quote:I've been pooped on by birds on three separate occasions. Fowl creatures!
My parents got me a book from the library and read through it with me when I was 3 or 4. I remember little pictures of sperm wearing top hats and white gloves, and carrying little canes. They were quite dapper, as I remember them.
Then, when I was about 8 or so I found my parents' copy of The Joy of Sex in the bottom of my dad's underwear drawer, and filled in any blanks they might have left out.
As for bees, I always liked bees. When I was a kid I used to set out plates of Dr. Pepper for them (bees, having good sense, love Dr. Pepper), and would often go around collecting them, letting them crawl around on me. I've never been stung by a bee. Or a wasp, for that matter, but wasps have always struck me as being fairly malevolent, so I've always given them a wide berth.
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My sister-in-law (six) is like that, Noemon. She is one with the bugs. She's really allergic to ants, so instead of avoiding them, she learned how to pick them up without hurting them, and without letting them bite her...it's pretty amazing. She kept a pet praying mantis for a long time (until I killed it... ) and would feed it garden insects. She would catch bees and wasps herself without getting stung. Once she caught a huge, gorgeous butterfly and ran around saying, "Look at my beautiful butterfly! Let's feed it to the praying mantis!" It's really amazing to watch. She is an awesome kid.
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It depends on which part of "birds and bees" you are talking about.
If you just mean the female cycle & reproductive system, we had this nice little film in junior high that explained it all (thank goodness -- like two weeks before I started, and no one else had explained anything to me!)
If you are talking about sex -- living on a farm I think my family just assumed I understood all about that -- after all, I could see farm animals, uh, mating. (Didn't realize we don't necessarily use their same position). But on the human level, well, that was kind of a "learn as you go" thing for me -- taught by my first boyfriend <GRIN>. I was really pretty naive'. My household didn't talk about it.
In fact, once in church I remember asking my grandmother what the word "circumcision" was when the preacher said it. She was mortified and just said "Shush! I'll explain later!" But she never did.
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I remember in fifth grade, they separated all the 5th grade boys from the girls, and took us to separate places. They showed us boys some stupid film that had nothing to do with anything while they gave the girls "The Talk." Us boys had no idea what was going on. Afterwards, all of the girls had these pamplets that they wouldn't show us, and they were all giggling.
Us boys didn't get the talk until the next year from our gym coach. It was just like the same scene in Wonder Years. A very surreal expereince, having a crotchety bachelor explain the intracicies of the female reproductive system by using a chalk drawing that looked like the head of a cow.
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We had a sex-ed class in seventh grade and there was that same bachelor teaching the class all together. Luckily we already knew most of it by then, but that teacher was full of crap. He basically said that girls got all weepy but it was all in their head and we were pretty much making it up. He wouldn't admit anything about the hormones part of it. Great class.
*grin* My husband just told me about his experience with sex-ed. They got split up, and the male coach simply told the guys, "You will be having girlfriends soon and they will get mad at you for no reason. Don't take it personally, and do whatever they want you to do." That was his entire class. It served him well, I think.
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I guess for me, it happened when I was seven and stumbled across a couple of my Dad's Playboy magazines. Okay, I didn't just stumble across them, I was just pilfering about on a rainy day and Tah Dah!!!!
Talk about getting my attention! Wowzers! Well, when my Dad came to my room later to find out what had happened to them, my curiosity just started sending out question after question. My Dad did the best he could to answer the questions and got my Mom's advice along the way.
I got a more clinical look into Sex Ed the next year when our third grade class was part of a state test project on Sex Ed. Basically, I was educated in a small school system in the Appalachian mountains where class sizes were very small. As such, we were often used as places to try the new teaching techniques that were popping up in the 1970s. In our case, it was to basically lay out the whole sexuality issue to a group of third graders.
Over the next couple of weeks, we learned about reproduction, periods, puberty, gender and a whole host of other issues. Since this was also the height of feminism, we were told an awful lot about how gender roles were changing. The classes weren't segregated between boys and girls and if I remember correctly, any question you asked was answered.
