My mother never gave me the sex talk. I was left to pretty much figure it out on my own.

And Shir ... maybe you could share the Scary Sex Toy Friday links with people. If nothing else, it might shut them up.

My mom bought a complete set of body encyclopedias for us when we were about 8; I can't remember ever having the talk, but I remember asking a few questions.

Mostly, they knew I was reading all kinds of informative stuff, so they just kinda grooved on that.

Course, I never thought I'd have to give the talk to an actual kid-shaped person of my own, but I was The Teacher Who Gave Out Condoms and answered the sex questions, so I am cool with it.

But at what age should the sex talk begin? I mean, it would be logical to say ""When they start asking questions" but some kids never do.

9? 10?

But at what age should the sex talk begin? I mean, it would be logical to say ""When they start asking questions" but some kids never do.

Yeah, I never asked my parents about sex. I always figured I'd learn that stuff when I was an adult.

Except when I was about 7, I noticed us three kids (at the time) were all three years apart, but there was no kid three years after my younger sister. So I asked my mom about that and she told me there was an egg but she and my dad didn't fertilize it. Which led me to imagine them going to a hardware store to get fertilizer - and then I wondered how people fertilized eggs back in cavemen days. (I didn't ask about that though.)

My mom was a little like Erin's folks; I never got The Talk (though both my brothers did, right before leaving for college), but she bought us some very cool, picture-filled "this is your body, this is how it works, and this is the fun you can have with it and with other people's bodies as long as you follow these guidelines for staying smart and safe" books, left them around, and made sure we knew she was available for follow-up questions. I don't know about my brothers, but I never had any follow-up questions because the books were seriously really really good. If she'd picked crappier books we might have had more to talk about!

I was the sex ed go-to girl at my college paper. I'm unsure if it was because I had the office with a door, or because they thought I was a slut.

We had sex-ed in 8th grade of the Lutheran school I went to. It was all "Premarital sex is bad, homosexuality is bad, m-kay."

I'm pretty sure that's the kind my staffers got, because they were all "UTI! WTF!?!"

Catholic school sex-ed filmstrip was in the 4th grade. But it was so vague I still didn't really get it until I got my hands on a romance novel several months later. I was all, "Oh THAT'S what they meant! Okay."

High school sex-ed talk was mortifying, and also really offensive, since I was at an all-female school, and the talk was given by the school priest. It basically boiled down to, "If you get a boy aroused to a certain point, he can't be held responsible for his actions because of some biological bullshit, so DON'T DO IT, LADIES."

barf.

The closest we came to sex-ed in my school was a talk that was supposed to be about menstruation but was so full of euphemisms that I had no idea what they were talking about until after it'd happened to me ... and then my mother had to tell that THIS was what they meant and here's a pad but make sure you dispose of it discreetly. For sex-sex basically it was "don't".

We also had sex-ed in our public high school. Lots of info on conception and all that.... and at one point our teacher said, "...so you can see how getting pregnant is pretty unlikely."

Ugh.