What I wish I'd known about sex growing up
From sexting to online porn and dating apps, it's fair to say that teenagers in 2021 are growing up in a very different world from their parents and teachers when it comes to sex and relationships.
Young people are crying out for more support and reliable information. They know the gist of what they are missing; they see it online; in gaming, on porn sites, Bridgerton even. But for many millennials and older members of Generation Z, getting good sex and relationship education has come too little, too late.
We spoke to five young people about exactly where their sex education went wrong and how they wish they'd been better prepared for the future.
“The mechanical realities of gay sex” - Jack Rear, 27
As part of the first generation to grow up with the internet, perhaps it was inevitable that my sex education didn’t speak to the digital age. What could Johnny Condom, a singing anthropomorphic prophylactic in a video we were shown repeatedly, have known about Pornhub, sexting, social media and revenge porn?
But for me that was just a small part of the problem. As we were taught about how our bodies would change in puberty, where babies came from and how to use condoms, I started to realise that only one half of the sex-ed curriculum was interesting to me.
By the time I had any notion that my knowledge of periods and pregnancy would be of no use, we’d moved on. Sex education was covered once, in my second year of high school, and never touched on again. With no education and nowhere else to turn, I went to the internet.
Much has been written about the ways porn is troublesome around areas such as consent or respect for performers and rightly so, but part of me wishes more attention was paid to its mechanical inaccuracies. Rarely did I see porn actors reaching for a condom or a bottle of lubricant. No one ever requested a breather to psych himself up to be penetrated.
Beyond that, I soon learned that socially, sex between men was far beyond anything I’d learned in school. The power dynamics are different, hook-up culture is far more prevalent, as is chemsex, the use of drugs when having sex, maybe group sex, too. There is baggage that comes with having a sex life as a gay man that I wish I’d been prepared for.
I know some parents fear that if these subjects are broached in front of their children it will change them. That acknowledging gay sex will make their child gay. If that is the case, how would I have known I was gay despite never being taught about gay sex?
Not being taught about gay sex was a symptom of a bigger problem with my education. Sex, as far as my teachers were concerned, involved one man and one woman and was performed to make babies. Perhaps something about “missionary with the lights off” was also mentioned, but the details are hazy.
There was no notion that sex could be for anything other that procreation. Sex for its own sake, gay or otherwise, was never mentioned. Pleasure? Fun? Connection? None of those came into it.
I have the utmost sympathy for adults who have to talk about sex with young people. The last thing you want to think about is how they might use that information, and the last thing they want to ponder is how much of the information you’re sharing comes first-hand.
But until we get over our squeamishness, our terror of even speaking words like “porn”, the only lesson they’ll take is that they shouldn’t ask and might as well continue getting it wrong.
“What a man’s body looks like” - Katie Russell, 25
For most of my teenage years, I pictured a penis to be the size of one you’d find on an ancient Greek statue (tiny).
Needless to say, it was a shock when I finally saw one in the flesh in my first year at university.
I had no idea what to expect. I had never seen a photo of a penis and, even after my school’s condom-on-a-penis-model demonstration in Year 11, I assumed the model had been enlarged for educational purposes. Looking back now, this is just one example of how my sex education did not prepare me for the Real World.
Going to an all-girls’ grammar school, sex was an enigma – and most of my knowledge was based on overheard snippets of explicit conversations from boys on the bus (that was where I learnt about oral sex) and from the one experienced girl in my class (that was where I learnt some factually inaccurate information about hymens). I would have benefited from seeing what a “typical” naked body looks like (and, no, those photos of genitals covered in herpes don’t count), and to have learnt about different contraceptives aside from condoms. It would have saved me a lot of time on Google.
But sex education should be about more than the technicalities. In particular, I wish I had been taught about sex positivity – that sex is enjoyable, rather than shameful. There is a particular pressure on girls to “lose their virginity” (a horribly passive term) to the right person at the right time, or else risk being seen as either “slutty” or “frigid”. I wish my school had addressed and perhaps explained this stigma, and taught us that girls have as much right to go out and actually enjoy having sex as the boys at the nearby school, who had no qualms talking in depth about their sexual experiences at house parties.
As part of my fantasy, empowering “girl power” sex ed, where we learn about the joy of orgasms, there’s a key point we can’t overlook: consent. In the past few weeks, much has been said about how young boys need to learn about consent. I wholeheartedly agree, but girls also need a thorough education in consent and boundaries, too. In particular, sexual coercion – where a person pressures their partner to do something that they do not want to do – is rife, and yet, because it is not spoken about, it is harder for those who experience it to understand that it is wrong. All teenagers should learn that there is no grey area, that no always means no. Better to learn that in the classroom than in real life.
“That the sex in porn is distorted” - Alex Denny, 23
There are many things I wish I’d known about sex as a teenager that I only discovered at university. Complex questions around consent were never addressed, for example. I remember a friend asking in one school workshop: “You told us that if we’re having sex with someone who’s drunk they can’t consent, but what if both of us are drunk?” He never received a clear answer.