All in all, I'd think it was a pretty healthy way to learn, but then again, what other life experiences have I had to compare and contrast it to?
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I was five when my mom was pregnant with my little brother. She read my sister and me a picture book, I think the title was How Babies Are Made. It was very complete, but all the illustrations were photographs of colored paper cut and layered. It was neat artwork. I realized when I was much older that if they’d used actual pictures it would have been considered pornography, but for some reason anatomically correct paper dolls were okay in a children’s book.
Then when I was 10 or so Mom gave me a copy of A Doctor Talks to 9-12 Year Olds and asked if I had any questions.
Then we had sex ed in eighth and tenth grade. And in seminary I took a very in depth Human Sexuality class taught by the University of Minnesota medical school and designed for people who would be doing counseling.
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Hey! That How Babies Are Made book you mention is what I used with my own kids when they were young (I didn't want them to be as clueless as I was).
Of course, now there is more sex-ed in school, both at the junior high and high school level. My kids already knew about things at age 10 that I didn't learn until I was 17 or so (by experience).
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Very cool about your sister-in-law, PSI! Bees are pretty much the only insect I've ever felt like I had a distinctly positive relationship, but I'm generally fascinated by insects. I'd love to have met your sil's preying mantis; I love watching mantises regarding things--it's incredibly cool.
You know, I've occasionally wondered whether or not I was actually doing the bees harm with the Dr. Pepper. None of them drowned in it the way ants will in honey (as an aside--how do bees keep ants from over-running their hives? Anyone have any idea?), but I wondered if the sugar in the Dr. Pepper was in a form that was useful for the bees, in terms of honey production. ScottR, you keep bees, right? Any thoughts on this?
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Wow! It seems that by far the two most common ways people here have learned about sex is either from the classic "school talk" or finding books/magazines that belonged to their parents. Hey, Porter, do we need to hide some of our reading material better? Not as much of the peer-teaching as I expected.
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I would say that parents should definitely hide that stuff better, and really enforce some private areas of the home. My parents let me have the run of their bedroom because they didn't want me to feel shut out. I think that was a bad plan.
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quote: And in seminary I took a very in depth Human Sexuality class taught by the University of Minnesota medical school and designed for people who would be doing counseling
well! It's a good thing you got this, dkw! It might come in handy in the future.... <GRIN>
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I'm thinking Hatrackers as kids did more interacting with printed materials than with peers. </generalizing>
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katharina, would you believe that erotic dreams for me usually consist of reading erotica in my dreams? Very unsettling, once I realized it.
My mother, a nurse, had The Talk (of sorts) with me when I was about five. I'd just asked her what a "boustier" was (the French short stories which were so intriguing). However, I came away with a pretty vague idea that 1) you did this only so you could have babies, and 2) somehow your bodies merged through the clothes. I didn't believe people actually did what I was reading about until I was about 16 or 17 yrs old. Up til then, I guessed it was all some sort of wink-wink-snigger-snigger societal joke.
I remember clearly thinking, "You cannot be serious."
For me, books were a fairly gentle ease-in. I could deal with it on a highly theoretical basis; i.e., I didn't have to look anyone in the face while they were explaining it. That helped, at least for me. And I recieved my first romantic kiss after I started college, so early exposure didn't lead to early experience with others, at least in my case. YMMV
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I don't remember when I figured out the whole tab A slot B thing. I knew everything that happened AFTER, and that nakedness and very close contact were involved but no one ever told me how it all "came together." Seeing as my TV watching was rather strictly controlled and I really didn't have any friends, I figured out sometime around 6th grade or so. But I don't remember how. I just remember being rather confused by the (not terribly explicit) love scene in a particular book one day, and then later knowing what was being implied. Posts: 2849 | Registered: Feb 2002
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Fowl creatures!![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
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) and would feed it garden insects. She would catch bees and wasps herself without getting stung. Once she caught a huge, gorgeous butterfly and ran around saying, "Look at my beautiful butterfly! Let's feed it to the praying mantis!" It's really amazing to watch. She is an awesome kid.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
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Not as much of the peer-teaching as I expected.
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