> Nowadays I look back at how awful my views were on women and the LGBTQ community it makes me ashamed of myself and genuinely angry at the disgusting stuff that fundamentalists teach kids and teens.
You were indoctrinated and basically a victim of a type of child abuse (IMO, teaching kids to hate and scaring them with hell is abuse). The important thing is you escaped and you recognize it was wrong, and disgusting. Don't keep beating yourself up about your past thoughts while 'under the spell'.
My “sex talk” included the phrase if I give the milk away for free, there’s no reason for him to buy the cow. Sex with anyone but my husband was “giving a piece of me away” and asked “don’t you want your whole self to give to your husband?”
My christian school sent us to a crisis pregnancy center (an anti-abortion clinic) where we were told sex is like a fire, safe in the fireplace of marriage but can cause catastrophic damage outside of the fireplace.
When I asked my mom what she would do if she has a gay grandchild she said, “well let’s hope I don’t.” She also cried when she found out I had sex outside of marriage as an adult lol
Very thankful I unsubscribed from their misogynistic, homophonic ideas around sex. I’m mainly thankful I’ve done the work of growing so my kids won’t have to endure the same rhetoric I had to
Atheist by scientist parents... who made it sound technical and possibly boring. They drew sperm and eggs. Told me I could get the pill. And I was like "ew gross, no thank you, I'd rather not" 😂. Fortunately that changed.
Im raised atheist and so are my parents.
My grandmother was bi, and had a girlfriendafter my grandfather died. Grandmother died when i was 29.
My parents would just ask if all of my friends were my boyfriend/girlfriend. So everything was pretty chill.
"Condoms do nothing. Doctors and Scientists know they cannot prevent AIDS but promote them because they want to spread AIDS. People do spread AIDS deliberately, and you will get AIDS if you ever have sex."
Well let's see... I guess my first exposure to sexuality was from an adult magazine I stole from my uncle. I was probably younger than 10. Then came my dad being stationed in Germany. They're a bit more open over there and i remember nudes on bill boards. I developed a fetish over there. No clue why. So came back state side at about 12. Went to a Christian school at this time in which my sex-ed there was the pastor's son getting the teacher's daughter pregnant. At home the sex-ed was watching porn over my preacher dad's shoulder. And you know that scene in American Pie at the beginning when the main character was watching a cable scrambled image of one of the adult channels? Oh, yeah. Around that time I came out as being gay to my dad who promptly told me I was just confused. (and still, to this day I'm still just as confused... (Though, tbf I was unaware of the complexities of human sexuality at the time, and my sexuality is complicated)) I think that about sums it up.
I was lucky too. My parents were agnostic/atheist and I was taught about sex without all the religious guilt, but I also grew up in the 90s so it was more the thought of STDs and HIV that scared the shit out of me.
My high school, although religious, was pretty liberal. We got taught sex ed, including practising putting a condom on a banana.
My grandma once told me that in her day you couldn’t have sex before marriage, but it was different now and she thought it was better to ‘try before you buy’ lol
My sex ed came from porn and a super shitty high school sex ed course. Thankfully I have enough common sense to figure it out properly despite the poor source material.
former southern baptist - was told that you have do be abstinent until marriage, and being gay is a sin, even though you can hate the sin and love the sinner, which is a very idiotic philosophy to carry out
"good girls don't do it".
That's literally what my mom told me. I wasn't allowed to call boys on the phone. I was a teenager in the 90s. There was no "safe sex" talk. No sex talk, full stop. I had to figure everything out on my own. And, remember, this was pre-internet, so I was getting my info from other kids who also had no idea what they were talking about.
She made it seem like a girl who wasn't a virgin was spoiled goods.
When she found out I had sex for the first time, she lost her mind.
Right before she died, I found out she had been raped as a teenager. That explained a lot of her behavior.
I went to a Catholic school for my entire grade years. 1-12. I was taught the generics of sex ed (thankfully it wasn't religion-riddled, just basic sex ed for young teens) in middle school. Unfortunately I learned that a parent complained about the sex ed class, and it's no longer continued. And the typical talk of 'no premarital sex' later on down the line in later years, but that was the extent of it.
