but how do people get the knowlage???

[Coff33bunny]

I'm 15, asexual, and apparently extremely innocent. My parents never gave me nor my sister The Talk, and I never had any thoughts related to sexual stuff until my friends started talking about it. They somehow already knew all this stuff and i was just left very very confused. i didn't know what the word 'masturbate' meant until a year ago because i didn't think i needed to know until someone tried to talk to me about it. I looked up the word 'thong' in the google dictionary once and a while later my sister saw it because i was looking up another definition and it was in my search history (as far as i know, she's allo). She just gave me this weird look like 'why would you have to look this up?' and that has lead me to wondering is there like a secret communication network that allo people have the ability to tap into and learn all this stuff?? Where do they find out this stuff? Do i actually have to learn what all these random words mean to be a member of society? Confusion????

[quadfasciata]

Dirty jokes in middle school.

[Lichley]

Older siblings, parents who give The Talk (tm) earlier, the internet, dirty jokester, dark humour. There’s tonnes of possible places.

[spencexists]

those really fucking weird, annoying, and overly aggressive guys in middle school. 

THEY FEEL THE FUCKING NEED TO MANSPLAIN PERIODS SOOOO MUCH AND I FUCKING HATE YOU, ANDREW

[Scylactic]

56 minutes ago, Coff33bunny said:

I'm 15, asexual, and apparently extremely innocent.

I'm 17, almost 18, and I'm still extremely innocent! 😂😅 You're not alone.

 

56 minutes ago, Coff33bunny said:

i didn't know what the word 'masturbate' meant until a year ago

I also found out only a year ago (or was it just last year 🤔). I found out when I was scrolling through Psychology Today. The Internet is very helpful 🙃

 

56 minutes ago, Coff33bunny said:

Do i actually have to learn what all these random words mean to be a member of society?

Well, yes and no. It's not an actual requirement, but if you wish to understand your friends' jokes and/or not have people potentially pulling pranks on you about what those words mean, or not be seen as a child among peers as I have been, then yes, you probably need to know those words.

 

I think most people find out about TM from surfing the Internet and/or immature jokes in middle/high school.

[Zagadka]

I didn't understand what "sex" was at all until I was 13 or 14, and that was after sex ed from school and my parents. I wasn't especially sheltered or innocent... though most of my friends were on the nerdier side... when I'd be in group settings and the other kids would make comments or jokes or references, I wouldn't get it and play along as best I could. I remember we were camping out and they broke out Adam Sandler's album "They're All Gonna Laugh at You!" and I was just... shocked and confused... I mostly looked words up in the dictionary and encyclopedias (this was really pre-internet) when I heard them. When we got onto AOL in 1994 or 1995, I saw my first real sexual pictures (really just people in skimpy clothing but very sexual) and was confused. I had to self-discover masturbation by just "feeling a good way" with certain movements and experimenting.

 

It was very confusing.

[rebis]

FYI, in high school and college? A whole lot of lying going on!

 

 

[stardust628]

I'd say older siblings is probably the initial way, then passed around in school. I'm the oldest child, so I only heard bits from my classmates. My mom gave me the talk at a reasonable age, so I knew the mechanics of sex in its basic form, though I never understood the "why would anyone want to" part. Once in middle school, one of my classmates accidentally said the word "condom," and everyone laughed. I asked my mom later and she said it's short for condominium. I was sheltered but even I knew that was b.s. This was before we had internet.

 

My daughter is a teenager now, and she gets a lot of her information from social media and her friends. I'm very open with her, but I'm still surprised by the things she already knows. Heck, there are some things she knows that I still don't.

 

Does it matter? I would say it's never a bad thing to educate yourself. To draw a parallel, my family is atheist, but we still discuss religion because it's a big part of society.

[Snao Cone]

There are certain things that you can learn from books, parents, and school. I picked up on a lot of the more formal stuff (reproduction, puberty, etc) from books that my mom bought for my older siblings, which I read over and over again starting when I was about 6.

 

There are certain things that you might pick up from media or entertainment. I started watching shows far too mature for myself around the same age as reading those books, so I was exposed to things like LGBT identities and recreational sex a little bit earlier than most.

 

There are certain things that you can learn from friends before puberty. When I was 10 I started hanging out with this girl from another school, because my mom knew her mom through working in the community. She was much more knowledgeable about "dirty" things than I was, so that's how I got more familiar with things like porn, sex work, lesbianism, etc.

 

There are certain things you'll learn from friends during puberty and adolescence. We're all a major mess or hormones during that period as our bodies are changing and our brains are expanding in their capacity to explore and understand. I was fine with making sexual jokes with my friends in my teenage years. This was before the internet was in every household, let alone in the palm of everyone's hands, so sometimes looking things up to learn new stuff was a group activity. We had sleepovers to watch soft porn together on the cable channels that would air it at 2 in the morning.

