Earlier this week, Reddit user u/bongzmcdongz asked people who have had abstinence-only sex education to share "the most outrageous or untrue thing you were told." If you've never had to sit through one of these courses, the responses may make you laugh, gasp, and cringe — all at the same time. Here are a few of the top voted replies:
1. "We watched a video of a guy holding a brick over a teen's head and saying there was a 1% chance he was going to smash his face in. He was trying to illustrate how the 99% effectiveness of birth control doesn't seem so good when put in different terms, but ya know, those are the actions of a psychopath."
2. "The instructor gave all the boys in the class chewing gum and let them chew on it for a few minutes. Then she asked them if any of them wanted to share. Of course, none did. Then she asked if they didn't want to share gum, why would they want to share sex partners? This was in a co-ed class, so all the girls in the class got to see too."
3. "We were told that hickeys kill you because they cause your veins to burst."
4. "We were shown a video where a lady said she could tell if a girl was a virgin just by looking into her eyes. The implication was that premarital sex causes your spirit to die so that you become just a shell with nothing to offer."
5. "I was given a diagram of the female anatomy in which the clitoris had been erased — as in, someone went into Microsoft Paint and whited it out. The urethra, vagina, labia, and anus were labeled, and then at the top of the labia, it was whited out."
6. "We were taught that girls who wear thongs are going to damage their genitals."
7. "That every time I (a girl) had sex, I was giving away a part of my soul. So each sex partner whittled away bits of my soul. If I had sex before marriage, my God-given husband would only get a tiny scrap instead of a full half and thus wouldn't be able to love me as much as he would if I'd waited. Honestly, it's pretty confusing. This was taught in my Christian private school."
8. "Watching porn would make you want sex so much that you wouldn't be able to control yourself."
9. "Instead, she told us about Barbie. See, all of us 12-year-old girls in class needed to idolize Barbie. Ken, Barbie's husband, never sees Barbie gain weight after she gave birth to Kelly and Tommy. Ken never sees Barbie without her hair done. Ken never sees Barbie without makeup on. Barbie is the perfect wife we should all strive to be."
10. "I was taught in school that self-pleasure was also a sin. So, as a young girl discovering her body, every time I masturbated, I'd cry because I thought I was going to Hell."
11. "I was taught that you only have a finite amount of love to give, and if you give it away to people before you’re married, you won’t have any left for your partner."
12. "I remember seeing an infographic showing a pyramid of people, implying that having sex with someone is like having sex with all their partners, and their partner's partners, and so on and so forth. And that every additional partner increases the risk of cancer by some percentage."
13. "Condoms will fail close to 100% of the time.”
14. "Taking birth control pills will actually poison the body, because menstruation is a form of waste disposal, like urination or shitting."
15. "I was convinced that saliva is involved in the baby-making process. Not that you'd kiss someone and then boom, pregnant, but that someone's saliva over time would make their baby look like you. The more saliva, the stronger the resemblance. ... Long story short, I spit in my cousin's drinks for a solid two months because I wanted her baby (she was pregnant at the time) to look like me (who was 8)."
16. "My partner was taught that LGBTQ+ people are the offspring of adulterous adults."
– u/wuurms
17. "Emergency contraception (aka Plan B) is the same thing as an abortion. ... It is not."
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.