I think the first time I heard anything about how heterosexual sex works, it was from my cousin (who was actually a year younger than me) when I was about 8 or 9 (I think she told me that the penis goes inside the woman and wiggles around and then babies are made--this grossed me out greatly).

My mom had taught me about periods and stuff when I was about 7 I think, and at my school grade 5 girls (about 9/10 years old) have a special day-long workshop about menstruation and stuff (the boys don't get any sex ed until grade 6). I remember in the pamphlet they gave us about menstruation there was a FAQ section, and one of the questions was "can a tampon break my hymen?" and I had no idea what a hymen was and I think I looked it up in the dictionary. Anyways, in grade 6 (in Ontario) our compulsary sex education starts, with all the diagrams of the uterus, penis etc etc. I think in grade 7 you learn about stds and stuff and grade 8 you start some stuff about contraception (though that may be in grade 9 gym class, where it is all girls again).

My mom always told me I could ask her questions, but I was shy and much preferred to learn these things from a book.

Cat had kittens when I was five. Bizarrely, though my sister had been born just a few months before, what I remember is my dad explaining feline reproduction with way too much detail.

I also got a copy of "Our Bodies" somewhere around nine, and the next year we had sex ed in school. Most of what I knew by then was pretty accurate, but I don't remember talking about it with my parents much - not because they wouldn't have, but because I was embarrassed. What they did say was for the most part direct and accurate, so I didn't believe a lot of crap by the time the books and classes came around.

Also, a formative experience: at about seven, I went to see "Damn Yankees" with my parents, because my dad's college roommate had done the sets for the show. I didn't get a lot of the jokes, and kept asking my mom why everyone was laughing. She finally just said, "It's about sex," which shut me up and convinced me for the next several years that anything adults said that I didn't understand HAD to be about sex. Which, in retrospect, is not such a terrible assumption.

I remember being trapped in embarassing situations and having excruciatingly embarassing conversations with my mother. The most memorable was the time she decided to tell me about hand jobs- at the beginning of a 3 hour car trip, just the two of us, no escape. It was all framed in a positive and feminist way, she was telling me about safer alternatives to PIV intercourse etc. But still uncomfortable.

Interestingly enough, she has a totally different perspective. I recently asked her about explaining sex to me (because I'm starting to have these conversations with my son) and she said "oh my god! I HAD to tell you, you started asking questions at age 3! Pointing to your labia and saying 'what's this, Mama, what's this?' and asking about where babies come from! I ended up explaining periods and everything to you before you even started kindergarten!"

So I think I must not remember the earliest ones, only the junior-high age conversations in which everything out of a parent's mouth is necessarily the most embarassing thing ever. Also I'm kind of proud of my 3-year-old self.

I learned about sex from the internet.

I went to private school, religious school and my parents were a bit hesitant to talk about..anything, really. There are stories. They are funny, to everyone except me. It was awkward. Sitcom awkward.

Anyways, yeah. From the internet.
I have no idea how I've made it this far...

I learned bout it from my Uncle Frank.

I first got the whole story about sex when I was about 8 or 9. I was (and still am) a television watcher, and I could figure out almost everything except what the commercials for maxi pads, tampons, and "Summer's Eve" were about. So I asked my mom. She shined me on for a while, probably because I would wait and ask in front of company. But then one afternoon when I asked, she sat me down and told me about my reproductive system, having a period, and PIV sex. It all made an enormous amount of sense to me.

Later, I would ask about different aspects (does it hurt? what is oral sex? etc.). What was interesting is that I tended to ask these things in front of my dad, who was very uncomfortable with the whole thing. But I think I wanted his perspective, too. But he normally just left it to my mom to answer.

But then I became interested in the internet, and suddenly there were a whole lot of answers to questions I didn't even knew I had. O.O!

My mother told me the hetero basics (penis in vagina, fluid comes out, starts the process of making a baby/fetus) when I was really small, about 4 years old. Which I promptly forgot.

I remember being 8 or 9 and reading kids' books about animal and human babies being conceived that were pretty vague - they would always say a 'seed' from the father would meet an egg in the mother, but wouldn't say where the seed came from and how it got inside the mother. I (correctly) had the sense that this information was being kept from me because I was a child. I remember trying to work up the nerve to ask my mother. I was reading a Judy Blume book (The Adventures of Sally J. Friedman As Herself, I think - I may be off on the title) where the 10-year-old main character asks her mother the same question I had.

My mother said, "Let's go to the library and figure this out." She then checked out just about every middle-school-audience book about sex and let me read them all and said she'd answer any questions I had. The books were mostly fabulous on the subject of menstruation - what was happening inside your body, how you could tell when you were going to get your next period, what other secondary sex characteristics would develop during puberty, etc. One of them even advocated looking at your genitals with a hand mirror, a la Our Bodies, Ourselves.

However, they did not talk about pleasure. At the age of 10, I still thought that adults only had sex when they wanted to conceive a child. And they didn't talk about contraception at all.

Fast forward a few years. My mother went to college when I was 10 to become a nurse, and by the time I was 12, she had a number of textbooks (anatomy, psychology, maternity, developmental this-and-that) that covered human sexual response and function, contraception, homosexuality being a natural variation rather than a disease or abnormality, masturbation being a nearly universal activity, the whole nine yards. I think I was the only kid in the 7th grade who knew who Kinsey and Masters & Johnson were and what all the different types of contraception available then were. My mom let me read all her textbooks, since it was information I needed to learn at some point, so why not then?

