I meant to post this article from Buzzfeed a while back – 18 Absurd Sexual Misconceptions People Had When They Were Younger. Its a list culled from Reddit, and all of the stories are hilarious. Here are a sampling:

“From watching ‘sex’ scenes on TV, I thought yelling out ‘wait wait’ and pulling away from your partner was part of foreplay.”

“As a kid, I thought that when you ejaculate one of your testicles goes through the penis, and into the woman. And that’s how they get pregnant. I had no idea if they grow back or something, don’t think that thought ever crossed my mind.”

“I thought oral sex meant talking about sex. It got weird when my parents gave me the talk and I later told my older bro how I had oral sex with mom and dad.”

“When I was about 6 or 7, I asked my dad what sex was and he told me it means ‘naked’. Later when I got out of the shower, I yelled, ‘I’M SEX!!!’ at the top of my lungs.”

These stories are funny because we can all relate to being completely baffled about sex.

I remember believing that sex entailed a man simply lying on top of a woman, without moving. I also thought this was how couples slept at night.

It’s amusing to look back now and remember our child selves being so convinced that these stories were the strange truth about sex.

Jokes aside, these little tales also reveal just how bad of a job we do talking about sex in an honest and informative way, especially with our children.

Of course, children shouldn’t be exposed to age-inappropriate information about sex; a three year old doesn’t need to know the nitty gritty details of how to perform oral sex.

But for most people, sex education consisted of a decades-old 15 minute pregnancy video played in your 5th grade class, and – if you were lucky – an extremely brief, extremely awkward chat with your parents.

While many of us eventually learn that some of the more spectacular misconceptions about sex are in fact false, the tidbits of misinformation that aren’t quite as fantastical as say, a human-puppy hybrid, tend to stick around well into adulthood.

One of the pivotal moments in my decision to become a sex therapist came during my freshman year at Brown University. My classmates learned that I was interested in sex therapy, and started asking me a lot of questions. I was stunned by the level of misinformation that was evident in their queries.

It may be funny to think of an eight year old thinking women get pregnant spontaneously, but it’s not so funny when an eighteen year old smart enough to get into an Ivy League university believes you can’t get pregnant when you’re on your period.

The moral in all of this?

We need to approach sex education with less embarrassment and more consistency.

We need to start talking to kids about sex at a young age, and keep the conversations going throughout their childhoods.

Let’s just say I hope there are fewer stories of “sexual butterscotch” in the future!