When did your sex ed start?

[Heather]

Whether it was at school at home, or somewhere else, when did you first start getting it?

I'm a big fan of data and sentiments like this -- http://ht.ly/A7IXc (And it is so odd to me to see backlash around this, because when I was young in the Chicago area, we all got sex ed -- however rudimentary it was -- starting in middle school and I don't remember hearing any whoop about it at all. The folks being all weird about this are likely the same age I am, so probably had it too, which leaves me double-confused, unless they just have developed very selective or imaginative memories.)

In fact, I'm a proponent of stage-appropriate sex ed starting as soon as possible, like with asking little, little kids before you tough them, even with diapering and toileting, giving proper names for body parts as soon as they're asking names and letting the wee ones know in preschools and daycares that their bodies are their own -- as goes for other people's bodies -- so boundaries should be respected.

When did you first start getting some? And when would you LIKED to have started?

[Mo]

I learned some basic puberty information in fifth grade (we got little samples of deodorant and pamphlets about menstruation) but nothing mentioned sex, just physical changes. In seventh and ninth grade I got official "sex education" but all I remember learning is a list of discharges and symptoms related to STIs. Maybe we learned about how to use condoms too, but that was it; clearly it wasn't interesting enough to make much of an impression on me! And in ninth grade the STI lesson was right near the drugs lesson, and it all felt like a big "Just Say No" situation without any real information or nuance.

I would have loved to get a bigger picture starting in that fifth grade lesson; I think learning by lecture would have been hard, but I was an avid reader and would have loved age-appropriate material at that age, especially as I had a friend who became sexually active when she was 11 and I felt like not really understanding what was happening and what non-abusive relationship dynamics looked like meant I didn't react to that situation in the way I wish I had.

[Peonies]

Well, I would like to answer "never" because I never really got actual sex ed, but I did have a "form" of sex ed starting in 7th grade. One day a year in health class was sex ed day in 7th and 8th grade. So in my entire 13 years of school I only had 2 days of sex ed. Health class was only an hour long so if you want to look at it that way - I only had 2 hours of it EVER. I would also consider it to be abstinence education since that's all they talked about.

In 6th grade I remember the school nurse talking to our gym class (we didn't have co-ed gym) about menstruation one day. She did an OK job, but I had already started my period by then.

I agree with you Heather on age-appropriate sex ed starting as soon as possible. My mom did a pretty good job of that, but my school sure did not. Thankfully she talked to me about menstruation earlier than the school. I had already had my period of 2 years before we talked about it in school. I can't imagine how horrified I would have been if my mom had not talked with me about it early, and went I to the bathroom to wipe and discover blood. I was only 10.

[Karyn]

I don't remember my parents ever talking to me about sex, so all the information I got was from school. Unfortunately, that consisted of a couple of hours of discussion about puberty in grade 5 (they split up the boys and girls) and a few weeks of abstinence-only "education" in grade 10. Most of what we talked about in high school was STIs and unplanned pregnancy, with the implication that if you had sex before you got married your life would basically be ruined. There were lots of pretty full on pictures of STI symptoms.

I didn't really pay a huge amount of attention to any of it, because somehow I knew that that was a pretty ridiculous way to teach sex ed, but one thing I do remember very clearly is having a sort of "reflection time" near the end of class where we were supposed to write ourselves a list of all the reasons why we wouldn't have sex until we got married, or (for people who were already sexually active) a list of reasons why we would stop having sex. It was awful. It did make me go out on my own though and try and learn as much as possible from non-biased sources, so yay for that I guess?

It would have been great to have sex ed that started earlier, with my parents talking about the things Heather suggested: not touching someone without asking, proper body part names, the works. That class in grade 5 was a missed opportunity, too. They could have covered so much more than just the physical puberty information.

[Keda]

Being in the UK, I guess it's not surprising that I had more school sex ed than it seems is available in the US. I had one session in primary school - probably year 6, so I'd have been 10 and everyone else would have been 11. I remember watching a DVD in which a woman in a yellow spandex jumpsuit explained reproduction, with one of those camera-through-a-rendered-body tours that were popular in the 90s, and then we had five minutes to ask questions and that was about it.