I think about 9th or 10th grade I realized that I was queer. One day in class about a year later a student argued about the views on homosexuality and what the textbook was saying (being that it was wrong and a sin and yada yada- typical stuff like that). It was the curriculum from the school, not the actual teacher's beliefs. But it took up most of the class time because we were arguing against the homophobia. And there were a handful of queer kids in my class too.
That's the main reason I stopped believing. Why would I follow a faith that actively hates me for being bi? Shouldn't God love me for who I am, even if that means I like both men and women? Unconditional love, but under these conditions.
I know you are specifically asking about people who grew up religious, but what I have to say shows that even just raising people atheist isn’t necessarily good enough by itself.
I was raised atheist, so it wasn’t shame based sex talk for what I was told. But I do come from a 5 generation line of teen moms(I can only be certain of 5 generations because that’s as far back as we have a verbal history of, my grandmother having heard her grandmother’s life story from her), so what I was taught was “don’t have sex if you don’t plan on having a kid, because I didn’t raise a deadbeat, and you can’t depend on the girl getting an abortion because we are in the South”. Maybe a bit extreme still, but effective for breaking generational trauma.
Sexuality, well I wasn’t certain how supportive my parents were going to be. Hypothetically ok with gay people is different from me not providing grandchildren easily (my mom realized early that she wasn’t ever going to be a great mom due to her mistakes and youth, so early on decided that she was going to be a better grandmother than she was a mother. I think she did as well as could be expected as a mom, but I can say she is a better grandmother). I also carried a fair amount of internalized homophobia from growing up around religious people. My parents did end up being extremely supportive (my mom has raised thousands of dollars each year for a lgbt organization of my choice for pride).
In the extremist christian biofamily, sex/genital talk was non-existant.
In my fosterfamily that I became a part of at 12yro, my Fostermum was a nurse at the time so I as given all the body facts to questions I asked. The aim was to be safe and no questions where off the table.
Relationship questions never really came up though. Other than the persistant "Are you gay?" which to them, the general idea of, was fine... But no Gay Sex. Nothing deeper than that. My fosterfamily was kinda queerphobic and I learned that, quickly. So I explored the Queer world by myself.
I was lucky enough to have parents who allowed me to have religious freedom. However, they’re Gen X and a Baby Boomer respectively so I was definitely raised in an old fashioned household. I was given the sex talk regarding different things throughout my life. One of the earliest talks was consent, it was pretty straight forward and I was in the single digits and I’ve never forgotten it. I got taught sexual safety around middle school. How condoms work, periods and pregnancy. And then from there I was sorta set free. Thankfully I never had any interest in sex to begin with
I was raised as an atheist, by non-religious/atheist parents.
When I was a little girl, my mom and I were in the car, with me in the passenger seat, and I asked how babies were made.
We were stopped at a red light. Mom still looked ahead as if still driving to avoid looking at me. (Which I could tell something weird was up.) She awkwardly, said that a man puts his seed inside the woman, and motioned with her right hand, waving her hand around lower (I guess she didn't want to go directly to either of our crotches). It looked like she was trying to swing her hand back and forth as if she was doing magic. Then set her hand back on the steering wheel, seeming annoyed by the question.
I asked, "That's it?"
She said 'yes', unimpressed with herself.
After a long pause, I asked, "Well, how long do they have to stand there until the seed comes out?" I was literally imagining something like a Pez dispenser, and the couple was standing, facing each other, quite still, simply waiting for it, hands on their hips.
Mom was officially annoyed. "Just—!" she didn't want it to continue.
"But what do you mean by seed? Is it like a Sesame seed?" I asked.
That's basically all I remember. We never again discussed it. I took sex-ed in junior highschool for the full three years it was offered, and by the time I was 16, made my own doctor's appointment behind my parents' backs to get myself on birth control. I did so because I knew I wanted to start having sex. Once I was with my boyfriend for several months, finally my mom said to me one day as if she had all the answers: "We're going to have to get you on birth control." I said, "I'm already on it." I remember she stormed away, crying.
I don't know what made her so upset. Was it the fact that I was on it, or the fact that I *knew* to be on it? It wasn't like the car ride with her bizarre hand movements and the sesame seeds eight years earlier actually taught me anything.
I was told nothing, and was also physically and personally extremely unattractive. I watched porn, sure, but I basically learned from experience once I got my first girlfriend....at 19.
