This morning, I put out a call for Sex Ed horror stories from former and current teens, after reading about Utah’s decision to adopt an abstinence-only policy when it comes to teaching about sexual health. Of course, that’s ridiculous - but not as crazy as some of these testimonials. Read on, it’s fascinating.
On Periods & Other Ovarian Mysteries
“Our sex ed in biology class was very good, it was our teacher of religious education who told us bullshit: he once said that men can’t have sex with women during their period, because the the period blood forms crystals which hurt the penis. One of the girls in our class asked him if that’s what his wife told him.” - lostwiginity
“Here’s my sex ed horror story: in 4th grade they separated out the boys and the girls, and basically gave us the Puberty Talk. For the girls, they explained in admittedly accurate detail the changes that were going to start happening with our bodies. But they never mentioned….why. So here I am, 9 years old, knowing that soon I would start having my period, which by all accounts was painful and inconvenient and would last until I was in my 50s, but I had no idea for what purpose.” - awellfittedname
“The most memorable class was when one boy asked, “What’s PMS?” Our teacher just shook his head in his hands & sighed with exasperation. We never even learned what the acronym meant, but I now understand his reaction.” - choplogik
“The closest we ever got to sex ed was spending a period making masturbation jokes with our guidance teacher. It was funny at the time, but now I have the same relationship with vaginas that old people have with the internet.” - fourflatsmuth
On What’s Going On With My Body?
“The only thing I remember from sex ed is about pubes. I remember being told “Pubic hair will cover the male genitalia.” So I imagined the entire penis being completely covered with hair. And not normal pubes, but long, straight and shiny hair. Like a chewbacca penis!” - cutcutpaste
On Sexually Transmitted Infections
“Since everyone else is sharing their U.S. sex ed stories… In junior high we basically got told that if you had sex, this guy in a big white suit with the word “AIDS” written across him was going to run up to you and give you AIDS; the high school for that district had no sex ed class. Just a nursery inside the school for “teacher use”. The school is known far and wide across the state as Pregnant Valley. I then switched high schools to a place with sex ed assemblies that handed out condoms. :I” - ravingsofamadpoet
“In my “sex ed”, they told you that if you waited to have sex until you got married, you wouldn’t get STDs. They did not add any qualifiers to that statement.” - emmafred
“I have quite a few from my Sex ex teacher, but I’ll go for the worst one that I know. He asked us who would kiss someone who had aids. My friends and I raised our hands and he said why. We told him you can’t get aids that way.. He said You could get aids from holding hands, because if they have a cut and you have a cut then Boom you have aids. He responded to our every protest to this notion by saying “you’re talkin’ ‘bout cars, I’m talkin’ ‘bout apples.” For the record Texas teaches abstinence.” - heysir
“In Florida (in the 90s), we got a talk about periods in fifth grade and an abstinence talk in eighth grade. The kids at the abstinence talk were VERY excited about abstinence and mainly discussed sex in terms of negative consequences. At one point, one of the girls had us balls our hands into fists and put them together. “This is how big genital warts can get.” Thankfully my family had had HBO for years, so I had a decent understanding of what sex was, otherwise I would’ve been pretty mystified.” - ethicalbreakdance
“I grew up in a rural county and the only sex ed we ever got was a video about AIDS in 6th grade. All it explained was that you couldn’t get AIDS from hugging someone and it featured a rapping dog. In middle/high school we would be taken out of gym class for two week periods & our teacher would sit at his desk for an hour reading magazines while we sat around. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that that was supposed to be sex ed as well, but our teacher just refused to teach it.” - imtakingthedogdumbass
On Sex Before Marriage
“At my Catholic high school there was this excitable woman who came to the health classes to discuss “sex ed” (see: abstinence) and did a lengthy presentation with props and class participation, etc etc. She told us things like, “There’s no such thing as bad sex. Sex will always feel good! So why not wait until you’re married?” I did this demo in which 4 or 5 of us students were each given an oreo and lined up in front of the class. The first person chewed up their oreo and was then instructed to spit it into a glass of water. The glass was passed down the line and each student spat in their respective oreo cud. I was last in line. When the glass came to me, the woman said, “Okay, now drink it.” A moment of hesitation on my part and then she said, “Ha! No, don’t drink it! Gross, right? This is what your partner will be getting if you have sex before your wedding night. Wouldn’t you rather be a clean glass of water?”” - randazzinator
“I also have a rose story! My little brother did the True Love Waits program through our church youth group, and they did a skit the day they got their promise rings where he had a rose and a bunch of girls came through and tore petals off and one threw it down and stomped on it, so when the last one came through he didn’t have anything to give her. There’s also a skit where the guy had a present and girls kept asking to peek at it and unwrapping a little bit of it… yeah.” - adventures-in-mediocrity
“My sex ed teacher actually used the quote “why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” when encouraging us not to have sex before marriage. there are probably worse stories, but the awfulness of that stuck by me.” - evangelineviola
“My freshman year in high school, we had some guy come in and be like I’m married and sex with her is far more enjoyable than sex I might have had when I wasn’t married” which might imply that he had sex before he was married but no one asked that question. For his demonstration, he used duct tape. One was fresh and sticky, the other was used and wouldn’t stick to anything. He was trying to say that relationships won’t “stick” if either one of the pieces were used before.” - kimurrr
