"Six hours into my first period, I was utterly convinced I was dying..."

"The thing that stuck with me the most, though, was being shown a video of a girl receiving a bra for her birthday and being laughed at by everyone. That message of 'women’s bodies are disgusting and something to be ashamed of' stuck with me for a long time. 

I have endometriosis, and I’m so mad about the 'education' (Christian propaganda) I received. I could have saved years of pain and being ill if they had just taught me what I needed to know. It really is just a way to disempower girls, which breaks my heart. "

"We learned that sex is for male pleasure and for women to endure."

"All the guys howled with laughter and told her she was nuts. It didn’t even phase her, and she actually doubled down on her statement. 

When we reminded her that she didn't even have a penis, she said, 'Nope, but I still know you’ve got a bone down there.' Dumb!"

"They listed nothing negative about it. I thought to myself, 'That’s the one I want to try!'"

"When they learned the girls actually learned something, they got upset and wanted to know what we were taught. They became so vocal that they got their wish. 

In a separate lesson, they were told some version of what we learned. After the lesson, they returned to class, very shocked. All they repeated for weeks was that they were glad they weren’t girls."

"I didn’t even know how sex worked until late high school."

"One friend of mine even refused to pee near men, as he was afraid their penises might touch, and then he’d have AIDS.

Obviously, this is nuts, and I assumed I had misremembered until a friend from school admitted to hearing the same thing. Wild."

"However, my teacher explained that we were lighter because gravity hadn’t gotten a hold of us yet."

"Cue me around six hours into my first actual period, utterly convinced I was dying..."

"Also, if you have unprotected sex, you'll definitely get pregnant and ruin everyone's dreams, but if you have an abortion, the spirit of the baby will become a ghost visible only to you that will follow you everywhere, for the rest of your life. (I swear this was what our teacher in public school told us.)If you drop acid, it will live forever in your spinal fluid, and you'll get random flashbacks, especially when you crack your back. And, of course, if you smoke menthol cigarettes, your lungs will crystallize, so if you're in a car accident, they'll shatter into a million pieces."

"No joke, she pulled and pulled on a condom, but it wouldn't break, so I thought it looked like a strong option!"

"I got my period a few months later and had very light flows to start, but it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I discovered the 'red fluid' was blood and was horrified. 

Don’t ask me what I thought the red fluid was, I thought it was just another fluid our bodies made."

"I abruptly pulled the car over and explained that pregnancy could occur if the girl was just about to experience their first period. 

As a mom, I still shudder when I remember that."

"We all left absolutely convinced your period stops when you're underwater, which has been proven false, but is still a very common misconception."

"Also, they didn't teach us about any of the sexual health ailments that you can get without even having sex. I think they should have led with that. I mean, it's good to know about STIs, but it's important to know about the others, too, given that sex is technically optional, but having genitals isn't! 

It wasn't an abstinence-only education, but I wonder if they were trying to make us think nothing could go wrong as long as we didn't have sex."

"The coach actually went so far as to tell us that condoms were worthless because they all have holes in the end that HIV can fit through. "

"In addition to clearly failing on the birth control and sex ed portion, they had us watch a video on STIs when I was a senior in high school, and in it, they stated you can get HIV via bodily fluids (which is true), but then they went on to give the example of getting breastmilk in your eye. Now, not only did my area have a huge teen pregnancy issue, but our state's number one export was meth, yet there was no mention of needle sharing, drugs, or sex as the primary ways people get HiV.I’m a physician now, and I looked it up when I was in med school. I think there have been fewer than a handful of documented cases of getting HIV via breastmilk, and to my knowledge, none that involved breastmilk in the eye. There was also no mention of the complications of HIV, nor that it can be very well managed now with a few medications, and that it is in no way a death sentence anymore — something that I think is borderline a miracle. 

There was also no mention that while HIV has historically disproportionally affected LGBTQIA communities in the US, it is rising in heterosexual communities, making heterosexual contact the number one way worldwide that HIV is spread. "

Note: Some responses have been edited for length and/or clarity.