When you're a kid, sex is a huge mystery that nobody seems to want to tell you about.
And because no one wants to talk about it, you're left to get your information from...less reliable sources.
So by the time you learn what's actually going on, you've got a whole list of things about sex that are utterly and completely wrong, and usually pretty funny. So I asked the BuzzFeed Community to tell me all the things they believed about sex when they were kids, and the answers did not disappoint.
Let's see what they had to say!
1. "I thought penises began at the belt and ended at the inseam. I also thought they were arrow shaped and pointy. I was both disappointed and relieved."
2. "When we had the puberty talk at school, the nurse was teaching us girls about erections and said that, 'When boys get excited and aroused, their penises fill with blood and explode.' 11-year-old me really didn’t know why us girls complain about period pain, when boys' dicks explode and they have to regrow their penis every time they get a boner."
3. "My best friend and I thought oral sex involved talking, like phone sex, because an oral presentation meant making a speech. She read a Cosmo at her cousin's house in 7th grade and RAN to my house as soon as she got back to tell me, 'Oral sex is NOT what we thought!' We still laugh about it."
4. "When I was little, I thought sex was just two people kicking each other rapidly underneath the covers. I pictured my parents doing this all the time, and I didn’t get it."
—Molly C.
5. "I assumed that the man just rubbed his dick between the labia on the outside like a hotdog and a bun. I didn’t know it was meant to actually go IN the vagina."
6. "I used to think every time you had sex it resulted in a pregnancy. So I was really confused with TV shows and movies when a couple was surprised by an accident. ... Did they forget they had sex?"
"I thought you got pregnant every time you had sex. I found out this wasn’t the case when one of my friends mentioned she could hear her parents having sex and giggled that they had sex every night. I gasped, 'Every night? How many siblings do you have?'"
7. "When I was little, I didn't even know sex involved vaginas. I thought it was just penises and boobs."
—Anonymous
8. "I thought a woman could choose what sex her baby would be based on what she wished for while making the baby during sex."
9. "Sex was often referred to as 'sleeping together,' and I knew that a penis went in a vagina, so I genuinely thought that the person with a penis just stuck it in and then they fell asleep together like that."
"I thought that sex was just lying together in bed, penis in vagina and just waiting, not doing anything but just waiting until the man came."
10. "I believed that the piece of music known as 'The Wedding March' somehow made women pregnant."
11. "I thought you weren't allowed to have sex until your parents died, or else it would shame them? I don't even understand how I got that idea since most of my grandparents are still alive."
—Anonymous
12. "The phrase 'bust a nut' was common when I was a pre-teen. I thought it meant the testicle literally exploded during orgasm."
13. "I was wondering how gay men have sex. Like, wouldn't it hurt to put a dick into a dick? Lol."
14. "I thought when boys went through puberty, they also had a period but with semen instead of blood. Thank you, public school education!"
15. "When I was little, my neighbor and I would play house and pretend to be a mom and dad. We'd play and then be like, 'Okay, it's time to go to sleep!' We would get under the covers and start tickling each other because that's what we thought adults were doing. When we got a little older, we started adding hair pulling and squeezing each others arms."
—Myke T.
16. "I thought you had to be the same height because your parts needed to line up."
17. "I knew how sex worked, but I only thought that’s how people who weren’t married had babies. If you were married, I thought you just asked God for a baby and he gave it to you. I suppose it was my way of reconciling why having a baby out of wedlock was so shameful, but having a baby when you're married wasn't."
18. "I thought it was a mechanical thing you did where the man and woman would stand upright and the man would stick his penis into the woman’s vagina and they would just stand there."
19. "This had to do with me being both young and asexual: I knew about the act of sex itself, but I had no understanding of sexual attraction. I did not know that people look at each other and feel the physical and mental urge to have sex with a particular person. So I thought that people just selected sex partners almost at random during hookups."
20. "I thought that if a woman was on top she couldn't get pregnant."
—Anonymous
21. "My mom is a nurse, so she always gave me age-appropriate answers to any questions I had about bodies growing up. When I was 8, I asked what the 'blue liquid commercials' were about. She told me an age-appropriate explanation of a period: 'You know that it takes cells from both a mom and a dad to make a baby. Well, the mom's body will get ready to have a baby before it gets cells from the dad. It prepares her half of the cells. If she doesn't get the cells, then her body will get rid of all of the stuff it prepared at the end of the month. Those commercials are for the products that catch that stuff so you can get rid of it the next time you're in the bathroom.' So, I pictured a monthly period as a grotesque situation where women randomly expelled baby parts at some point every month. I was constantly looking in the trash can after my mom went to the bathroom to see if I could find a hand or toe or something."
"Not really sex related, but I thought you had to take your tampon out to pee. This went on for years, until one day I mentioned to my mum, 'I need to pee, but it's so annoying. I only just put this tampon in.'"
22. "I didn't think there was any way us gays could have sex and look in each others eyes. Lol. Figured that one out."
—Anonymous
23. "I thought when you had sex you just got naked, laid on top of each other, and kissed. Nothing else. Just that."
"When I was in second grade, a girl in my class told me that sex was when you took all your clothes off and rubbed your stomachs together. I mean, she wasn't totally wrong, just turned out there were a couple more body parts involved lolol."
24. "When I was in elementary school, one of my best friends told me that her older cousin said that sex was when you kissed somebody all down their body until you got to their butt. Her older cousin must’ve been an ass man. Lol."
25. "I used to think that people would only have sex to have a baby. So if someone had three kids, that meant they only had sex three times in their life. I couldn’t comprehend that people would do it for pleasure."
26. "My friend told me that when you have sex you have to 'drill her.' I took that very literally and thought, 'Well that sounds awful. I don't want to do that!'"
—Tony P.
Thank you to everyone who submitted your story! I hope you finally figured it all out and have a thriving sex life!
Note: Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.