My parents never gave me “the talk”. I remember walking passed my parents room one day hearing them talk to my sister about sex from a book with cartoons. I was confused hearing my sister getting the information but not me. but then didn’t really think about it again.

I ended up hearing about sex, masturbation even rape in the school yard and didn’t have any spaces outside of that to actually understand these things.

My parents have never spoken to me about porn. any conversation about sex came from mum and it always felt awkward and not very direct.

I wish there could have been more directness and clarity, not leaving things to imagination and for that to be an evolving conversation that was age appropriate rather than relying on one big talk.

It would’ve been nice to get some sex ed from my Dad but he avoided the topic.

The advice I got from my Mum was great, wear a condom, respect the girl you’re sleeping with.

So Dad’s was absent, Mum’s wasn’t complete.

I wish they had of told me how awkward sex can be, how you’re not supposed to know everything, that you should ask your sexual partner questions about what they like and don’t like.

I also wish I had of known about STD’s/STI’s. Would’ve saved some doctors trips.

My dad actually tried, sort of. He sat me down, no eye contact, done in about ten minutes. Mum never said a word about any of it.

Porn specifically never came up from either of them, so I found out from mates and just assumed whatever they told me was right.

I wish it hadn’t felt like a box being ticked. Dad’s version felt like something he had to get through, not something he wanted to talk to me about, so I never went back to him with real questions after that.

I wish someone had made it clear I could keep asking things as they came up, instead of it being a one-off and then nothing for the next five years.

Mum finally sat me down about porn when I was seventeen. I was thirteen when I first came across it, so by the time she brought it up I’d already worked out my own version of normal from whatever I’d stumbled onto online.

She meant well, she talked about respect and not comparing real people to what’s on a screen, but I remember thinking, a bit late for that now.

I wish she’d started before I needed to unlearn anything.

By seventeen it wasn’t information I was missing, it was habits I’d already picked up without anyone checking in on them. I wish the conversation had come earlier, before I’d had years to figure it out wrong on my own.

My brother had a stash of FHM and Zoo under his bed, and one afternoon he handed me a copy like it was nothing. That was it, once I’d seen one I started buying my own from the newsagent every fortnight.

Nobody at home ever talked about porn or sex in any real way, so that stack of magazines quietly became where I learned what I thought I was supposed to know.

It wasn’t that anyone did anything wrong on purpose, it just meant a magazine trying to sell copies ended up shaping what I thought sex and women were meant to be like.

I wish there’d been an adult to check that against, instead of assuming it was all correct.

My parents were quite open about sex and porn.

That said, I would have liked it if my Dad didn’t use objectifying language when talking about women we saw on the street. This set up a bit of a mindset for me that it was OK to look at women’s bodies as objects, which has taken quite a lot of work to unpick.

Dad also frequently bought us soft porn (titty mags, calendars, that type of thing), even when we were in relationships (and he was) which I found strange. However sex was always talked about in our house as being about both reproduction and pleasure – and pleasure for both parties was really important in how my parents spoke about it.

Overall, I would say my parents actually handled those conversations pretty well – and the openness is something that I try to model with my kids.

I had very little in regard to conversations it was kinda “are you having sex” and I would say “no” and they would just say “be careful”.

I guess I kinda wished they would have been curious with me. Although I don’t know whether I would have wanted to talk about it because I was gay.

What I wish was different is maybe if they gave me a book or something to start the conversation, something that I could explore alone before talking to them about it.

My dad was the cool type, we had a lot of fun but he always cracked jokes instead of saying anything real.

It felt like nothing was off limits, but nothing ever actually got said either. I never felt like I couldn’t ask him things because it was all one-liners.

I wish he’d used the jokes as an opening instead of an ending. He was relaxed about it, but relaxed isn’t the same as useful, and I don’t think he ever noticed the difference.

I wish he’d asked me if I had questions or how I felt, instead of just defusing it and moving on.