 

But really, at all of these points? I was mostly ahead of the curve of my peers on an intellectual level. This is in spite of my lack of experience or drive to seek experiences. (Tied in here is a complicated picture of why I didn't realize I was asexual until my 30s, but let's just brush that aside this one time.) We all started without knowing much. Curious people researched more. A few people were brave enough to try it at 15 or 16. Others were 17 or 18 or older before they found themselves in a comfortable situation to go forward. For many of them, though, they act like they know more than they do because they want to pretend they have done the things they're hoping to get someone else to do with them. They will talk about what they learned from porn or entertainment as if they've lived it, but that shit isn't realistic at all. I don't think it comes down to whether sexual people have a secret communication system. The only structural difference between sexual and asexual teenagers (or at least sexually-motivated and not-sexually-motivated teenagers, since a lot of people who will on their own time develop a sense of sexuality fall into the latter category in adolescent years) is the incentive sexual people have to boast about this shit, even when it's not true. Don't worry about being naive, or whatever. There's nothing magical about being allosexual that gives them this knowledge. They all have to learn it in uncomfortable and awkward ways too.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, trifasciata said:

Dirty jokes in middle school.

Yup... I don't know if textbooks are even used anymore but when I was at that point in my schooling (it's called junior high here) I actually had a textbook that a previous user had drawn a gigantic phallus in. Not just a random one, they actually altered an illustration with it.

[spencexists]

21 minutes ago, Autumn Twilight said:

Yup... I don't know if textbooks are even used anymore but when I was at that point in my schooling (it's called junior high here) I actually had a textbook that a previous user had drawn a gigantic phallus in. Not just a random one, they actually altered an illustration with it.

Textbooks are not used, they are all online. But the teachers are still fucking required to give them to us and we still fucking carry them everywhere and they're so fucking heavy and there is no room in our lockers cause the school is so poor.

[AspieAlly613]

For me, it's been "hear the phrase once or twice and figure it out from context" or "hear the phrase  few times and look it up"

[Blue eyes white dragon]

I never got a real talk from my parents and my schooling didn't cover it except briefly in biology. I mainly looked it up on my own and then I had that one "friend" wanted to experiment with me so yeah.... funnily enough, I was always the one amongst my friends to crack the dirty jokes lol😅

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Ally123 said:

Textbooks are not used, they are all online. But the teachers are still fucking required to give them to us and we still fucking carry them everywhere and they're so fucking heavy and there is no room in our lockers cause the school is so poor.

When I was in high school the building had more students than it was originally designed for so lockers were shared. Being the outcast I was (and still am) I wasn’t about to place that much trust in a random so I carried all my books around in one very big and heavy over-the-shoulder bag. In fact I can be seen with the bloody thing the only time I was seen in the video yearbook for my senior year. Incidentally I also found the video yearbook for my first year which I don’t appear in at all.

[spencexists]

1 hour ago, Autumn Twilight said:

When I was in high school the building had more students than it was originally designed for so lockers were shared. Being the outcast I was (and still am) I wasn’t about to place that much trust in a random so I carried all my books around in one very big and heavy over-the-shoulder bag. In fact I can be seen with the bloody thing the only time I was seen in the video yearbook for my senior year. Incidentally I also found the video yearbook for my first year which I don’t appear in at all.

Yeah at my school we also share lockers and they're only like a foot by 6 inches but they don't let you go to lockers in between classes or during lunch so they're kinda pointless. Also only 2 grades get lockers.

[Guest]

11 minutes ago, Ally123 said:

Yeah at my school we also share lockers and they're only like a foot by 6 inches but they don't let you go to lockers in between classes or during lunch so they're kinda pointless. Also only 2 grades get lockers.

Crikey, those sound more like a wall safe.

 

I had 5 minutes between classes, barely enough time to get to the next class let alone go to a locker, especially if one had to go from a third-floor classroom in one wing to a third-floor class in the other. There was no main hallway for the third floor, so worst case scenario it was downstairs, through the second floor hallway and back up the other end. I don’t think I ever had to do that though. There was an elevator for wheelchair-bound students but that still left the third floor West wing classrooms out of reach for them. I guess alternate arrangements were made if necessary.

[Homer]

9 hours ago, Coff33bunny said:

is there like a secret communication network that allo people have the ability to tap into and learn all this stuff??

That secret should be "parenting"...

[quadfasciata]

10 hours ago, Autumn Twilight said:

Yup... I don't know if textbooks are even used anymore but when I was at that point in my schooling (it's called junior high here) I actually had a textbook that a previous user had drawn a gigantic phallus in. Not just a random one, they actually altered an illustration with it.

Private, public, magnet, non-magnet. They all have this.

[aafire]

I had a lot of sexual friends that eventually made things pretty clear during high school, despite my generaly clueless self.

[Euna]

Don't feel bad... I pretty much had to figure it out on my own via the internet and a professor showing a movie with multiple sex scenes (yup).

[taetae]

Kids do look things up, they watch porn, they have older siblings etc.

I don't get why knowing sex stuff equals being guilty. What does innocence even mean in sexual context. I really don't like this word, I honestly think it's making sex to be something it's not. idk, any thoughts? 

[RobL2415]

So I'm 27 and I often have to look things up about dating and relationships and marriage because I have little or no experience in such things. The last girl I dated, about two months ago, actually thought it was cute that I spent time doing this. I don't understand why that was a turn-on for her. But I guess there are women out there that appreciate that sort of thing.