Let's face it: Sex education in schools is often...not great. A lot of young people walk away from these lessons with ideas about sex that are disturbing, harmful, ridiculous, or just plain inaccurate.
So yesterday, a viral Reddit thread posed a question to the internet: "What's the worst sex ed advice you received at school?"
Here are some of the most shocking things young people were really taught about sex:
1. "Masturbation elongates your penis. Half of my class was just tugging their slugs for the rest of that afternoon."
2. "That lubricants are not needed 'if the man is doing his job right.'"
3. "We were told that a wet dream produced an amount of fluid tantamount to wetting the bed. They didn't even tell us what fluid it was."
4. "'Condoms are worthless, so don't bother.' This was at a public school in an abstinence-only state. The statistics they gave us were that condoms fail 16% of the time because there are tiny pores in them. And sometimes human sperm can swim through those pores. HIV is 100% smaller than a human sperm, so how often do you think it can get through those pores?"
5. “Don’t have sex or your penis will fall off.”
6. "That sex isn't supposed to end until the lady's boobs start whistling."
7. "You can’t get pregnant on your period. Wrong."
8. "It was unsolicited sex advice from a psych teaching assistant. 'Don't go into dark alleys because you WILL end up having sex in there.' With whom? No freaking idea. Maybe the weird alley sex goblins."
9. "The STD talk during my middle school’s health class consisted of a vague video showing a paintbrush dipping into various paints, one after another, until there was a messy smear of colors everywhere. The advice was, verbatim, 'Girls, don’t let other people’s paint get anywhere near you.' Art class afterward was real fun, though."
10. "I basically had the same sex ed they gave in Mean Girls. The whole 'Condoms don't work. Pills don't guarantee 100%. So if you have sex, you WILL get pregnant.'"
11. "Did anyone else get the tape thing? My teacher took two pieces of tape and stuck them to her sleeves. She would then peel them off and re-stick them to her sleeves, getting the back side of the tape more linty each time. She said that the pieces of tape were people, and every time she put them on her sleeve, it represented them having sex with a different person. Eventually, when she put them together, they didn't stick very well from all of the shirt fibers, and this meant they were so emotionally disconnected that they couldn't form a lasting bond. So don't have sex or you'll be a broken shell of a person unable to love."
12. "I'm 24. And when I was a freshman in high school, my health teacher legit told us that women could get pregnant by just sleeping naked next to a man. She told us her best friend who 'never had sex but kissed and hugged a man naked' got pregnant."
13. "When I was homeschooled, my mom told me that masturbating caused cancer because you'd be too aggressive to your ballsack due to 'the motion.' I feel bad for my father now."
14. "They showed us this very sad video where a girl got pregnant but couldn’t handle motherhood, so she suffocated her baby with a pillow. What the fuck?"
15. "I had a gym teacher say it's impossible to have sex with a woman if she didn't want to because the hole closes up. He went to jail for guess what?"
16. "'Men are completely incapable of controlling themselves.' Made it sound to everyone like we had no control over our bodies, thoughts, or actions, and that we spray urine and semen at everything that crosses our path."
17. "In seventh grade, we had a speaker come talk to the whole school in the auditorium. This motherfucker told us that if we pleasured ourselves, we were statistically much more likely to be rapists and pedophiles. Every guy in that room, including myself, felt instantly ashamed. Fuck that guy."
18. "Abstinence is the only way to get to heaven. Unless you are married."
19. "I went to a school in a wealthy suburb in Texas. Our school was forced to teach "SaVe Sex, not SaFe Sex." So, abstinence only. No discussion about condoms or any other type of birth control. Like a third of the female students graduated with at least one secret abortion under their belts."
20. "My sex ed teacher told us, 'Ejaculate is the whitest substance on Earth.'"
21. "Don’t try to stick your dick too far in, because a baby will grab hold of it and pull its way out."
22. "Mine (at an all-girls school) was: 'Every time you have sex with a man, you lose some of your special glue. If you lose all your special glue, no one will want to marry you.'"
23. "Condoms should never be used during sex because they 'block the flow of God's love' from one person to another and signify that you are 'refusing to fully accept your partner for who they are.'"
24. "That men had to be circumcised before having sex or the foreskin would rip, leading to all kinds of infections, permanent injury, or even death."
And finally...
25. "You guys got sex ed?"
Okay, now it's your turn. What messed-up lessons did YOU learn in sex ed? Sound off in the comments below.
Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.