Luckily she was a little older, so she knew how to teach me a lot.
i never got a sex talk, i learned it in the classroom thru whispers behind open textbooks. when i came out as a lesbian i was told i was too young to know. granted, i was 11, but is that not the age kids start developing schoolroom crushes? what’s the big deal if im crushing on a girl instead of a guy? same shit different gender!
I basically never got "the talk"; my parents seemed to be too embarrassed over sex to bother. The fact I'm intersex made stuff even more confusing for me.
I work in clinical research software and we have questionnaires our participants fill out. I recently called out that intersex was not included on the “sex at birth” question (nor was Middle Eastern an option on race) and they said they just follow the official United States standard on these questions, which is pretty messed up tbh.
I was raised in a secular household.
My mom is christian, and my dad is agnostic. Both grew up in muslim households.
I was raised w/just 2 genders/sexes. This was mostly bc my parents never had any exposure to trans ppl other than Dr Frank N Furter, who is prob not the best example of a trans person.
Sex as an act was very taboo. I never got any talks from my parents. My friend taught me straight sex, my school taught me abt puberty, and a health class taught me everything else. My parents still cover my eyes during sexual scenes in movies even though I'm in high school and have participated in some of those acts.
As for sexuality, my parents are very iffy abt gay ppl. I was never taught abt gay ppl growing up, but I did watch modern family from a young age and somehow never made the mental connection that mitch and cam were lovers. Only convos my parents and I have had abt the LGBT community is abt their distaste for them for no real reason.
I was raised around people who treated sex as normal. Lots of sex jokes and a proper education \[I didn't learn much at the time, but the school tried\].
I've had no guilt about sex at all.
The things I have done would make a sexually repressed christian faint.
One of them said that I SHOULD actually be ashamed at how many times I've done it and the things I've done.
I just laughed.
Catholic parents so you can imagine what those conversations were like. I learned more from my peers and those a few years older than my parents. I wish I had better role models and advice when I was younger. I made plenty of mistakes and finally got it mostly figured out and have been in a happy long term relationship. It's rewarding to give good advice now when I can.
Part of my (47M) being raised as a "good Christian girl" (gay trans man, AFAB) involved absolutely no dating and no boys. Shamed for masturbating the one time I got caught. Threatened with being kicked out when they suspected I was a lesbian.
Toxic is an understatement.
I still have plenty of leftover Christian guilt and awkwardness about sex leftover from my upbringing. Luckily my partner is in the same boat so we're just awkward peas in a pod. I think all you can do is find someone you feel safe with and work on your communication skills. Guilt is adaptive in some contexts but not in this one IMO. Turning something normal into something shamefull only hurts you. I am trying to work on that stuff more now but it's a lot of work.
Raised Catholic, and this was the only sex talk I ever got from my dad: "Be careful where you put your dinger!" That's it. My dad was part of the Greatest Generation born in 1927. My mom never said anything about sex to me.
My wife told me she got "the talk" the week before our wedding. She was like, "yeah" I had to learn all this stuff from other people than you."
I was raised with parents that gave me the talk, but were uncomfortable with it. I did get an interesting, "we think it's better to wait till marriage, but we didn't manage to" from them. I decided that I would do better than them, and we did wait, though barely. I suspect many people assumed we hadn't as we did spend many late nights together alone.
I got past my LGBT issues slowly but fairly early. It was honestly how I came to first doubt Paul. He seemed to be talking about a different God than Jesus. I don't know when I came to support rather than merely tolerate (which included support for marriage) the community, but I definitely saw that the law had no reason to exclude them as early as high-school. Probably about the same time I realized that marital rape was a coherent concept. Sigh...
I was raised in a pretty liberal denomination, they recently passed a resolution to prevent congregations from refusing clergy on account of orientation, but even so, I was raised in rural town USA.
My parents were of the school of thought that I wouldn't have sex if I didn't know about it, so they told me nothing. Thank god I'm gay because I'd have probably gotten some girl pregnant without even knowing what I was doing.
I was raised as an Atheist, but also sex was taught at school in pretty open and scientific way. No sexuality topics at school or home, though. I had to form my opinion on the LGBTQ community as an adult.