There was a talk given by someone from outside the school, when I was probably about 13 or 14, about female puberty - which was pretty pointless really, as she was talking about starting periods and buying your first bra, which was old news to the vast majority of kids in the room. Even those, like my friend, who hadn't started their periods yet, knew all that the talk covered and more from their friends. It was a shame, though, because the speaker herself was very good; I felt like she would have been able to tackle some important issues, which are tough to talk about with ninety teenagers, and done it well, had that been the topic she was given.


We also had compulsory sex ed throughout secondary school, with varying levels of success. It was part of PHSE (Personal, Social and Health Education), which got a single one-hour lesson every two weeks. With these ten or fifteen classes per year, the teachers were expected to cover sex ed, drugs and alcohol, bullying, careers and work, personal finance, and goodness knows what else... so nothing was ever done in much detail.

The curriculum for sex ed was very focussed on STIs, pregancy, and safer sex. We had that ridiculous "experiment" with the dolls - the school owned a couple of "realistic" baby dolls, which needed feeding and changing and so on, and would "cry" all night, and we'd have to take one of these home and "parent" it for a couple of days to scare us all off getting pregnant. They also had little devices which would detect if the "parent" removed the batteries, and you'd fail, not that anyone particularly cared about failing PHSE. Luckily there weren't enough dolls to go around and I didn't get one; my plan had been to lock it in the garage all weekend.

The teachers made a huge difference to the quality of my sex ed - I had two; one stuck firmly to the curriculum, because he was so, so very embarrassed to be teaching sex ed at all, and blushed the whole way through it, and generally his classes were just an opportunity to muck around. The other teacher - happily the one we had more often - was tough as old boots, and totally down-to-earth about everything; she was the one who had an A0 poster in her classroom of novelty condoms on a washing line (I've never seen a condom with udders or alien antenna anywhere else, alas), and who did a really good job of engaging us, getting us to discuss important issues, and generally escaping the black-and-white-ism of the curriculum. She showed an interview with a couple, one of whom was HIV+, who were dealing with all the hardships of trying to conceive with HIV, which made HIV much less of a boogeyman and much more of a relateable condition to me; and when a friend of a friend got pregnant by accident in year 11 (age 16), it was this teacher who my friend went to for help, and who handled it really really well.

She still had to be highly selective about what she taught, given that she had all of about four hours per year to spend on sex ed, and there was lots that I didn't learn, and lots that she tried to cover but couldn't really - fifteen minutes on "What should you do if someone wants you to have sex and you don't want to" is not a comprehensive education on consent and sexual ethics. I'm sure I could have gone to her with questions if I had needed to though - at that point in my life my sexuality was pretty much zero, so it all sort of passed me by.


I suspect that part of the fury about young sex ed comes from a disagreement about what sex ed entails. Certainly when my Mum read about proposals to do sex ed for five yearolds in school, it was clear that she was thinking about five yearolds being taught, basically, how to have sex, possibly safer sex, and what the risks are. She wouldn't immediately think of body parts, and bodily autonomy for yourself and respecting others' decisions about their own bodies as sex ed - while feminism has done a lot to illuminate how much of problematic beliefs about sex, and how much of rape culture, is rooted in simple ideas like these, I'm not sure that's filtered through to everyone yet.

[bigbywolf]

I have a lot of bitter feelings about my sex ed and the sex ed of my peers, and it's because of where I used to live.

I lived in a small population town (40k of people all up over a large mass of land) and one of the most frustrating things about this was we only had two high schools. Boys high school and Girls high school (oh, sorry, do you have a problem with the gender binaries? Tough.). It was literally hell to go to an all girls school when I didn't feel "all girl" at all, and here's where one of my biggest frustrations were.

You would think, since we're unfairly lassoed into a gender binary that is grossly misrepresentative of people, that at least then health classes would be great at teaching beings with vagina how to prevent being pregnant. Like, this was literally the ONE plus that could possibly come out of an "all girls" school, since there didn't need to be such a broad spectrum of contraception discussion and we could really have a zoomed in look to contraceptives that cater to beings with vaginas (more often than not, the being that can actually get pregnant)
Nope.

