From the Sunday Times:

Some things really make you feel old, and how you initially found out about the mechanics of sex is chief among them. If you’re under 20 and don’t live in a cave, we can safely assume that the internet was your first port of call as a teenager. If you’re under 30, television and the advent of relatively explicit weekly magazines probably helped you along.

But if you’re 40 or over, had a sheltered upbringing, and read magazines such as Bunty or Jackie — more ponies and macramé than “position of the week” — then the story is quite different. Chances are you educated yourself by leafing through books, any books, hunting desperately for the enlightening parts, and then sharing them with your girlfriends.

I spent the earlier part of this year compiling an anthology of the kind of stuff my friends and I passed round furtively at my all-girls’ school — the “dirty bits”, which became more dog-eared with each breathless reading. Some of the books had, in their time, been banned, or burnt, or both — Lady Chatterley’s Lover being a prime example. Twenty-five years ago we still thought those books were wildly exciting, and that we were wildly exciting too for familiarising ourselves with them.

(Read more…)

I found about sex from Loveline on MTV, sex blogs like Naked Loft Party, and that old standby, Judy Blume. Perhaps I’m from the multimedia generation?

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