I got my sex education from EastEnders and playground gossip – I'm so grateful my son doesn’t have to

Sex education has changed a lot from when I was a schoolgirl, completely baffled by the whole thing. When I was 10 or 11, here was a girl in my class, who was an authority on sex because she claimed to have once heard her parents having it. We girls gathered around her in awe as she solemnly imparted her wisdom: “If you do it standing up, you get a baby. Five minutes is one baby, 10 minutes is twins.”

We were very grateful to her for this information, which none of our parents or teachers had thought to give us, and we had chirpy discussions about whether, when it was our time to have sex, we would opt for the one- or two-baby option, or would we go for “missionary”, which meant no babies. That made me wonder: why we would be doing it at all in that case?

We watched a lot of westerns and American cop shows back in those days, where women often seemed to be being mauled by men. As a very young child, I watched cowboys forcefully kiss beautiful young women who would initially slap their face or run away but then, when caught, would eventually succumb to being “ravished” (as rape seemed to be perceived in westerns).

Women on these pre-watershed shows were constantly being pulled about, stripped and strangled and frankly, never looked like they were having a great time. It took many years of adulthood to realise that these scenes massively informed my ideas of what sex was: it was something men did to you.

In the first year of secondary school, we realised our sex guru at primary school may have been a charlatan. Some nice ladies came into our school one day, separated the girls from the boys, and gave us condoms and tampons to play with. We were all given a talk about sex and told only to have it once we were 16. We were each given a box of tampons which later we gave to the boys, who put them under the tap at breaktime and threw them at each other.

There was no LGBT+ awareness, discussion or education. There was just Boy George and Julian Clary (and thank goodness for them).

It was EastEnders, not school, that brought the fact that same-sex couples exist, and are normal, to my attention. Barry and Colin, played by Gary Hailes and Michael Cashman, were a gay couple who moved into Albert Square and in 1987, and the nation saw the first ever loving kiss (on the forehead) between two men. I was 14 and it blew my mind. My discomfort and upset was not at the kiss, but the homophobia that erupted afterwards (“EastBenders” was the Sun’s predictable headline). The only upside was that Cashman went on to become a politician, campaigner and founder of Stonewall.

Nowadays, sex and relationships education (SRE) is very different. I went along to a talk at my son’s school this week. They invited parents in to tell us what they were going to talk with the year 7s about in SRE. I went because I knew that my son would be unlikely to welcome a cheery “So what was the sex talk like today darling? Did they tell you about wet dreams?” from his mother.

The talk was conducted by a company called It Happens and frankly, if our sex education had been anything like this in the 80s, my own early sexual experiences would have been a great deal more fun and my teens and twenties far less anxiety-filled. I’d have had fewer deep and meaningful cats with friends consoling, “We’ve all been there, Shap. It feels horrible, but you just have to put it down to experience.”

It Happens talk to children not just about sex, but about friendships; about learning to identify people who make them feel good about themselves, and those who make them feel anxious. They talk about feelings and choice and beautifully simple techniques to promote conversations around consent and acceptance.

In Dutch schools, we were told, children as young as four are talked to in schools about relationships and they have one of the lowest teen pregnancy rates in the world (we have one of the highest in Europe). Obviously, you don’t talk to a four- or five-year-old about the physical act of sex and what fun it can be; what you can start talking about, though, is bodily autonomy and identifying and coping with rejection in a way they can understand. “If you high-five a friend and they leave you hanging, how does that feel?” It’s that simple. And not scary and doesn’t rob anyone of a childhood. It does stop many more young teenagers having a baby, though (two babies, if they do it for 10 minutes).