Sex Miseducation Class

"Next we're talking about how the devil created gonorrhea."

"Don't have sex; you will get pregnant and die!"

— Coach Carr, Mean Girls

For a variety of reasons, fictional sex education classes in formal educational institutions are not comprehensive, nor will they ever adequately prepare the class of Hormone Addled Teenagers for the reality of sex.

Usually, this trope applies to a High School sex-ed class or the setting's equivalent of it. The classes themselves will likely be portrayed as awkward and woefully lacking in content, such as overemphasizing virginity, teaching abstinence-only "sex ed" (maybe even by using scare tactics), or only showing the very basics of human anatomy while being very vague or even incorrect about the details. Maybe you'll get to put a condom on a banana, but if you want to know more about how periods work, non-heterosexual sex, how to use birth control correctly and where to get it, literally anything about the clitoris, or STDs, you're fresh out of luck. The assigned instructor is either an Apathetic Teacher who couldn't care less about having to teach "health" or a sincere educator hampered by Moral Guardians who want to protect the teens' innocence because they think Sex Is Evil, and/or that teaching kids about it will encourage them to go out and have sex. Either way, the students rarely come out of the class more prepared for intercourse, but the work definitely mined some Cringe Comedy out of the whole affair.

This trope is influenced by discourse around sex education in real life. Traditionally, sex education was not taught in schools and left to the parents lest it corrupt the children. However, a spate of issues (such as rising teen pregnancies and the AIDS crisis in The '80s) have helped reframe these classes as a vital public health tool. Some schools have been quicker to catch on than others, though, hence the stumblings depicted here. As such, this is Truth in Television; however, due to the controversy surrounding them, No Real Life Examples, Please!

Compare The Talk, which covers all situations where an authority figure tries to teach a young person about the birds and the bees, Miss Conception, where a character gets inaccurate information about sex, and Egg Sitting, the goal of which is to portray the difficulties of caring for a child. Not to be confused with Professional Sex Ed (where a paid sex worker does some hands-on teaching) or the trope formerly named "You Fail Sex Ed Forever". This is also paired with Psychosexual Horror when it's played for horror.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: Parodied in the episode "The Turmoil of the Beehive", where the pair attend a sex education class at school. Their teacher claims that having sex will cause you to die, even if you wear a condom, and doesn't make any comment when Panty mistakes a condom for bubblegum and manages to blow a bubble using it.

Fan Works

• In the Discworld revised by A.A. Pessimal, the thirteen-year-old girls at Seven-Handed Sek's convent school for girls get their Personal and Social Development from a young nun, only a few years older than they are, who is haltingly, fumblingly, embarrassingly useless at it. The teachers are fine with it being on the curriculum as long as somebody else teaches it, and the young nun in question was assigned the job by being lower on the pecking order. The situation is resolved when SHS girls are invited to the Assassins' School, which teaches sex ed to female pupils in a no-nonsense, factually accurate, thorough way which leads to traumatised girls staggering out of the lecture hall, after a bout of Aversion Therapy delivered by Matron Igorina, vowing they will be celibate for the rest of their lives.
• Living The Dream features an unusual example. In the chapter "Mr. Stoner Teacher Man", Greg takes it upon himself to teach sex ed in Miss Cheerilee's class. First he shows porn of various people drawn by David, of which includes relatives of those in the class. Secondly, Greg brings out a realistic doll of himself, and then proceeds to fornicate with it while the class is forced to watch. Not once does he attempt to explain about anatomy or safety.
• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing:
  • When Joshua Sweet tells Mitch Downe he has to take a blood sample in case his rapists gave him anything, Mitch is confused by what he means, making Sweet wonder how bad the high school's sex ed class is.
  • J.R. asks Dakota how much sex ed he's given Cowlarado, to which he says “Keep it in your pants until you’ve got a ring." J.R. isn't surprised, as that's what most teenagers in town get taught.

Films — Live-Action

• The Girl Next Door involves an attempt to avert this. The main character, for his high school final project, puts together a comprehensive and entertaining sex ed film starring porn stars. A famous porn producer signs on as a financier and distributor, and he makes a fortune in royalties.
• Mean Girls: The health/sex ed class shown consists of the gym teacher yelling at the girls to not have sex at all lest they get knocked up, though he still passes condoms around. To add to his dubious credentials, he's later revealed as a Creepy Gym Coach who hooks up with underage Vietnamese girls.
• Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in the comedy sketch "Sex Education": An old-fashioned school teacher explains sex in a very technical, boring, and highly unromantic way. The class includes a practical demonstration by the teacher and his wife; the students, however, have difficulties paying attention and need to be constantly reprimanded throughout.
• Lampshaded in On Chesil Beach. Florence is a twentysomething virgin in early 1960s England who is about to get married. To prepare herself for her wedding night, she reads a generic sex manual which frames sex as an invasive act, stating, "Women are like doorways. Men enter them." This doesn't help ease her anxieties about sex.
• Sex Ed is about an awkward inner-city schoolteacher who realizes his students have no proper sex education and takes it upon himself to teach them. The kicker? He's a virgin, and the whole thing is played for Cringe Comedy.
• Yes, God, Yes takes place in a Catholic school in the Turn of the Millennium. The sex ed class there is atrocious with no discussion of anything besides heterosexual sex in marriage and even then, both the kids and adults have severe issues around sex and sexual activity.

