You Fail Sex Ed Forever - Television Tropes & Idioms

[If her books are anything to go by,] Anne Rice has an, at best, rudimentary understanding of the workings of a penis. I know Anne Rice must have experienced a penis at some point. I read on Wikipedia that she has children, and was married. So I'm not sure what kind of married life she had, because she is clearly no authority on the male reproductive organ. [...] It is therefore somewhat unsurprising to me that Anne Rice is a widow.

— Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw, on Anne Rice's Filthy, Disgusting, Inexcusable Porno Books.

You would expect the people in porn industry to know how sex works. And yet, the movies often depict things that wouldn't really be enjoyable, should be done differently or are just plain weird. Hentai movies are the worst offender, frequently crossing into You Fail Biology Forever.

For porn movies, this is usually done on purpose, to conform to what the audience believes to be true, or to get a better camera angle. Partly, these are perfectly Acceptable Breaks From Reality, since porn caters to its customers' sexual fantasies, rather than reality. In hentai, this may indicate that the author never got laid or is pandering to a specific audience.

This shows up in a lot of Fan Fic because said fiction tends to be written by teenage girls who don't know all that much about sex. Like doctors who write medical dramas, and therefore know exactly what they're talking about, only the complete opposite. It can also be an effect of doing no research before writing about anatomy the author does not have.

Compare with Hollywood Sex, where the sex is realistic in action but still more idealized than most sex in the real world.

Note: Please have a handy jug of Brain Bleach on hand when reading this page. You have been warned.

Typical subtropes:

Rape Is Love
O Ring Orifice
Biggus Dickus
STD Immunity
IKEA Erotica
Right Through His Pants
Doing it twice (in five minutes) — allows for more footage with one character but a man's body rarely works that way (without chemical assistance at least).
Excessive amounts of semen — The average amount of semen ejaculated ranges about 1.5 — 5 ml (5 ml being about the equivalent of a US teaspoon.) Especially ridiculous when combined with the previous subtrope.
- Some works that use the above (I'm mostly referring to porn stories here, where they're most prevalent) are probably just used to convey the male lead as exceptional or catering to a specific audience. Or both.
Implausible lubrication or complete lack thereof. For example, neither saliva nor water works very well as lubricant. Butter, as in one fanfic, might work better in terms of actual lubrication, but not straight from the fridge. Blood, seen in vampire fanfiction, is the opposite of a lubricant.
Implausible positions — especially in hentai bondage scenes. Many of these would dislocate some joints if performed in real life.
All sexual encounters include oral sex.
- And all oral sex givers have no gag reflex, and no women ever have jaw issues, such as TMJ, that make oral painful. And also, all high school girls can deepthroat reflexively.
No sense of taste — a typical porn actress seems capable of giving a blowjob regardless of where the penis has been a moment ago.
Facials — invented by porn industry (for an undermentioned reason — it's much easier to film). Women out and inside the porn industry tend to hate it, despite the rumour that it's "good for the complexion".
- actually there has been research on this and the conclusion is: "the ingredients suggest that it could work that way".
Weird anatomy — occasionally seen in hentai, and really common in fanfics written by virgins. Virgins who think their hymens are located inside the vagina or, worse, that the penis enters the cervix during sex! The latter is particularly bad — even the sensation of a penis pushing or hammering onto the cervix (another common trope in hentai and fanfics) is already so painful for women in real life that men who do this are liable to get kicked out of bed. Except, of course, by the percentage of females who like experiencing that.
Mistaking "clitoris" for a synonym for "vagina." The clitoris is a little nub of flesh which sticks out. It is not something you insert things into.
Over-the-top female orgasms.
Sperm flowing into the womb — occasionally seen in hentai, and fairly common in fanfics and erotic literature, even though this is impossible under normal circumstances. The cervix is basically blocked with a mucus plug that lets only a small fraction of the sperm cells through.
A virgin always bleeds — a very common and very old myth in real life, and thus it's no surprise that it turns up in many works of fiction as well. It's still blatantly false, though — only about 20 to 30 percent of girls and women bleed during their first time, and even then it's usually of preventable causes rather than the opening in the hymen being too small or tight.
All women are born with hymens, and a virgin always still has her hymen. Rare indeed is the woman in fiction whose hymen breaks without sex, regardless of how many horses she's ridden, how many fights she's been in, or any number of other activities which can break the tissue. Even rarer (in other words, non-existent) is the woman born without a hymen. Only a penis can break a hymen, according to dramatic requirements.
- In some cultures, this notion (along with "virgins always bleed" as noted above) is so prevalent that there are surgical procedures available to reconstruct the hymen, thus "restoring" a woman's virginity.
- It has also become common practice for some OB/GYN's to break the hymen for medical tests when there is a chance of inherited disease that affects that area. Especially for scrapings or blood tests.
Over- or underreaction — In a lot of movies, a woman moans the moment the man touches an erogenous zone of her body. While it is possible for a very sensitive woman to react like this, it's extremely rare. The men never make a sound, unless it's a single manly groan the moment of orgasm.
Bizarre comparisons — Although it's possible for vaginal fluid to taste like strawberries under specific circumstances, writers with no first-hand experience in the matter should refrain from guessing.
Timed Orgasms - A lot of the time in fiction, partners will only climax when it's convenient to do so, usually at the same time as the other. No effort is required or even considered to please the other after one is satisfied.
The two-second orgasm. Once a woman cries out that she's coming, no effort is made to "ride it out", unless the male hasn't climaxed yet. See Timed Orgasms; this is usually the signal for the guy to pull out instantly and have the woman engage in oral/facial/etc.
- Subtrope: female orgasm from penetration alone. Approximately three-quarters of all women will require some kind of clitoral stimulation to reach climax.
The Elusive Orgasm - Most of these tropes deal with unrealistically positive depictions of sex, but there are also tropes that are unrealistically negative. In particular, in the past decade, it's become a fairly common sex joke in comedies (film, television, whatever the case may be) that a male partner in sex has extreme difficulty giving his female partner an orgasm. Guys out there, don't worry- it's really not that hard. If you pay attention to what your partner likes and dislikes, it should be no harder to give a woman an orgasm than to reach one yourself.