Then I had comprehensive, detailed, explicit sex ed in the 9th grade, back in the late 80s. I aced the class since I'd already had the background from my mom's textbooks. I remember being floored by how little my classmates knew. There were girls who didn't even know the basic sperm-meets-egg info, and I'd say the vast majority had never heard of an IUD or a diaphragm - the only girl my age who did know about those contraceptives also had a nurse for a mother.

Moral of the story? Get and keep books with honest, straightforward, research-based information available and allow your kids to read them!

My mom and I have a ridiculously open relationship when it comes to sex. She taught me herself, because she knew that I wasn't going to learn about protection or anything in school (Catholic school...) I was told that if I was going to have sex, then I should know everything that I needed to protect myself. It still get's a little awkward when she finds condoms and all, but she is proud I know enough to protect myself. I never learned in school, so I count myself lucky to be able to confide in her with this kind of thing

I know I had the sex talk and I have no recollection of it, but when I was five years old my parents allowed me to watch my sister being born! It was a great life experience.

Basic ideas about sex were given to me by my step-sister starting at about 6 (she was 7). Later when my parents got a divorce and she left I started buying books from amazon.com and looking at porn on the internet. I was really into it and would look up gay men (being as at the time there were few sites aimed at women) and sneakily buy pornos. I didnt have a credit card so this usually entailed me stealing my mothers and having awkward conversations later in which my mom would search my room and toss any "contraband" porn out. Of course I became a master at hiding things but not enough to avoid having to pay for three new, "Guide To Getting It On" books taht she tossed out. Around 18 my feminist conscious re-emerged (from latency in high school) and I stopped listening to misogynistic rap music and started questioning the mainstream porn I was watching. I found books by Susy Bright and Tristan Taormino that totally opened up a more enlightened sexual construct and have been grateful ever since. My mother still thinks I'm perverted because I buy porn (no longer mainstream though) and mag subscriptions. It was a fight that didnt end until I left home. She wont touch my "porno drawer!"

Yeah, my mum always told me about sex, although she was obviously a bit embarressed sometimes. my dad, on the other hand, who i didnt really see through my childhood much, always talks about sex in a graphic and pretty mysogynistic way, i think i'm pretty lucky to have a mum like mine, otherwise i might have turned out like him.

Surprisingly, fan fiction. The first time I read anything about sex, it was on the good 'ol classic Fanfiction.net. I can't remember exactly what fandom, though, either Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings. I think I was 11 or so. My parents are extremely conservative and refuse to mention "the deed", so the internet has taught me sex ed. Thankfully there have been wonderful feminist and body positive sites out there to help me along.

Well, that and porn, but that's another note entirely.

I don't think I knew anything about sex until sex-ed class. I think probably middle school, because I actually went to a pro-feminist, all-girls middle school (thank goodness!). Even then, sex was mostly learned through experience and talking to my more experienced friends.

My talk about menstruation, however, involved my mother handing me some book in 5th grade and saying "Read this." Before that, I thought that blood my mom had was something a woman got only after she had kids, because she was hemhorraging from the births. I thought a "period" was some sort of clear liquid that came out of my ass monthly. What the hell?

Oh yeah, and before 6th grade I also used to fear the pain of childbirth I would inevitably experience, because no one had ever told me that I didn't *have* to have kids when I got older...

Oh, I forgot to add that, if/when I have children, they will know about sex, its risks, responsibilities, and its fun as a part of growing up and having their parents speak about it as a natural bodily function. Not at some pre-determined date and time.

Argh. The fact that we can't edit is just completely at odds with my writing style-- i.e. I ALWAYS forget something. ADDITIONALLY, I just remembered that I didn't know a woman got wet when she was turned on until about my freshman or sophomore year of college. Though I didn't lose my virginity until I was 19 due to personal choice (not lack of choice! haha), I was experienced in the other departments, so I think it's tragic I was so unfamiliar with my body. It is even more so that sex-ed for men focuses on education about arousal, when for women it involves menstruation and pregnancy, with little to nothing about the physical aspects of arousal whatsoever. Or so it did in my experience, and I'm currently 26. Thank goodness I took my education into my own hands. Feel free to take that in the most "inappropriate" context possible.

When I was little and I asked "where babies come from", my mom always told me it was a "special cuddle." Kinda cute, really.
I got my period when I was in 6th grade, my mom took me to a "Mothers & Daughters" seminar thing where they talked about periods and boobs and all that stuff, and then on the way back my mom said something - I'm not sure what, exactly - that led to my final realization: the penis goes INSIDE the vagina! EEEEEWWWWWW! (I thought it was absolutely DISGUSTING. I have since... made peace with the idea, I think it is safe to say.)

I think I figured out most everything else on my own through the internet and stuff. The only hiccup was that nobody told me anything about the clitoris. The first time I saw mine, I thought I had a little tiny penis! I was revolted and thought I'd been born some kind of hermaphrodite and my parents had never told me.

I don't think I learned about sex until I was eleven or twelve, in my first proper sex ed class (there was one when I was nine but I think we only learned about periods, so I had a vague idea that uteri were somehow involved but nothing else). This isn't because my parents refused to talk about it but because I just never asked. Anyway, I was pretty disturbed by the thought that otherwise sane and rational people would voluntarily do such a disgusting thing, and decided that it must be something that happened by accident if two people slept in the same bed. However, I couldn't figure out what happened to the underwear - so I asked my mother and she told me "they take it off, duh" and shattered my illusions of accidental sleepsex. ;_;