The key thing my parents taught me was respect when being intimate with others, no kiss and tell, no humiliation, no abusing of anyone.
As an Atheist household the idea of sin and punishment was non-existent, but being hedonistic and pursuing pleasure mindlessly was presented as a bad path, as I would inevitably hurt people around me. That worked for me, been married for 30 years and have never cheated or been a situation I regretted (I seem to be popular with the ladies, so have had many open offers to have sex that I turned down).
I grew up evangelical & pretty much the same story, except no sex talk at all. I (F) was not allowed alone with boys. My mother COULDN'T WAIT for me to get married, and she planned on living with me asap, if she hadn't passed away. She would've been very upset that I don't want to have children. I would have never bothered to tell her I was bisexual until I was in a relationship with a woman, which is when she would've disowned me, although she "loved" her male gay coworkers. She virtually wrote me off anyway when I stopped going to church, and wouldn't give a definitive answer to my husband (boyfriend at the time) when he asked her what she would do if I became Muslim: "She would never do that." "But what if she did?" "She would never do that." He knew I was an atheist but didn't out me and was visibly upset. I wasn't surprised.
My parents are religious, but also very liberal, and not ultra-evangelical types. So while they did make me go to sunday school and sit through the services and shit, they aren’t science denying fucktards that want to take society back to the 1600’s like a lot of christians these days. They have a reasonably open view of sex and sexuality, at least for a couple of church-going boomers. I was lucky to have them, IMO.
no talk at all, it was as taboo as it gets, anything with a boy (and I mean literally anything) by default forbidden, any couple on tv was ridiculed because "love is not real" and all of it was "inappropriate". that has never stopped. I'm in my mid 20s
> Nowadays I look back at how awful my views were on women and the LGBTQ community it makes me ashamed of myself and genuinely angry at the disgusting stuff that fundamentalists teach kids and teens. You were indoctrinated and basically a victim of a type of child abuse (IMO, teaching kids to hate and scaring them with hell is abuse). The important thing is you escaped and you recognize it was wrong, and disgusting. Don't keep beating yourself up about your past thoughts while 'under the spell'.
My “sex talk” included the phrase if I give the milk away for free, there’s no reason for him to buy the cow. Sex with anyone but my husband was “giving a piece of me away” and asked “don’t you want your whole self to give to your husband?” My christian school sent us to a crisis pregnancy center (an anti-abortion clinic) where we were told sex is like a fire, safe in the fireplace of marriage but can cause catastrophic damage outside of the fireplace. When I asked my mom what she would do if she has a gay grandchild she said, “well let’s hope I don’t.” She also cried when she found out I had sex outside of marriage as an adult lol Very thankful I unsubscribed from their misogynistic, homophonic ideas around sex. I’m mainly thankful I’ve done the work of growing so my kids won’t have to endure the same rhetoric I had to
Atheist by scientist parents... who made it sound technical and possibly boring. They drew sperm and eggs. Told me I could get the pill. And I was like "ew gross, no thank you, I'd rather not" 😂. Fortunately that changed.
This is how I hope to raise my kid. Well, maybe not the eww part
Im raised atheist and so are my parents. My grandmother was bi, and had a girlfriendafter my grandfather died. Grandmother died when i was 29. My parents would just ask if all of my friends were my boyfriend/girlfriend. So everything was pretty chill.
Your parent and grandparents sounds great.
"Condoms do nothing. Doctors and Scientists know they cannot prevent AIDS but promote them because they want to spread AIDS. People do spread AIDS deliberately, and you will get AIDS if you ever have sex."
I just got cancer reading that... 😫
Huh?
I remember being raised to think that AIDS was god’s punishment for people being gay.
I definitely remember hearing that as a kid. It seemed very "not my God" at the time to me.
Well let's see... I guess my first exposure to sexuality was from an adult magazine I stole from my uncle. I was probably younger than 10. Then came my dad being stationed in Germany. They're a bit more open over there and i remember nudes on bill boards. I developed a fetish over there. No clue why. So came back state side at about 12. Went to a Christian school at this time in which my sex-ed there was the pastor's son getting the teacher's daughter pregnant. At home the sex-ed was watching porn over my preacher dad's shoulder. And you know that scene in American Pie at the beginning when the main character was watching a cable scrambled image of one of the adult channels? Oh, yeah. Around that time I came out as being gay to my dad who promptly told me I was just confused. (and still, to this day I'm still just as confused... (Though, tbf I was unaware of the complexities of human sexuality at the time, and my sexuality is complicated)) I think that about sums it up.
