Sex education in Hungary back in the old days

love - 1974 - fortepan/ Urbán Tamás

We know that sex education is still quite a problematic subject practically all over the world. Though it is not such a taboo anymore, parents and their kids still tend to get uncomfortable when it comes up, instead of playing it cool as they do in most of the movies.

Today, we have unlimited resources on sexuality, sex life, and sex education, thanks to the internet. Despite the official sex ed classes in schools, a lot of youngsters continue gaining and gathering information from all over the internet. This can be dangerous in a sense since no one will explain to them whether what they see or read is actually the reality. On the other hand, even those kids who live in more modest countries where sexual education at schools is scarce or incomplete or where parents feel like it is not crucial until the question of marriage arises have the possibility to obtain all the necessary information on the subject. Oftentimes, even too much.

However, before the internet, for a very long time, until the 1970s, there was no such source in Hungary for teenagers and young adults.

This led to some very strange and – frankly, through our eyes today – very funny ideas about how a woman can get pregnant.

Kissing couple in 1958 – Fortepan/ Chuckyeagertumblr

About 30-40 years ago, sexual education for teenagers was considered a necessary but nasty task at school, so they reduced it to the bare minimum, writes nlc.hu.

The most that was taught during these classes were simple biological facts, lacking all emotions, strictly separating boys from girls, usually done under one hour, once during their studies.

Of course, curiosity in students was stronger than to just leave it at that. Love and kissing, and the act of making love involved intimacy and, of course, the question of contraception – though not everyone was willing to talk about it openly. Or at all, as such. The biology teacher saw everything from a scientific point of view, while the homeroom teacher gave the floor rather to a health professional.

Most of the parents did not want to or did not like to talk about sexuality with their children, so they let others, mainly the health professional, do the dirty work. At least with her, girls saw a condom and were taught how to put it on a banana. Might sound funny as it is not really part of a sex education class nowadays, at least not everywhere.

Due to the secretive nature of sexuality, young adults had very interesting and funny ideas about getting pregnant, for instance. There were some common questions and misconceptions travelling around the country, like “Can I get sick if I masturbate?”, “How long can I go on with foreplay to stay a virgin?”, or “Is Kalmopyrin an effective birth control pill?” (Kalmopyrin is a simple pain killer, by the way.) All these sound quite funny for us, I think, but it is due to the fact that sexual education classes today involve much more than simple biological facts.

How could youngsters back in the old days get their questions answered, you might ask?

From the 1970s, a magazine for youngsters called Ifjúsági Magazin started a column on sexuality, where a journalist and History major, who also obtained a medical degree to be more professional and credible on the subject, provided all the necessary information in a humorous and understanding way.

In every issue of the magazine, he answered a concrete question of a reader that was so general that everyone reading the article could feel involved.

Just like in the case of the previously mentioned questions about pregnancy, the magazine received some letters without any basic knowledge on the subject. For instance, one of the readers asked: “I was so stupid, I went to my boyfriend’s apartment where I got tipsy, but I remember that nothing else happened than him grabbing me with a wrestling move and bringing me to bed. Can I be pregnant from this?”. (If your answer is yes, I suggest you watch Sex Education or Big Mouth on Netflix.)

Another reader’s letter gives us the impression that she did have some sort of talk with her mother, who might have been in a rather funny mood as the girl claimed:

“My mother told me several times that if a girl loses her virginity, a deep cut appears between her nose and her mouth. It happened to me that one day this cut was just there on my face, when I did not lose my virginity, please believe me. How could I prove to my mother that I have never had an intimate relationship before?”

Her mother was either a bit cruel, scaring her daughter, but most probably she just passed on the knowledge she was given when she was her daughter’s age.

At the same time, these magazines offered information for parents as well, to fill in a hole left by their sex education back in the day. More and more books on sexuality were published as an educational source for adults on intimacy, ethics, social changes, habits, boundaries, and reproduction. These words were emphasised on every page to highlight their importance, and the books started to talk about sexuality and sex itself as a source of pleasure and happiness.