All that was discussed in these health classes were how to say no to drugs, and how to get out of a toxic relationship. These are both important discussions to be had, without a doubt, but I am so angry and hurt at the thought that people in the same school as I was in are so disadvantaged in their understanding of keeping themselves sexually safe.
So for me, I taught myself sex ed. my open minded, incredible mother taught me sex ed. And scarleteen, more than any other resource, taught (teaches) me about sex ed.

(If any of the language I used in this is transphobic please tell me!! I'm still trying to learn the ropes with this)

[acb]

We had three sex ed lessons, as far as I can remember - one when we were 11 on puberty, one when we were 12/ 13 on puberty again and a video on the mechanics of vaginal sex (ours was in Welsh and judging by the perm was from the 80s but the narrator also had a yellow spandex jumpsuit - is this a thing in the sex education world?) and one when we were 15 on contraception with the school nurse who was so embarrassed by the whole thing that she couldn't say the word erection and one of the boys at the back of the class had to shout it out for her.

I'd have loved to be taught the real names for things from a young age as well as building good foundations for physical boundaries and then when we were a bit older I would have loved some stuff discussing relationship models, healthy relationships and ANY mention AT ALL of LGBTQ people would have been lovely. Speaking of SRE for 5 year olds, there is this really good clip of a woman doing SRE regarding child pornography. I'm not sure if I can link to it because it's part of a documentary on porn which contains some fairly sexually explicit content as well as some dubious slightly slut-shamey analysis of pornography but it's a BBC 3 one called Porn: What's The Harm? and it is on YouTube - the specific section about SRE with primary school children is about 50 minutes in and I think it's just a great example of age appropriate sex ed.

[Keda]

I get the impression we're about the same age, so it could even have been the same video, translated.

[Johanna]

Until I was 13, I was living in Germany, and my earliest experience with sex education there was in either the second or the fourth grade (I was in the same room for those two years and I remember the room the class took place in, but not my age ). We had a picture book that explained how reproduction worked with a cartoon family. It was told from the point of view of a little boy, who was asking his pregnant mother questions throughout the pregnancy. There were pictures of male and female anatomy with the correct names, and a child-appropriate explanation of how pregnancy happens.

In 7th grade, my last year in Germany, we had a class that focused more on safer sex, STIs and birth control, but all I remember that class covering was condoms, the pill and AIDS. There was no overt "sex is bad" message, but the information we got was so rudimentary that it left us with more questions than answers.

In 8th grade, my first year in the US, we had one day where our class was split, and the boys and girls each were in a room with a teacher and allowed to ask questions. There was no curriculum for this, and the teachers were not health teachers but our regular teachers, and so predictably none of us felt safe actually asking questions. It was a pretty uncomfortable 45 minutes that achieved absolutely nothing.

My last experience with sex education was in 9th grade, in a different school in the US. It was a unit in our health class, so it only made up a few weeks out of the semester. We got to label drawings of male and female anatomy, learned about reproduction, and also talked about safer sex and birth control. I remember that being fairly comprehensive, though perhaps a bit late, (and also all of us being smart-asses even at that age, and thanking the teacher for including the clitoris in the diagram).

[Sam W]

Mine started slightly before I hit puberty (maybe age 9 or 10). My mom left the "It's Perfectly Normal" and "It's not the Stork" lying around where she knew I would find them. So I read them and enjoyed them. Nothing in them was a total shock, since my parents were the type to use anatomical names for body parts and answer my questions frankly, rather than try to hide it.

I got sex ed in school in 7th grade first (I was homeschooled until 6th grade, so no clue if our area has classes that occur in elementary school). It was stuff I already knew combined with a terrible video about the risks of sex (although it did mention condoms). We spent maybe one class on it. 9th grade was way better, because Planned Parenthood was invited in for a few days to teach . Way, way more comprehensive than a video. Plus, it's what inspired me to go into sex ed.