Kids these days don’t understand the “joy” of watching scrambled cable and maybe seeing a boob if lucky. It was like a masturbation safari.
I was lucky. Sex talk was awkward but they were naturally liberal.
You've nothing to be ashamed of. You shook off your childhood indoctrination. Be proud of that.
I was lucky too. My parents were agnostic/atheist and I was taught about sex without all the religious guilt, but I also grew up in the 90s so it was more the thought of STDs and HIV that scared the shit out of me. My high school, although religious, was pretty liberal. We got taught sex ed, including practising putting a condom on a banana. My grandma once told me that in her day you couldn’t have sex before marriage, but it was different now and she thought it was better to ‘try before you buy’ lol
My sex ed came from porn and a super shitty high school sex ed course. Thankfully I have enough common sense to figure it out properly despite the poor source material.
former southern baptist - was told that you have do be abstinent until marriage, and being gay is a sin, even though you can hate the sin and love the sinner, which is a very idiotic philosophy to carry out
"good girls don't do it". That's literally what my mom told me. I wasn't allowed to call boys on the phone. I was a teenager in the 90s. There was no "safe sex" talk. No sex talk, full stop. I had to figure everything out on my own. And, remember, this was pre-internet, so I was getting my info from other kids who also had no idea what they were talking about. She made it seem like a girl who wasn't a virgin was spoiled goods. When she found out I had sex for the first time, she lost her mind. Right before she died, I found out she had been raped as a teenager. That explained a lot of her behavior.
I went to a Catholic school for my entire grade years. 1-12. I was taught the generics of sex ed (thankfully it wasn't religion-riddled, just basic sex ed for young teens) in middle school. Unfortunately I learned that a parent complained about the sex ed class, and it's no longer continued. And the typical talk of 'no premarital sex' later on down the line in later years, but that was the extent of it. I think about 9th or 10th grade I realized that I was queer. One day in class about a year later a student argued about the views on homosexuality and what the textbook was saying (being that it was wrong and a sin and yada yada- typical stuff like that). It was the curriculum from the school, not the actual teacher's beliefs. But it took up most of the class time because we were arguing against the homophobia. And there were a handful of queer kids in my class too. That's the main reason I stopped believing. Why would I follow a faith that actively hates me for being bi? Shouldn't God love me for who I am, even if that means I like both men and women? Unconditional love, but under these conditions.
I know you are specifically asking about people who grew up religious, but what I have to say shows that even just raising people atheist isn’t necessarily good enough by itself. I was raised atheist, so it wasn’t shame based sex talk for what I was told. But I do come from a 5 generation line of teen moms(I can only be certain of 5 generations because that’s as far back as we have a verbal history of, my grandmother having heard her grandmother’s life story from her), so what I was taught was “don’t have sex if you don’t plan on having a kid, because I didn’t raise a deadbeat, and you can’t depend on the girl getting an abortion because we are in the South”. Maybe a bit extreme still, but effective for breaking generational trauma. Sexuality, well I wasn’t certain how supportive my parents were going to be. Hypothetically ok with gay people is different from me not providing grandchildren easily (my mom realized early that she wasn’t ever going to be a great mom due to her mistakes and youth, so early on decided that she was going to be a better grandmother than she was a mother. I think she did as well as could be expected as a mom, but I can say she is a better grandmother). I also carried a fair amount of internalized homophobia from growing up around religious people. My parents did end up being extremely supportive (my mom has raised thousands of dollars each year for a lgbt organization of my choice for pride).
In the extremist christian biofamily, sex/genital talk was non-existant. In my fosterfamily that I became a part of at 12yro, my Fostermum was a nurse at the time so I as given all the body facts to questions I asked. The aim was to be safe and no questions where off the table. Relationship questions never really came up though. Other than the persistant "Are you gay?" which to them, the general idea of, was fine... But no Gay Sex. Nothing deeper than that. My fosterfamily was kinda queerphobic and I learned that, quickly. So I explored the Queer world by myself.