Examples:

Anime And Manga

Read Tezuka's "Buddha". Come on man! You've been trained as a doctor! Surely you would know what a pregnant woman looks like!
99% of all Hentai work.
- Including everything from positions and size to a woman's breasts ejaculating milk during orgasm. Best to not even get started on the whole hermaphrodite thing. These are so common that even a casual glance at the stuff will generally reveal several examples, Or So I Heard.
  - The single worst instance this troper has seen was a QMA hentai doujin in which a girl was taken from the front (vaginally) and behind (annally) at once, and the two penisses rubbed against each other inside her. IN THE SAME BODY CAVITY. Epic fail.

Fan Fiction

There exists a Futurama fanfic, which shall remain nameless, whose author believes that Rohypnol is a "sex drug" in the sense that it makes the drinker uncontrollably aroused, as opposed to knocking them out for easier raping. Obviously, its use leads to Rape Is Love. One wonders why the author didn't just have them use Torgo's Executive Powder for this.
Horrifically bad types of lubricant get used in slash fics. One instance that stands out involves melted sugar. Did the writer realize what temperature sugar melts at? Even if, by some miracle, they both weathered out the insane heat, it seems like the fact that it's going to feel essentially the same as sandpaper in a few minutes would put them off the idea.
- In other fics, peanut butter has been used. It isn't even slippery!
- A Lord Of The Rings Slash Fic involved honey. Honey. Honey isn't slippery, it's sticky.
  - One fic did this one worse, specifying that it was cold honey, overlooking the fact that that would make it extremely thick and viscous.
- One hentai comic used cake as lubricant - or least the implication of it.
  - Cheese Cake?
- There are so many examples of this that some people have started playing Lube/Not Lube.
- And there's a Live Journal community for collecting crazy examples.
Two separate entries on FanFicRants, months if not a couple of years apart, complained of fics featuring the use of glue as lubricant. Hopefully, they were talking about the same fic.
- A Tenipuri fanfic had vodka used as lube. Even if it were slippery... the burn oh god the BURN.
- A Fire Emblem fanfic had a drunken duo use someone else's conditioner. Granted, that stuff is incredibly slippery, but, depending on the conditioner, it's also likely to hurt like hell... Anyway, never under any circumstances use shampoo, or shampoo/conditioner. Just ... don't.
- And engine oil, as seen in one piece of otherwise quite good original erotic fiction, probably isn't a good idea either.
A Fullmetal Alchemist slash fic wherein one character's orgasm was described as "barely taking the edge off". Ladies, just because we don't come with much of a cool-down period ourselves...
A Kingdom Hearts Akuroku Slash Fic where an empty beer bottle was used as a dildo. A beer bottle. With little to no lubricant involved. (It's led to a variety of mocking icons, such as this one.)
- Apparently that happens quite often in real life. This troper has seen some hilarious examples on a medical forum, including amusing X-rays of the stuck object.
- And while on the topic of KH badfic, who can forget LOL have a potion?
An Inuyasha fic mentioned on Weepingcock claimed that a character orgasmed five hundred and sixty-two times in three days. Someone worked out that that adds up to once every eight minutes, with no breaks to sleep. Even assuming that demons could possibly have more, er, physical stamina than humans and are physically capable of doing so, wouldn't it get boring after about the tenth time?
- The erotic poetry of the troubadour Duke William IX of Aquitaine (grandfather of Elanor of Aquitaine) makes this Older Than Feudalism. In one, a man pretends to be mute so that two women will have their way with him thinking he will be unable to tell anyone. His exploits involve a completely ridiculous number of encounters (188) with these women while they are all locked in an oven...but it is spread out over 41 days, meaning four or five times in a day. Much better than once every eight minutes, but still excessive when you keep doing it for that long.
