“Don’t have sex or you will get pregnant and die.”
That was pretty much the sexual education message at one Christian high school, a Reddit NSFW viral thread revealed this week. It asked people who didn’t take sex ed: “What was something you had to learn the hard way?”
Get ready for a mix of hilarious, scary and sad answers that show how little some are taught about sex, sexuality and sexual health.
Sex
A few people definitely could’ve used a talk on what intercourse is.
“Never knew you had to stick it in. Always thought you just rubbed the parts together like spreading peanut butter onto some bread,” one guy said. “Boy oh boy was I wrong.”
Another admitted not knowing about the “in-out part” until he discovered online porn.
“I thought you just put it in and left it there.”
How babies are made
Porn also helped the ill-informed figure out how to make babies.
Before seeing a penis and vagina in action, one person confessed, “I thought babies were made when lovers kiss.”
One woman who was raised Catholic initially believed pregnancy could only happen after marriage.
“This was what I came up with on my own, and when I mentioned this to my mother, she was like, ‘Yeah, that’s about right.'”
READ MORE: Sexual education compared across Canada
Another woman was told by her mom that her first period meant she could now get pregnant, which freaked her out.
“I had pregnancy scares for three years until I found out how pregnancy happens. I found out from a pregnant girl in my class Freshman year.”
She credited Family Guy for knowing baby-making “had something to do with sex.” But she thought “kissing a boy or masturbating would just trigger it.”
Masturbation
Guys also owned up to being totally confused — and at least on one occasion, brought to tears — by masturbation.
“When I was masturbating without actually knowing that was what I was doing, I came and panicked because I didn’t know what it was and cried a bit.”
Someone else recalled a high school classmate thinking clear urine was a sign of semen and the same as masturbating, which he was against for religious reasons.
Periods
Men were equally as clueless about menstruation.
“I didn’t learn until a senior in high school that a girl’s period lasted longer than one day,” one respondent admitted. “I always assumed it was just one day a month, until I made a comment and was told how wrong I was.”
YouTube helped one woman figure out she wasn’t supposed to insert the plastic applicator. A boyfriend taught another girl from a religious background that “she had a hole down there.”
“I had never explored down there on my own,” she explained.
“I had been trying to put a tampon in my urethra. Sex Ed is important.”
AIDS
One sex ed teacher told her students about AIDS, but missed filling them in on how they can get it, just to “avoid touching blood, breast milk and sex organ fluids.”
“I touched my own blood before and I thought I could get AIDS from myself,” one man recalled.
He was in Grade 5.
READ MORE: Made-in-Canada HIV/AIDS treatment embraced by everyone but Canada
Shady sex ed
The extent of sex ed at one school, according to the thread, was apparently a “purity ring ceremony” 11-year-olds were forced to participate in.
Elsewhere, boys were treated to this single sex ed speech in the gym: “Gentlemen, you’ve got a zipper, keep it up…Now let’s play some basketball.”
The curriculum was eventually contracted out to an abstinence-only company, the Redditor wrote.
“It took until I was, like, 20 to learn that we were lied to quite brazenly.”
A couple of the sex truths he figured out on his own: Abortions don’t make a woman completely infertile, and the AIDS virus cannot get through condom pores “like a ping pong ball through a hula hoop.”
Another guy summed up his bad sex ed experience with this list:
- I thought girls peed out of their [bums] until like 6th grade
- I thought I had an AIDS right after learning about it because I had kissed a girl
- I didn’t know what was happening the first time I ejaculated
- I still don’t exactly know what menopause is.
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