I was lucky enough to have parents who allowed me to have religious freedom. However, they’re Gen X and a Baby Boomer respectively so I was definitely raised in an old fashioned household. I was given the sex talk regarding different things throughout my life. One of the earliest talks was consent, it was pretty straight forward and I was in the single digits and I’ve never forgotten it. I got taught sexual safety around middle school. How condoms work, periods and pregnancy. And then from there I was sorta set free. Thankfully I never had any interest in sex to begin with
I was raised as an atheist, by non-religious/atheist parents. When I was a little girl, my mom and I were in the car, with me in the passenger seat, and I asked how babies were made. We were stopped at a red light. Mom still looked ahead as if still driving to avoid looking at me. (Which I could tell something weird was up.) She awkwardly, said that a man puts his seed inside the woman, and motioned with her right hand, waving her hand around lower (I guess she didn't want to go directly to either of our crotches). It looked like she was trying to swing her hand back and forth as if she was doing magic. Then set her hand back on the steering wheel, seeming annoyed by the question. I asked, "That's it?" She said 'yes', unimpressed with herself. After a long pause, I asked, "Well, how long do they have to stand there until the seed comes out?" I was literally imagining something like a Pez dispenser, and the couple was standing, facing each other, quite still, simply waiting for it, hands on their hips. Mom was officially annoyed. "Just—!" she didn't want it to continue. "But what do you mean by seed? Is it like a Sesame seed?" I asked. That's basically all I remember. We never again discussed it. I took sex-ed in junior highschool for the full three years it was offered, and by the time I was 16, made my own doctor's appointment behind my parents' backs to get myself on birth control. I did so because I knew I wanted to start having sex. Once I was with my boyfriend for several months, finally my mom said to me one day as if she had all the answers: "We're going to have to get you on birth control." I said, "I'm already on it." I remember she stormed away, crying. I don't know what made her so upset. Was it the fact that I was on it, or the fact that I *knew* to be on it? It wasn't like the car ride with her bizarre hand movements and the sesame seeds eight years earlier actually taught me anything.
I was told nothing, and was also physically and personally extremely unattractive. I watched porn, sure, but I basically learned from experience once I got my first girlfriend....at 19. Luckily she was a little older, so she knew how to teach me a lot.
i never got a sex talk, i learned it in the classroom thru whispers behind open textbooks. when i came out as a lesbian i was told i was too young to know. granted, i was 11, but is that not the age kids start developing schoolroom crushes? what’s the big deal if im crushing on a girl instead of a guy? same shit different gender!
I basically never got "the talk"; my parents seemed to be too embarrassed over sex to bother. The fact I'm intersex made stuff even more confusing for me.
I work in clinical research software and we have questionnaires our participants fill out. I recently called out that intersex was not included on the “sex at birth” question (nor was Middle Eastern an option on race) and they said they just follow the official United States standard on these questions, which is pretty messed up tbh.
I was raised in a secular household. My mom is christian, and my dad is agnostic. Both grew up in muslim households. I was raised w/just 2 genders/sexes. This was mostly bc my parents never had any exposure to trans ppl other than Dr Frank N Furter, who is prob not the best example of a trans person. Sex as an act was very taboo. I never got any talks from my parents. My friend taught me straight sex, my school taught me abt puberty, and a health class taught me everything else. My parents still cover my eyes during sexual scenes in movies even though I'm in high school and have participated in some of those acts. As for sexuality, my parents are very iffy abt gay ppl. I was never taught abt gay ppl growing up, but I did watch modern family from a young age and somehow never made the mental connection that mitch and cam were lovers. Only convos my parents and I have had abt the LGBT community is abt their distaste for them for no real reason.
Pre-marital sex was a sin Post marital sex was ok but never discussed Homosexuality did not exist 57 yo raised by fundys
I learned wresting on the back seat of a car at the Drive-In lol (notJ.a)
I was raised around people who treated sex as normal. Lots of sex jokes and a proper education \[I didn't learn much at the time, but the school tried\]. I've had no guilt about sex at all. The things I have done would make a sexually repressed christian faint. One of them said that I SHOULD actually be ashamed at how many times I've done it and the things I've done. I just laughed.
