These crazy sex-ed stories will remind you that high school was…not great

“Don’t have sex. Because you will get pregnant. And die. Don’t have sex in the missionary position, don’t have sex standing up…just don’t do it, promise? Okay, now everybody take some rubbers.”

If only high school sex-ed was as articulate as Coach Carr’s enthusiastic lecture in Mean Girls.

Some fuuuuun facts for you: Only 24 states require sexual education to be taught in school, and only 13 require that education to be medically accurate.

Yeah. High school is bad, and sex-ed is even worse, but at least it makes for a bunch of good stories:

Mary, 21

The teacher was really awkward. For the two days of class on the reproductive system, he threatened that if anyone joked or laughed, they would get detention. Basically, all they taught us was women have babies and that sex (whatever that is) outside of marriage is like the unforgivable sin of sins. Then when I went to summer camp my junior year and the girls were talking about “how far have they’ve gone” and “spit or swallow” I was like, “spit what?” And then my freshman year my roommate learned of my horrible nonexistent sex-ed so she showed me The To-Do List on Netflix to educate me.

Béa, 23

My high school’s idea of learning about LGBTQ+ sex ed was to play that Macklemore song on repeat. Surprisingly, it didn’t teach us much.

Candice, 19 

To prove to a girl who was particularly worried about the tampon string coming off that it was secure, we played tug of war with one.

Lizzy, 25

My teacher told us we couldn’t get pregnant when we had our periods. That wasn’t in the curriculum, she was just an idiot.

Samaria, 20

We had this thing in 8th grade called an “STD Party” where we’d all have these cups of liquid and we’d go around the room and mix the liquids in the cup together. then at the end, some sort of solution would be added into the cups and the ones that changed colors had STDs and then the teacher told us who started the STD chain.

Mared, 21

I think my school wins. We had to put a condom on a massive girthy 12-inch dildo, and also they made us watch this. I was kicked out of class for laughing.

Gabby, 24

Our health/gym teacher finished the chapters on drugs and alcohol, looked us dead in the eye, and flipped past the chapters on sex and reproductive systems.

Kat, 22

At the end, they asked if anyone had any questions. Only one person put their hand up and it was a boy who asked “When will the girls get boobs?”

Mary, 21

We watched my teacher’s birth videos to scare us.

Elizabeth, 23

I skipped sex-ed so I wouldn’t know anything I wasn’t ready to know, and as a result didn’t know what an erection was until sophomore year of college.

Sydney, 19

Sex-ed was a very short section (maybe two weeks) in my required health class. The teacher was a longterm substitute teacher and when a student asked him if female ejaculation was real, he said no, it definitely wasn’t. When I tried to correct him, he told me I was wrong. I felt bad for the guy! He was straight and had a girlfriend and had no clue that female ejaculation was a thing.

Dana, 20

After practicing putting a condom on a partner’s fingers in class while saying “pinch an inch”, we were forced to look at images on a projector of SUPER up-close STDs while describing what we saw to try and match it to the list we’d been provided of common STDs and associated symptoms — all of a sudden there’s a huge thud and this girl had fainted. When another teacher came in to help her there was an image of a penis with yellow pus on the board.

Charli, 23

Genuinely, the teacher made us shout out every word we’d ever heard used instead of penis or vagina to “get it out of our system.”

Katie, 24

It was actually a great curriculum! We learned about all the various diseases and what to use as protections (Various condoms, birth control, that sort of thing). We learned the parts of genitalia and what they were called, We learned about rape and sexual abuse, and as we had a large LGBT community, we learned about that as well. We watched a few scenes from “Monty Python: Meaning of Life,” specifically the “Sperm is Sacred” song, and the sex-ed scene. We touched upon masturbation as well, as I recall.

I still feel like I gained absolutely nothing from my high school sex-ed experience, but least we have more resources like your local clinic, doctors or Laci Green videos. Knowledge is power, folks, so keep asking questions.

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Some responses have been edited for length and clarity.

@TheTab