6 Women Share What They Wish They’d Learned In Sex Ed

Many women have long since forgotten their high school sex education classes. Perhaps your health or fitness instructor handed you a stick of deodorant, whispered some lessons about birds and bees, and taught you about human anatomy. Perhaps you never even took sex education at all—less than half of US states presently mandate its teaching in public schools, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Furthermore, just 20 states mandate that sex and/or HIV education be factual in terms of medicine if it is offered.

Elizabeth Boskey, PhD, a certified sexuality educator and expert on STDs, says that depending on where they live, young people could receive anything from no sex education to sex education focused solely on abstinence or well-designed, comprehensive programs that help build both skills and values.

We want to promote positive sexuality as well as prevent harm; most people have healthy relationships as they get older, says John Santelli, MD, MPH, a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Whatever our experiences with sex education may have been, we all share the feeling that there are gaps in our sexual education.

These gaps arise because a large portion of sex education is not focused on empowering people to make educated decisions, but rather on anatomy and pregnancy prevention.

Even though we are well past our sex education days, we can’t help but reflect on the things we wish we had known about our sexuality when we were younger. Here, real women discuss the sex-related gaps in their knowledge.

What it feels like the first time

I went to a very small public school in the states that are in the South. Our biology instructor was forced to teach our health class, and he only covered two topics. One was that we were all going through adolescence, which meant we would all be sweating more and needing deodorant. Another was that, as females, we would all be getting our periods once a month, which meant we would all be quite emotional for four to five days.

Birth control methods

IUDs were not discussed by our teacher; instead, she only mentioned birth control pills, diaphragms, and condoms (male and female).

I wish I had learned about copper IUDs sooner because I currently have one. I was unaware that there was an effective non-hormonal birth control option. Additionally, knowing where to obtain birth control could have been helpful—I can’t even recall how I worked that one out.

Knowledge about STDs

I never took sex education in school. In fifth grade, they used slides or a film to demonstrate how our bodies will change. When I was growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, it seemed like instructors and parents didn’t think it was appropriate to discuss sex. Still, knowing more about STDs would have been helpful. I hope that doesn’t come out as naive, but at the time, I was unaware of them. I was afraid after learning more about STDs because my 29-year-old husband, with whom I am no longer married, had been unfaithful to me numerous times during our marriage. Knowing the dangers sooner would have been beneficial.

Anything at all

I’d like to take a sex education class. I never talked about sex in my day unless a woman was a ‘tramp’ or ‘easy.’ I slipped my tongue during my first real kiss in the eighth grade. and I was terrified. ‘I don’t think this can happen, but I hope I don’t become pregnant from French kissing Mike,’ I wrote in my diary at the time. While I recall learning about eggs and sperm in eighth or ninth school, I don’t think we ever talked about condoms, oral sex, or anything similar. In essence, we didn’t talk about sex; it was a married couple’s private matter, and I didn’t pursue it further. Books, trashy magazines, and talks from sleepovers were the sources of conversation.

Female sexual desire

I wish I had known that having sex can occasionally be fantastic, bizarre, uncomfortable, funny, absurd, gross, embarrassing, and joyful. It was presented as the pinnacle of adulthood and ought to be treated seriously, which is understandable in many ways, but I was unaware of how bizarre and enjoyable it might also be. I also wish that girls, rather than simply boys, had been addressed when it came to masturbation and sexual desire.

My life changed when I realized that other ladies enjoyed having plenty of sex and masturbated. I think I lost out on the realization that my body belongs to me. I felt as though I had been taught about my body parts from a distance, and that their sole purpose was to cause me discomfort (such as monthly periods), have intercourse with my spouse after I got married, and eventually have a child. It wasn’t until I figured out how to share myself with someone else that I realized I was truly in control of myself.

Positive body image

The only sexual education I had was a cartoon about the origins of babies. That was all it depicted, in my opinion—a meeting between a swimming sperm and a floating egg. For me, the thing I missed most about being different-looking was having a good identity because, because of a childhood illness, I didn’t fit into the mold of what is typically considered attractive.

It probably took me until I was 50 years old to realize how beautiful I was on the inside—I think that’s a major hole. People should be taught to value who they are at a young age, flaws and all, and to accept who they are. That, in my opinion, is related to letting girls and boys have more freedom to express their identities and not telling boys they can’t wear skirts or tell girls they can’t look like boys.

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