“Smith, stop shoving that…urm.. that..urm.. cotton wool up Scotson’s nose and pay attention will you!” was the kind of thing you’d hear during a sex education day at a mixed comprehensive high school in the 1980s. Smith would have nicked a packet of free Tampax given to the girls, exclaimed “ooh look a mouse!” and then would have proceeded to use his new toy to taunt the class swot in order to show his male prowess to the disinterested girls.

When I was growing up, back in the 80s, sex education was a fairly new phenomena; it was whispered male and female anatomical words; it was a very red-faced male science teacher explaining female reproductive organs; it was separating the giggling teens into the two genders where puberty was very briefly described and it was giving the girls free Tampax ready for Smith to steal them for his own entertainment. This was pretty much the extent of sex education at a mixed comp state school thus I gleaned most of my information from Just 17 teen magazine.