I can recall the first film I saw about sex. It was at a school evening. My parents were there. (My parents !. Who had done it. Ugh !. Whatever it was. I wasn’t even certain I wanted to know). There I sat amongst my equally embarrassed-into-silence classmates, the setting completed by a ring of parents who looked at their shoes and cleared their throats a lot.

Then 'it' happened. The film said the word ‘penis’. “HA HA ! PENIS !”  yelled Joel, the kid who had no eyelashes and always barfed on the bus on school excursions. “PENIS !” screeched someone else. All hell broke loose as 30-or-so high-on-nerves pre-teens erupted into a spontaneous volcano of hysterical laughter.

In the background, the film was now displaying a highly-coloured drawing of the female anatomy from a side view. “EWW !” screeched Joel “WHAT IS THAT THING ?”. When it was carefully explained, one of the girls started crying and had to be taken to the toilet to recover by her Dad.

This was shortly followed by a mass evacuation of little girls to the tea room, all crying for the same reason (ie: because someone else was). By this time, the film had finished, nobody had learned anything, and Joel spent the remainder of the evening in the corner for making all the girls cry.

I am happy to say that I have since learned that I don’t really have fluorescent blue fallopian tubes and an orange vagina (complete with polka-dotted clitoris and dark-green labia), but I will still never forget the one truth I did learn during my first ‘sex’ lesson ...

... It doesn’t matter how young you are, (or how old you get), sex is sometimes just plain old funny and embarrassing.