Literature

• Catfishing on CatNet: Sex education at Steph's new high school is taught by a robot, because it can't disagree with the curriculum. This curriculum is strictly abstinence-only, with no acknowledgement of non-straight or trans issues at all. Steph and her Clowder friends work out a way to hack the robot so their AI friend CheshireCat can teach the class instead.
• Soul Music: Susan Sto Helit attends an all-girls finishing school where the subject of puberty and sex education is so badly handled the girls "left the class with the vague idea that they were supposed to marry a rabbit".
• When Women Were Dragons: Alex's teacher is uncomfortable discussing actual human biology and human sex, so he speaks in analogies without explaining what they mean. So, the "sex education" turns into a ramble about flowers and bees, and frogs, and also butterflies. All with a hefty side of moralizing.

Live-Action TV

• 3rd Rock from the Sun: As part of his mission to experience life as a teenager, Tommy has to go through a high school sex education class. It's taught by the school's gym teacher who's incredibly awkward and only gives the bare minimum details.
  Coach: Your man, and er, your male and female, they have these certain parts that are... how do you call...uh... "complimentary" to each other. These parts come into play. And that's how we all were born! (stands up and tries to walk away)
  Tommy: I'm sorry, but can we get someone who's actually had sex to teach this class?
• A Bit of Fry and Laurie: Inverted Trope as a long-suffering school headmaster fields a complaint from a parent who is furious that his son has been hearing inappropriate language such as "Sexual intercourse can often bring about pregnancy in the adult female," in biology class no less. Asked how his own child was conceived, the father irately replies "In the usual way," which he explains means getting married, setting up house, and waiting a bit. And eating three hot meals a day.
• The Daily Show with Trevor Noah: The 2021 "Remotely Educational" special had a segment where Michael Kosta took the role of the gym teacher that, for some reason, also taught sex education. His main lesson was that sex isn't really that fun, because getting lucky when you're single actually means getting a clean blood test a few weeks later, and when you're married, your wife isn't interested in you and you're too desensitized by porn to feel anything. The only good news he has is that if you have a foot fetish, you can just go to the beach to get aroused.
• Full Frontal with Samantha Bee: In her segment on the intersex experience, Sam mentions that sex ed teachers were wrong to claim that sex is a binary, while also noting her sex ed teacher was wrong to claim, "the only safe sex is sex with a banana." She found that out the hard way.
• The fact this is Truth in Television is referenced in Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Due to there being no federal standard for sex education classes and certain conservative districts limit what can be said during sex education classes, many students wind up under or misinformed about sex. Attention is also pointed at creative workarounds, such as teachers who aren't allowed to show how to put on a condom instead give a demonstration on how to properly put on a sock.
• M*A*S*H. Thanks to Army regulations poor Henry Blake has to give such lectures once a month, which are gleefully mocked by Hawkeye and the others.
  Trapper: What's the announcement, Radar?
  Radar: It's a lecture. Colonel Blake's gonna tell us everything he knows about sex.
  Hawkeye: It should be an enjoyable 60 seconds.
• The Parks and Recreation "Sex Education" starts out as an aversion, since the people being educated are actually Pawnee's senior citizens and so everyone's being straightforward. Then Marcia and Marshall Langman manage to take over the lesson and replace it with one clearly meant for teenagers, pushing for abstinence only with several biological inaccuracies. The seniors are not amused and Leslie decides to give the original lesson even if she gets censured for it.
• Sex Education: What we see of the school's sex-ed class consists of the students fumbling to put a condom onto a prosthetic penis. It leaves the students woefully unequipped for the ups and downs of real-life sex, which is why the awkward and virginal Otis — who was raised by a sex therapist — starts making money from giving sex advice to his classmates.

• In one episode of The Wonder Years the gym teacher delivers a sex-ed lecture to the boys. He draws a (rather) inaccurate picture of the uterus and ovaries on the blackboard, which boys compare to a cow's head. The boys expected something different and most of them just laugh.