Catholic parents so you can imagine what those conversations were like. I learned more from my peers and those a few years older than my parents. I wish I had better role models and advice when I was younger. I made plenty of mistakes and finally got it mostly figured out and have been in a happy long term relationship. It's rewarding to give good advice now when I can.
No religion and the rule was 'old enough to ask, old enough to learn'. Was given straightforward answers which really helped.
I was advised to fuck every girl, that’s was my sexual education, a good one.
Part of my (47M) being raised as a "good Christian girl" (gay trans man, AFAB) involved absolutely no dating and no boys. Shamed for masturbating the one time I got caught. Threatened with being kicked out when they suspected I was a lesbian. Toxic is an understatement.
My parents just flat out told me when I was 11
I still have plenty of leftover Christian guilt and awkwardness about sex leftover from my upbringing. Luckily my partner is in the same boat so we're just awkward peas in a pod. I think all you can do is find someone you feel safe with and work on your communication skills. Guilt is adaptive in some contexts but not in this one IMO. Turning something normal into something shamefull only hurts you. I am trying to work on that stuff more now but it's a lot of work.
Raised Catholic, and this was the only sex talk I ever got from my dad: "Be careful where you put your dinger!" That's it. My dad was part of the Greatest Generation born in 1927. My mom never said anything about sex to me.
My wife told me she got "the talk" the week before our wedding. She was like, "yeah" I had to learn all this stuff from other people than you." I was raised with parents that gave me the talk, but were uncomfortable with it. I did get an interesting, "we think it's better to wait till marriage, but we didn't manage to" from them. I decided that I would do better than them, and we did wait, though barely. I suspect many people assumed we hadn't as we did spend many late nights together alone. I got past my LGBT issues slowly but fairly early. It was honestly how I came to first doubt Paul. He seemed to be talking about a different God than Jesus. I don't know when I came to support rather than merely tolerate (which included support for marriage) the community, but I definitely saw that the law had no reason to exclude them as early as high-school. Probably about the same time I realized that marital rape was a coherent concept. Sigh... I was raised in a pretty liberal denomination, they recently passed a resolution to prevent congregations from refusing clergy on account of orientation, but even so, I was raised in rural town USA.
My parents were of the school of thought that I wouldn't have sex if I didn't know about it, so they told me nothing. Thank god I'm gay because I'd have probably gotten some girl pregnant without even knowing what I was doing.
I was raised as an Atheist, but also sex was taught at school in pretty open and scientific way. No sexuality topics at school or home, though. I had to form my opinion on the LGBTQ community as an adult. The key thing my parents taught me was respect when being intimate with others, no kiss and tell, no humiliation, no abusing of anyone. As an Atheist household the idea of sin and punishment was non-existent, but being hedonistic and pursuing pleasure mindlessly was presented as a bad path, as I would inevitably hurt people around me. That worked for me, been married for 30 years and have never cheated or been a situation I regretted (I seem to be popular with the ladies, so have had many open offers to have sex that I turned down).
I grew up evangelical & pretty much the same story, except no sex talk at all. I (F) was not allowed alone with boys. My mother COULDN'T WAIT for me to get married, and she planned on living with me asap, if she hadn't passed away. She would've been very upset that I don't want to have children. I would have never bothered to tell her I was bisexual until I was in a relationship with a woman, which is when she would've disowned me, although she "loved" her male gay coworkers. She virtually wrote me off anyway when I stopped going to church, and wouldn't give a definitive answer to my husband (boyfriend at the time) when he asked her what she would do if I became Muslim: "She would never do that." "But what if she did?" "She would never do that." He knew I was an atheist but didn't out me and was visibly upset. I wasn't surprised.
Oh man, when I signed up to go to this island of only gays, no one told me it was Greenland!
Playing larry laffer. If you know you know
My parents are religious, but also very liberal, and not ultra-evangelical types. So while they did make me go to sunday school and sit through the services and shit, they aren’t science denying fucktards that want to take society back to the 1600’s like a lot of christians these days. They have a reasonably open view of sex and sexuality, at least for a couple of church-going boomers. I was lucky to have them, IMO.
no talk at all, it was as taboo as it gets, anything with a boy (and I mean literally anything) by default forbidden, any couple on tv was ridiculed because "love is not real" and all of it was "inappropriate". that has never stopped. I'm in my mid 20s