Saturday, March 8, 2008

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...

13 comments:

Anonymous said...

one of my classmates in grade 6 thought that babies came out of women's breasts... which i think is rather freaky.

Anonymous said...

You know there was a powerful ad for safe sex oh many years ago which saw sexually transmitted diseases reduce dramatically. Now that the people have become complacent again there is talk of bringing another ad like that.
The ad went something like this. Two people are in bed and a voice asking (I am writing this from memory so some facts may be wrong but the gist is correct) “do you know where your partner has been before?”
Then they started to show the woman in the ad with another man before and that man with another woman before her and that woman with another man before that and so on and so forth. Then they did the same with the man who was in the ad.
And finally the voice asked “when you go to bed with someone do you know with how many people you are actually sleeping with?” the ad then finishes by showing the man in bed reach for a condom
If there is a person who saw that ad and was not affected by it then they’ll have to be a brick

Anonymous said...

@sjinadasa
lol! Freaky!

@mia
Where was this aired?

Anonymous said...

I didn't get the talk either. Amazing the things we pick up eh?

Times Eye said...

life is freaky

Jerry said...

@sam
Join the club dude!

@times eye
Too true...

Anonymous said...

lolz!

"I wonder why the thing had such vivid descriptions"

Me too!

Anonymous said...

In Australia about 15 or so years ago.

Anonymous said...

@anonymous
Hehe...

@mia
Oh! I thought it was here... :)

@six & out
Haha! And yeah, it's all revealed at that moment in history in a boy's life!

Makuluwo said...

At some point I used to think babies were hatched from eggs.. and then I found out the truth in sixth grade from some girl and I remember being quite horrified. 'WHAT? We slip out of our mothers' vaginas? EEYAAAA!!!'

Anonymous said...

haha. eeya, no?

mixedblessings89 said...

Hmm... different countries, same scenarios...
The situation is ditto in India, and I live in the oh- so- modern capital city of New Delhi...
My Mum did speak to us (my brother & I) about it, but it was only after she was sure we knew all of it, anyways. Just about how it's a 'pure' and 'sacrosanct' act...
BTW.. I messed up in my blog post. Those trees are not Gulmohars, they are called 'Amaltas'. I put up the English and the scientific names on the comments page of that article.
:|

Dee said...

I expect our parents hope we learn it from somewhere. maaan...the theories we had. teehee! i like ur blog...u are hereby a permanent residence on my roll :D whee!