“In sixth grade my science teacher took a piece of tape and put it on my arm. She ripped it off and showed everyone the dead skin on the tape. Then she started putting the tape on other kids and said if we had sex, all our germs would travel from person to person and eventually everyone would have diseases. Not really great to tell that to someone with severe OCD.” - frommartyrdomtostartyrdom
“Our sex ed teacher proceeded to tell us within the first hour that sex before marriage is illegal in our state and we’ll all go to jail, have it on our criminal records, be forever disgraced, die, burn in hell, et cetera if we have sex. In reality the law was invalidated around 2005, had been created almost 200 years previously, and hadn’t been enforced against anyone since the middle of the 19th century.” - breathingoptional
“My Catholic high school ‘taught’ sex ed in such a roundabout, abstinence-only way, that I realised after graduation that all my knowledge about reproduction, etc, came from my Biology texts and ‘All About My Body’ - which my Mum gave me when I was 11. Praise Mum!” - langiinspirations
“Oh, and I just remembered another one, in high school, the teacher gave us a hershey’s kiss and said “If you can wait until tomorrow, I’ll give you five, but if you eat it, you don’t get any more” I of course ate mine. She then spent the next day telling us this is how abstinence works and how no man will want to marry you if you have sex before marriage. Oh, did I mention that our district had an obscenely high pregnancy rate?” - artyourheartoutblog
On Babymakin’
“We had this program called “Baby: Think It Over!” in middle school, taught by a crazy hag who yapped all period and told us “If you little weasels have sex, you will get ALL KINDS OF PREGNANT!” So then she passed out plastic babies that cried occasionally to “take care of” for a week. To get them to stop, we had to stab keys into their backs for a few minutes to “nurture them” so they would stop. That’s what I learned. If you have sex, you get baby. When baby cries, you stab it until it stops.” - phiesalittlelighthouse
“When I was little my parents bought me a “Where Babies Come From” book. It explained that males have sperm and females had eggs, and that when combined the female got pregnant. The book had a lot of pictures of cats but it didn’t explain how the sperm and eggs were combined so I just figured that they were in your spit so sex obviously was just making out while naked.” - xoxocommunismgurl
On Abortion & Adoption
“We have a county health department sponsored program called Brazen. They’re supposed to be ~*~young~*~ and ~*~hip~*~ so they can connect with the youth. And they’re abstinence only. When asked about abortion, they kept casting practitioners as dirty and evil. In fact, when I kept asking them about their bullshit scare tactics, one of their members, WITH TEARS IN HER EYES, came up to me and asked me why I wanted to ruin their program.” - daylightbombings
“In middle school, sex ed for me consisted of people showing us a mass quantity of pictures of STDs and being told, “If you have sex this will happen.” We also had a guest speaker come in and talk about how she had a less than legal abortion procedure in pretty gruesome details. I know the program was called Choices, and I think the tagline was something like, “You’re worth the wait!” Needless to say, I was scared of sex for the longest time.” - krislovescomix
On Self-Pleasure & Exploration
“One time in grade 8, the topic of masturbation was brought up. It was presented to us as something that only boys did. A boy in our class asked the teacher if girls did it too, and her answer was “Nope!” (I had no idea what “masturbation” even meant until a classmate explained after class, and I was like “Oh, THAT!”)” - fullofwhoa
On Sexual Assault
“My middle school sex ed class featured worksheets with titles like “What should a person do to avoid being raped?” and “The Wedding of My Dreams”.” - tangleflower
On Scare Tactics
“My 8th grade sex ed teacher told us about a teenage couple that tried to make a condom out of aluminum foil and ended up in the hospital.” - far2frail
“My sex ed class involved someone putting a condom up their arm to show us they were stretchy, then we watched a movie where people died because they were having sex in a moving car.” - classicbrion
“I went to Catholic highschool. We were taught that even properly used, unbroken condoms had “pores” in them that let AIDS through. The teacher finished this lovely lecture with “I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t trust my life to a flimsy piece of plastic, would you?”.” - dibujocosas
“I was presented with a handy diagram of a girl and boy in a boat on a river. the waves get choppy once they hold hands,and when they kiss, there’s rocks. Then they “do it” and the go off the edge of the waterfall into the flames of hell. Yes. My sex ed teacher drew the flames of hell at the base of a waterfall.” - bitterbun
On Alternative Sexual Practices
“When I took sex ed, some guys in my class jokingly asked if you should wear a condom if doing anal and the teacher snapped at them, saying ‘You shouldn’t be putting things where they don’t belong!’” - zomtastic
” My 7th grade health teacher (who happened to be female) told us all that women CANNOT have sex without feelings. Men can, but women can’t and that’s why girls should wait longer. Like, the guys in class should maybe wait longer too but the girls would actually experience extra pain if they weren’t emotionally bonded to their sexual partner. Someone asked ‘what about prostitutes’ and the teacher got all somber and said ‘Those women HAVE to do that. They don’t enjoy it at all.’” - coituskid
“At my high school, they shoved everyone into the gym during 4th period one day and made us listen to an pro-abstinence guest speaker who told us that BASICALLY if you watch pornography, you WILL become a serial killer because Ted Bundy really liked porn. Also then we had to sign a virginity pledge (not for the first time, go Texas!) and everyone I knew put fake names.” - dandywolves
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That’s all for now - I got over 120 responses in just 4 hours. It’s enough to make your head spin.
This post is both amazing and terrifying in equal measure
