Most of it came from my brother and my extremely patient and much more seasoned first girlfriend. She just let me explore and play and get comfortable. It was like a free form hippy classroom with orgasms. My mother is an idiot. The first time I got up the courage to ask her "Whats an orgasm" She red-faced responded that it was an exchange of fluids between two people during sex. (This was pre-YouPorn by like 10 or 15 years). I knew then I was been bullshitted but had no way to call her out on it so I just filed it away for later to be answered by my horny friends with access to VHS porn and my brother's more detailed explanations. I hope that if I ever had kids that I'd raise them in an environment where they could ask me whatever without fear and know that I'd give them an honest answer. But by the time puberty has made their junk usable, I'll assume that they would have been exposed to things that I just learned the names of.
I learn from BDSM sites, and internet porn. And I certainly fucking hope my children do not learn from me.
Yep. Porn. I learned almost everything I knew about sex, up until I started having drunken, terrified sex with prostitutes when I was 19, from porn. I learned the rest when I entered my first serious relationship. I try very hard to let my boys know that they can talk to me or my wife about anything and I hope they come to me with some questions at least, but they probably won't.
Horrified, I kind of imagined a space-alien molesting my hypothetical yet-to-be-born children, before realizing that "what" was referring to a medium, like porn. I hope my future sons receive bountiful feedback from their female peers growing up regarding proper sexual techniques. As for my daughters, they could learn from textbooks and the Discovery Channel, or something.
Being raised by a single dad, I learned most of the basics from books about sexuality that, say, single dads buy and kind of just shove at their daughters so they'll read them and not have to talk about it. That was fine with me. I remember the only conversation I ever had with my dad about sex (except for the one where I asked to start taking birth control). I was young enough that he was still helping me take baths and I said, "Dad, is it true that you have to have s-e-x to have a baby?" And he said "Um, yes." And that was it. I had the classics like"Our Bodies, Ourselves" and "It's Perfectly Normal," but the absolute best one was: This book is the greatest. It was frank, cool, informative, covered a much wider range of things more in depth, and not as uptight as the usual ones. I referenced that book so much through my teens that by the time I was clearing things out of my room to go to college, pages were falling out of the spine. If it's still available if I have a daughter, she is absolutely getting a copy. That was the basics. The rest I learned from porn.
I used to think sex involved my dick being the hotdog and I laid it across the woman's vagina (aka hotdog bun) and somehow that made babies. Don't ask me how I came up with that idea. Once I saw porn, it made a lot more sense.
I grew up in the 80s. Half of what I know about sex came from Night Court, the other half from Whitesnake's Still of the Night video. Okay, yeah, it might have helped a bit having parents I could ask about those sorts of things...
I learned about sex in two ways. One was mainly the middle school bus. I was in eighth grade and one of my friends had sex and told us all about it. After that I went home, fired up AOL and checked out some porn. Since then it was all porn until the random hook ups in college. I haven't had a girlfriend ever...just FWB. One thing I have learned about sex is that if you aren't with someone who is a good kisser, it isn't nearly as good. Don't ask me why, it just isn't. The one Asian I've ever had the pleasure of entertaining was a terrible kisser, and it was accentuated in the bedroom. Good thing she had perky nips to keep my mouth distracted. I have had to teach someone...which was weird for me. I assumed everyone did the same thing I did, which was immediately go to the internet and find out everything one needs to. My housemate's sister's friend and I hooked up, and when we had all our clothes off and I was putting on the condom she looked at me and asked me what happened next. I was dumbfounded. I mean, who gets into a situation like that, and then asks what happens next. So I taught her as much as I knew (this was like the 4th time I'd had sex, so I was no Dane Cross). I learned later that she lost her virginity black out on prom night by her boyfriend of 9 months. [I argued that as rape, but apparently she didn't mind since "her body chose to"]. I backed out of that quickly.
I learned almost all of what I know about sex from books. Mostly they were books I got from the local library, so they were weird and outdated. Although, I also read "Deal With It" (the book that Audrey mentioned) and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. It kept me from having to have awkward conversations with my parents because it covers such a wide range of topics, from KY jelly to how to get a part-time job to drug use. I found a copy of it a few years ago, and it's so late 90's edgy but it will probably be relevant for years to come. What I didn't learn from books, I learned from my less sheltered cousins. As for my future offspring, I'm hope I'm the kind of mom they can talk to. But if I'm anything like my parents, I'll ignore it for years and then have drunken, heart-felt conversations with my daughter where I reveal the circumstances of her conception. If I have boys, I will just beg them not to cum on the guest towels and leave the rest up to their father.
Hahaha. My parents gave me 'Where Did I Come From' when I was younger. Their intentions were good, but I'd been reading torrid Wilbur Smith novels for years, so I ended up critiquing the book. "An orgasm is like a sneeze? Bullcrap! I remember Lostris getting inflamed with passion, her body moistening as his kisses ringed her throat. He felt as if the Gods sang to him as he sated himself in her tight, wet depths." Actual hands-on experience was all from my first girlfriend though. We were both hugely inexperienced nerds who had barely kissed anyone before, but we were eager to learn. Along with the physical practice, being geeks we studied the theory. We spent weeks looking up guides to oral on the net, sending each other our favourite porn, reading Savage Love, etc. I vividly remember finding out in the best possible way that she'd spent a week learning how to deep-throat a vibrator. I read everything I could find about different hot buttons to press, verbal foreplay, etc. Yes, we were / are very geeky. No, I wouldn't change a damn thing. It was a glorious time in my life.
My parents and I never had "the talk". We had some masturbation discussions, usually when they would hide my not so cleverly hidden porn files. *Side bar* Do parents randomly think, "Hmm, I think I'm gonna search around on the computer for a bit to find if Timmy has any porn." Cause my dad routinely found jpegs and videos I would hide in Sim City map folders or a random Red Alert program folder. He had to run a search, cause I would check recent documents, etc... But I digress *back to focus* Pretty much everything I learned from porn and then trial and error. And for those who say porn doesn't help, it saved me a lot of mindless stumbling. The first time I ever went down on a girl for more than 15 sec was my first gf in college and she came in about a minute. While I paid little weight to her claims of my prowess then, I recently talked to her, almost 7 years later, and reminiscing and joking around she mentioned that, no bullshit, I knew what the hell I was doing. See ladies, I'm a cunnilingus savant!
Up until I was about 5, the question "where do babies come from?" started out like this: "When two people love each other very much..." And then I got the full biological rundown of how babies grow in uteri and things like that. When I turned 5, the mechanics of penises and vaginas were introduced - again, medically. But the whole deal. My mom would draw diagrams. Fallopian tubes, vas deferens, semen, sperm, you name it. That you could put a penis in a vagina for reasons other than having babies was left as an exercise for me to figure out on my own.