one of them breaks.”
Not quite advice, but one Redditor did share a fascinating sex ed ‘factoid’ we’ve never heard:
• “My sex ed teacher told us, ‘Ejaculate is the whitest substance on Earth.'”
Several remembered getting a sex-ed lesson using two pieces of tape, like this one:
• “My teacher took two pieces of tape and stuck them to her sleeves. She would then peel them off and re-stick them to her sleeves getting the backside of the tape more linty each time. She said that the pieces of tape were people and every time she put them on her sleeve it represented them having sex with a different person. Eventually, when she put them together, they didn’t stick very well from all shirt fibers and this meant they were so emotionally disconnected they couldn’t form a lasting bond. So don’t have sex or you’ll be a broken shell of a person unable to love.”
And then there are these random thoughts:
• “They didn’t tell us u need to use lube. They just said it’ll work out some way. Fun story: I’m gay sooooooo yeah, that hurt… Like, really really bad.”
• “That lubricants are not needed ‘if the man is doing his job right.'”
• “Not school but my mom told me that anal could get somebody pregnant. But since I’m gay this doesn’t matter.”
• “I was homeschooled. All my dad told me was “you stick it in, you jizz, then it’s over..” Thanks, dad.”
• “It was unsolicited sex advice from a psych TA. ‘Don’t go into dark alleys because you WILL end up having sex in there.’ With whom? No freaking idea. Maybe the weird alley sex goblins.”
• “We were told that a wet dream produced an amount of fluid tantamount to wetting the bed. They didn’t even tell us what fluid it was.”
• “That men had to be circumcised before having sex or the foreskin would rip, leading to all kinds of infections, permanent injury, or even death.”
• “‘Men are completely incapable of controlling themselves.’ Made it sound to everyone like we had no control over our bodies, thoughts, or actions, and that we spray urine and semen at everything that crosses our path.”
Click over to the AskReddit thread for more nuggets of sex ed here.