Bad Sex Ed

In grade school I had a sex-ed class that was taught by a teacher who did double duty as the librarian.  She told us that AIDS was contracted from dirty library books.  She said the only way to keep from getting AIDS was to make sure you never got a book dirty.  (I think this was her passive aggressive way of getting even.  We’d just gotten a complete set of ‘Tin Tin’ graphic novels, and they’d been trashed by a kid who’d borrowed them and dropped them in mud).  I was a smart kid, and my parents were teachers too.  I told them about it and she had to go in front of the school board and justify herself.  If I recall, she said something along the line of ‘well, we don’t really know HOW people get it, so I wasn’t technically lying, and I didn’t want to talk about how it actually spreads’.  This was early enough in the AIDS epidemic that she was only a few years behind the time, but it was information we might have needed.   She didn’t get to teach sex-ed any more after that.

An 8th grade science and a 7th grade science teacher gave incorrect information. The first one was relatively harmless: she was asked if a tampon could “pop your cherry,” and she assured the class that the hymen was very far up inside the hymen and would be unaffected by tampons because they’re not long enough to reach it. The 7th grade teacher had answered the question about pregnancy from oral sex. He said it was possible because some gets inside the female. The true winner was a different male 8th grade teacher who told us that most of us girls were going to lose our virginity with our pants around our ankles to an older boy in the backseat of a car with drugs or alcohol involved. And it just feels like shoving a broomstick up inside you. 

I don’t know if Mr. B wasn’t used to giving females orgasms, or if he was just trying to change the subject back to fractions, but when someone asked our 6th grade teacher when do women reach an orgasm, he responded that it was when the sperm met the egg.

I went to a catholic high school and we went to a chastity speaker.  He first put the burden of sex on the man (as if women never want it) and that premarital sex and associated activities were like taking your beloved to the edge of the grand canyon and sex was dropping her off of it.  

Seriously?

My mother eloped with my father and after a week of marriage, my grandmother handed her a used tube of KY jelly and said, “Well, all I can tell you is - wiggle when he wiggles.”

She was serious.

I went to a public school, which offered sex ed taught by the gym teacher in “Health” class.  I remember him explaining all the entry points for infection on the human body. He was obviously very uncomfortable having to mention some of the orifices over and over, so, for the entire lesson, he mashed them all up into one word: “eyesnosemouthpenisvaginaanus.” (This became something of a chant at friday night football games.) He also demonstrated how ineffective condoms were at preventing transmission of HIV by throwing a tennis ball through an open door, the message being that HIV could get through a condom just as easily.  The only thing this class instilled in me was mistrust in condoms and the inevitability of contracting HIV through my eyesnosemouthpenisvaginaanus, whether or not I chose to use one. Yeah.

Our health teacher, Mr. S, explained to us that girls should not masturbate because it would make them lose any desire/need for boys.

When I was in 8th grade (at a relatively progressive public school) my health teacher told me that if you were bisexual you were automatically twice as likely to have an STD.

face.palm.

I was a sophomore in high school in 1994 and had come out as a lesbian to my classmates earlier that year. On the day we were supposed to discuss reproductive anatomy, pregnancy, safe sex and STD prevention in health class, just before class started, my teacher came up to me semi-privately and said, “Since this stuff doesn’t really apply to you, you can just go to the library for today’s class if you want.” I think he believed he was being terribly progressive. Right. Like Diana Cage says, “Everyone knows lesbians don’t fuck! We just roll around like giant pandas.”

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