Web Comics

• Ennui GO!: In "Sex Ed", Max's creepy gym teacher Coach Bobert gives Max and his friends a horrible sex-ed class, including calling a condom a "linoleum wrapper" and telling them that holding your pee for too long will cause it to eventually back up into your brain and kill you. Additionally, one scrawl on the chalkboard is "pee is stored in the balls". The comic's author noted that the comic was taken directly from the sex-ed class he had as a teenager.
• One Oglaf comic has a sea captain showing his crew a diagram of female genitalia. Unfortunately, they get it in their heads that it's a treasure map, steal it, and go looking for the treasure instead.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: One comic has an old woman teaching the kids that the goal of sex is to have sex as often as possible while keeping pregnancies and babies as low as possible, also helpfully defining sex as "put one thingy into another thingy". It's possible she isn't even an actual teacher.

Web Original

• INSTRUCTION AND ADVICE FOR THE YOUNG BRIDE on the Conduct and Procedure of the Intimate and Personal Relationships of the Marriage State for the Greater Spiritual Sanctity of this Blessed Sacrament and the Glory of God is a famed hoax purporting to be written in 1894 by a pastor's wife, generally explaining to young women that sex is a horrible thing that husbands need to be weaned off of as soon as possible, reducing sex to the minimum needed to have children, and setting a Sexless Marriage as a ten-year goal.
  At this point, dear reader, let me concede one shocking truth. Some young women actually anticipate the wedding night ordeal with curiosity and pleasure! Beware such an attitude! A selfish and sensual husband can easily take advantage of such a bride. One cardinal rule of marriage should never be forgotten: GIVE LITTLE, GIVE SELDOM, AND ABOVE ALL, GIVE GRUDGINGLY.

Web Videos

• This Diamondbolt video discusses this trope while covering various sex education videos of varying quality (ranging from "surprisingly well-done" to "God doesn't want us to do it before marriage, and if you do you'll die"). Bolt mentions how he himself wasn't taught anything about STDs, consent, or same-sex relationships in his sex ed classes — then adds that he went to a Catholic school, "and we all know what those are like".
• El Bananero: Professor Paul Vazo,^note A Punny Name based on "polvazo" or "big polvo", being the word "polvo" (dirt) one of the names in Latin America for having sex a PE teacher who during rest of his class "teaches" his students about Sex Ed. It's all Played for Laughs and with the Bananero's own style. Apart from the misdirection of his class, these videos also got a Decade-Themed Filter, being mostly in black and white, like these were recorded in The '60s.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: When Stan teaches a sex-ed class, he insists that sex is a mystery that you don't need to know, and he says that babies come from an octopus squatting on your brain.
• Big Mouth: The sex ed class is taught by Coach Steve, who has only just recently lost his virginity to Jay's mother. However, it's very clear that he doesn't know what he's talking about, so the kids step in and teach the class for him.
  Matthew: I think the person who slept with you may have committed a crime.
• Family Guy: In "Prick Up Your Ears" Lois is hired as the school's sex-ed teacher after learning they don't have one, but is fired after teaching kids how to use condoms. Afterwards, the school brings in a religious abstinence-based sex-ed program whose advice is so bad that the kids start having "aural" sex.^note as in sticking their dicks into ear canals
• Futurama: Downplayed in the episode "The Bots and the Bees," which features a robot sex ed tape that is fairly comprehensive (since the audience needs exposition on how robot reproduction works), but shames teenage robots for being "hideous" and hormonal and ends on the note that masturbation is unnatural and wrong.
• In the King of the Hill episode "Square Peg", Peggy is initially drafted to give her son The Talk but winds up as the school's sex-ed teacher. Hank is initially unsupportive but becomes proud of her for being taking on the opportunity. Unfortunately, none of the other parents agree for their kids to learn sex ed.
• The Simpsons: In one episode, Bart's class watches a sex ed video called "Fuzzy Bunny's Guide to You-Know-What", which shows an anthropomorphic rabbit dating, marrying, and eventually knocking up another one. It ends with Troy McClure saying, "And now that you know how it's done, don't do it."
• South Park:
  • The Season 5 episode "Proper Condom Use" sees sex-ed courses added to the curriculum of South Park Elementary. It goes poorly to say the least: Mr. Mackey is so incompetent he can't even get Ikea Erotica right, Ms. Choksondik's scare tactics end up sparking a gender war between the students, Mr. Garrison straight up performs sex acts like rolling a condom onto the dildo with his mouth in front of kindergarteners and treats it like normal, and Chef insists that people become sexually ready at the age of 17^note the legal age of consent in Colorado, where the show takes placeregardless of circumstance.
  • When Kyle's baby Canadian brother Ike goes through puberty in "Taming Strange", Kyle makes him watch a Canadian puberty video, where the Canadian Health Control Head claims a man and a woman make love by the man farting into the woman's "strange", filling it with air so she can queef in his face so a baby can be born. He's then told the truth by one of his assistants and reveals he believes this because his wife told him that.

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