Recently, u/Commercial-Jump-6383 asked "what are some things school definitely does not teach you in sex education?" and we decided to round up some of the best answers:
1. "What discharge is. It literally happens every day, why did they not tell me?"
2. "Having a kid is f*cking expensive."
"This tagline would probably be better birth control than that whole 'don’t get an STD' line they pulled on us."
3. "The only thing we did for sex ed was look at a few pictures of STI-ridden genitals with a quick 'watch out for them' added by the teacher, so I’d say pretty much everything else."
"I remember our teacher saying something like '1 in 4 people will get an STD'. Then he went up and down the rows saying '1,2,3, you'll get it' like the sex ed version of Duck, Duck, Goose."
4. "Sex is not as clean as it looks on TV."
5. "Anything about gay sex. At least when I was a teen. Half of the stuff they talked about had no relevance to me at all."
"I expand that to anything regarding LGBTIQA*."
6. "I wasn’t taught that the girl actually has to be wet when I tried to have sex for the first time."
7. "That you should pee after sex."
8. "Coercion. They talked for days and days about peer pressure regarding drugs, but just 'no means no' when it came to sex and physically forcing."
9. "How to actually have sex. I had no understanding of sexual positions, where the vagina was, etc, until I was like 18."
10. "I wish they would teach people that the vagina does not smell like cake, or flowers, or fruit. Just vagina and that’s ok."
11. "That there are many options after becoming pregnant and that miscarriages are much more common that you think."
12. "Anything about female anatomy or everything they go through every month that would have helped me be more empathetic and understanding. I learned a lot way too late."
13. "I feel like postnatal depression (PND) needs to be discussed a lot more. It can be absolutely terrifying for new mothers and their partners who aren't prepared for the possibility."
14. "As a queer female, I knew how to put a condom on a styrofoam penis but not why I was attracted to girls."
15. "Endometriosis. There should be more awareness about it. It's not normal to have really painful menstrual cramps."
16. "I did not know a vagina had two holes in the front, nor did I learn what it looks like or how it works. It was a taboo topic for us guys in sex ed which in hindsight is kinda stupid."
17. "How my own prostate worked. I had to figure it out years later when people where talking about it online."
18. "They taught us about every STI known to man except the most common one, HPV."
"They also didn’t teach us you can get cervical cancer from it and that the only sure way to avoid it is by getting vaccinated."
19. "How to get rid of an erection. Why is this not day one teaching when the majority of penis owners at that age are suffering?"
H/T to u/Commercial-Jump-6383 and AskReddit for having this discussion!
Note: All submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.