In school, sex education was pretty thorough on the basics, but anything beyond that wasn’t really there. We were taught about heterosexual sex and how contraception works, but from what I can remember, LGBT+ sex education – and the notion of sexual pleasure – were absent from my all-boys’ school. My secondary school sex education began in Year 8 biology lessons, but it was pretty much just a group of boys in a classroom, giggling through the videos we were shown. Thereafter, we learnt about sexually transmitted diseases, how children are made and the risks of sex – but nothing about what should feel pleasurable, what shouldn’t and why people enter into sexual relationships other than for procreation. Concepts like “friends with benefits” were foreign to me until I went to university.
It’s important for teenagers to know about the risks and benefits of sex. When you just talk about everything that can go wrong, it turns into project fear. All we heard about was the risks.
I also wish I’d known more about the hyper-realised depiction of sex in the media; not just porn, but sex in movies, music, everything. It’s great that the sex education now addresses the distorted view of sex presented by porn, but I wish I had been aware of this when I was younger.
It’s not just sex that I would have liked more guidance on, but the issues surrounding intercourse, such as the contraceptive pill. I had absolutely no knowledge of that before university. All the other complications and risks, such as blood clots, I never knew about.
As told to Claudia Rowan
“Women can enjoy sex too” - Poppie Platt, 24
Growing up in a religious family meant my sexual education came entirely from school; unfortunately, that was also Catholic, so we were told about menstruation and getting pregnant but not much else.
I always wish we had learnt, at home or school, more about masturbation or internet dating and sexting. Countless hours were spent discussing male masturbation but the stigma around female pleasure was all-encompassing – as teenagers, my friends and I spoke about sexual acts as something we did to please boys. It’s only when I went to university that I became surrounded by women proud to enjoy sex.
Furthemore, internet dating and sexting are such massive parts of modern relationships that instructions on how to do this safely would have been so helpful: how to spot grooming, how to check the person you’re speaking to is really that person, how to answer in ways you’re comfortable with. I am 24 now and figured most things out myself or from the internet, but a better starting point to the messy, complicated world of sex would have been great.
“Not to catcall women” - Henry Nash, 23
I knew the basics of sex when I was a teenager, in terms of human anatomy, but I wish I’d known more about sexual behaviour – how to treat women and how to interact with them on social media, for instance. Gay sex was never spoken about either, and I don’t remember being taught about sexually transmitted diseases. That’s quite shocking.
The sexual education I received when I was younger wasn’t good enough. My first class about sex in school was when I was in Year 6; I remember being shown a cartoon of a man and woman chasing each other round a bed with a feather. It wasn’t very helpful.
Even in secondary school, sex as a subject was very lightly touched upon. Conversations about sexual behaviour are just as important as learning the basics. I learnt naturally through interactions with my friends about what’s right and wrong, but I was never taught basic things, like not to catcall women.
Sexting is huge nowadays, especially on Instagram and Snapchat. Even when I was young, sending explicit photos was common. So many people have had their nude photos – or those of someone they know – sent around their school. Surely teenagers should be told about the dynamics of how that works, and what’s right and wrong?
Conversations about sexting and revenge porn might be hard to have, but they are necessary. When I was a teenager, revenge porn would never come up in conversations, and porn was just laughed about if it was brought up in class. But these things need to be taken seriously.
As told to Claudia Rowan
“You don’t owe men anything” - Maighna Nanu, 25
When I was at school we were taught not to wear PE shorts in case it distracted our male teachers. It was an all-girls’ school. Sex education consisted of a few medical students coming in and simulating putting a condom on a banana in front of a sports hall of 80 giggling girls.
That, and the more biological aspects that were taught in biology class, was about all we had to go on from higher authority. Apart from that sex education was something more learnt from other girls’ experiences or what had happened to friends of friends. Most, if not all, of the focus was on what boys liked, what boys thought and what was perceived to be normal. Behaving or erring from that was considered “weird” and undesirable, and when you are 17 there is nothing worse than being weird.
When you are young it can feel as if everything that happens at school and what is being spoken about is the single most important thing in the world - to think that your friends could be discussing what you did, or notably didn’t do, with someone feels life-altering.
One of my best friends’ new boyfriends lied about sleeping with her after their second date and that was considered completely normal, or something that she ought to consider a compliment. It can take a long time to unlearn the idea that you don’t owe men things and that subpar behaviour is not okay. Guys pressuring you into doing something or putting you down are red flags – regrettably, I don’t think I even knew what consent was until I was well into university.
I wish that there was more emphasis on the importance of doing what you are comfortable with rather than what you are supposed to do. Ultimately everything to do with dating, sex and love is a realm of trial and error – and what better time to do that when you are young. Now I know the warning signs, and I hope younger generations can spot them earlier than I did.
