The Birds and Bees of Sri Lanka

Did YOUR parents talk to you about the birds and the bees?

How do people over here learn about procreation? 99% of the time, there is no 'talk' between parent and child. I for one just sort of picked up the gist of it from the many books lying around the house. Notably the 'Reader's Digest Home Medical Guide'. Actually, looking back now, I wonder why the thing had such vivid descriptions... :s Maybe even a few adults needed a reminder on exactly how it works. Or if my parents placed the book there in the first place, so I'd read it and not have to ask THEM!?

I'll freak out about my parent's intentions later...

Anyway, point is, most of us never really get any real info off our parents. So how Do we find out about this stuff? I did some (sketchy) research, and found that most just get the info from a friend, or a group of friends who piece together something from the scraps of information they've found out. Freaky, when you think of all the misleading things that could pop up from a bunch of 6th graders piecing together facts. At that stage they're likely to believe it if told that babies are made by Microsoft, when we all know that they come from Mars.

But the fact is, all of them get it right some time or the other, without any help from teachers or parents. Sure, there are some leftover beliefs floating around such as doing certain things making you go blind which refuse to bug off, but these are just peripheral to the Main Idea. And it's not just the functioning. We know about safety first. We know. But how? Why do we know this stuff? Students in the US are having sex-ed classes drilled into them from kindergarten, yet some of them are dumb as bricks when it comes to it. But yet here we are, a country in which the subject is shunned and kicked aside by a culture driven by prudish monks, where the closest education we get is "Life Education", and we still know. Weird shit...