Although I wouldn’t say that I grew up with a conservative family, sex is still a fairly taboo topic in my household, so it was something that I never discussed with my parents. However, by the time I hit eight years old, I was transferred to a horrible Catholic private school that was exclusively for girls. Those were the most depressing and sexually stifling years of my life, and I would never choose to relive those days if I could help it.

I was stuck in that school for ten years – I suffered through both grade school and high school in that institution. Since it was a Catholic girls’ school (and a rather strict one at that), sex education was completely non-existent, and intercourse was never even mentioned until I entered my sixth grade.

My sexual knowledge was so limited that I was actually one of those preteens who thought that you could get pregnant from a toilet seat. I always assumed that was the reason why male and female bathrooms were separated. I also thought that you could get STDs from pool water, and believed that babies are birthed through the anus. It took a while for me to find out that there was actually a third orifice down there: the vagina.

And what about things like puberty and menstruation? Well, these lessons were introduced in the second quarter of my fourth grade, but I wish that they discussed the topic somewhat earlier. For one thing, I was always rather tall for my age, and I seemed to have hit puberty earlier than everyone else.

During the summer vacation between third and fourth grade, I experienced menarche. I simply woke up one day to find blood on my pajamas. Beset with horror, I started screaming, prompting my parents to burst into my room, asking what was wrong. Tears streaming down my face, I showed them the stains. My mother hugged me and said that it was completely normal for a girl, and explained to me what menstruation was. She then attached a pad to my underwear for me, to show me how it worked. While she explained away, I was still sobbing; I really had thought that I was going to die. Thinking back on it, I wish that someone had prepared me for that experience, so I wouldn’t have been so terrified. I was only 9 years old, after all.

Eventually, my school did start teaching us about puberty and menstruation as part of our home economics class. While they did teach us the basics, such as how to launder our underwear in the event of a stain, and when to anticipate our periods by marking them on a calendar, they never quite went into detail. To be honest, they really did not dwell on the topic for too long, and spent the rest of the year teaching us how to sew and fold clothes, along with other mundane household related skills.

What irks me now, however, was the extremely negative mindset they taught us. Our teacher said that menstruation was something dirty and disgusting, and that a true lady would never, ever mention her period to a man. She also taught us to never get caught with a sanitary napkin, because it was considered extremely embarrassing. She emphasized that discretion was extremely important, especially when you are around the opposite sex. Even then, I thought that this was stupid. If it happened to every woman, why should it be such a big secret?

On the other hand, I finally found out what a vagina was after they explained the menstrual cycle to us. I found out that menstrual blood originated from this orifice, and that babies were born from this canal as well. I admit that I was relieved when I heard that little tidbit of information, because the idea of shitting out a baby was just horrible.

However, they never quite told us about sex. While they did talk about reproduction, and how fertilizing an egg cell with a sperm cell eventually leads to pregnancy, they always left out the mechanism of intercourse: how it actually happens.

The first real mention of sex was in the sixth grade. The school had decided to introduce a brand new subject into the curriculum – Health Education. In one of our lectures, the teacher started discussing the reproductive cycle with the class. She had us watch a video discussing things like attraction and pregnancy. During one part of the video, where we glimpsed a couple entering a bedroom, she started covering the screen with her body and began fast forwarding the tape. By the time she had finished, the video was already discussing pregnancy and the development from embryo to fetus.

Apparently, after I dug up the video myself some time later, the part that she fast forwarded was actually a slide show of the erection, insertion, and ejaculation process. The pictures shown on the tape were illustrated cross sections of the sex organs, and were quite harmless. It was not lewd in any way!

Funnily enough, she allowed us to watch the last part of the video. It depicted an actual live birth in glorious, gory detail. The girls in my class started screaming, and one girl had to be brought to the school clinic because she threw up all over herself.

The next meeting, our teacher finally explained to us what sex was, mostly due to the many questions that were raised when she skipped parts of the video. When she told us that the penis gets inserted into the vagina, my jaw literally dropped. “WHAT GOES WHERE??” were the exact words in my head.

She also emphasized that losing your virginity was extremely painful, and that sex should be avoided unless we want to suffer through pregnancy “before we were ready”. She also mentioned sexually transmitted diseases, and started showing us a gruesome slide show of female genitals in various levels of infection. Yes, my teacher loved shock tactics and would rather focus on pain and suffering than to tell us about sex.

I was then resigned to the thought that women will always suffer because of their vagina. Menstrual cramps hurt, sex hurts, and giving birth hurts. It was always about pain and horror. In fact, these thoughts were reinforced by Christian Life classes. They taught us that God punished Eve with the pain of childbirth because she ate the forbidden fruit and fell into sin.

And… that is it. That is how my official sex ed ends. The Health Education teacher never finished the year with us because she was fired (the school never told us why), and the subject was never mentioned in my academic life ever again, even when I entered high school and college. There were simply more important things like algebra, philosophy, and of course knowing how to walk like a proper lady.

It was a dark time, full of ignorance and misconceptions. In fact, the only reason why I’m more enlightened now is because of a little thing called: the internet.