Let’s talk about sex education

Ah, sex education. I remember it like it was yesterday. It would have been 1987. Our entire year assembled in the school theatre. A beige, moustachioed, Open-University-looking chap stood alone on the stage with a slide projector. We’d never seen him before and never saw him again. He had been hired in especially for the occasion, I fancy, in much the same way and for much the same reason Russia uses the Wagner group to supply combat troops.  

On one of the early slides was a long list of synonyms for the male organ of generation. ‘Penis,’ he intoned solemnly, indicating the word with his pointer. ‘Willy,’ he said. ‘Dick,’ he said. ‘John Thomas.’ Pause. ‘Todger.’ You can imagine how this was all greeted by 250-odd thirteen-year-old boys. I don’t to this day know how he survived ‘Tummy Banana’. 

And on he went. There was a grisly photographic slide, if I remember rightly, showing how a condom was to be applied to a man with ginger hair.