There is a Luke/Mara fic called A tangled web that memorably lampshades this where Mara actually thinks during her first time "She had done every athletic endeavor offered by Imperial Intelligence, trained in every form of hand-to-hand combat, rode every four-legged beast in the galaxy that a saddle could be thrown over and her damn hymen had still been intact. It wasn’t fair".
An unnamed story referenced on FanficRants had one memorable problem.
"Nonononono, vaginal secretions do not come out of the clitoris!"
This delightful fanfic features the penis ENTERING THE CLITORIS. There are no words.
"Heather then stretched her cheeks apart and stuffed Lindsay's vagina in the anus, and let Lindsay's cum shoot into Heather." The author of this, and several other So Bad Its Horrible Total Drama Island fan fictions seems to be a 12 year old boy who's never even so much as glanced at a porno magazine in his life, because another of his works seems to imply that he beleves girls have balls.
There's a DragonForce Sam/Herman fanfic that fails on so very many levels. To summarize:
- You can't get pregnant from oral sex. Especially not if you're a man. Not even if you have a "womb implant".
- If you did get pregnant, you would not have morning sickness a few hours after the act.
- If you pass out from hypoxia after fellating someone too hard, you're probably doing it wrong.
"We went on the bed and started making out naked and then he put his boy’s thingy in mine and we HAD SEX. (c is dat stupid?)"

Film

Selene and Michael's infamously awkward sex scene in Underworld: Evolution. The way their bodies are positioned, Michael is basically making love to Selene's stomach, though they were sensible enough to photoshop out his penis. This scene is particularly awkward when you realize that Kate Beckinsale is married to the director, who obviously would have been watching the whole time.
- Which might be why it was so unrealistic.
During Jack and Ennis' first sexual encounter in Brokeback Mountain, Ennis simply applies a little saliva to his penis and starts plowing away... not such a good idea when having anal sex in real life.
You don't go ass to mouth!
A lot of movies have the characters thinking that interrupted intercourse (the guy pulling out before ejaculating) is a good, safe way to prevent pregnancy... It is not. This goes along with the misconception that condoms fail all the time when used properly they are, in fact, one of the best ways to prevent both pregnancies and STDs.
- In fact, if Scrubs has taught us anything, it's that friendly fire on the outlying village can still get a woman pregnant.
  - To quote the webcomic Filthy Lies: "Joseph just needed good aim on his money shot."
  - In class, we once found a year old condom in a coat pocket, filled it with water until it was the size of a grapefruit, dropped it out of a second story window and it didn't break. Yeah.
- In addition, coitus interruptus, condoms, the pill and very occasionally the diaphram are treated as the only contraceptives available, even in actual Sex Ed scenes. The Depo-Provera shot and contraceptive implants are rarely mentioned. This may be because writers don't have any reason to keep up with current trends in contraception, or because a set-and-forget, 99.9% effective contraception rules out a lot of potential plotlines.

Literature

Lampshaded in the Discworld novel Pyramids. While watching obscene tattoos on a large sailor's arms, Ptraci recognizes the scenes depicted and comments that one of them is "anatomically impossible".
- Later, his entire tattooed back is used by the Mistress of the Women as a lesson guide in erotic history for the Pharoah's harem.
- There's a similar gag (though not sexual in any way) on Babylon Five, involving the telepath Alfred Bester and the line "Anatomically impossible, Mr. Garibaldi... but you're welcome to try... any time, any where."
Necroscope uses this trope seriously. The shapeshifting vampires of the series often have sex that involves transforming themselves into massive, heaving conglomerations of Body Horror. They sometimes eat their victims in this fashion.
The "virgins have an unbroken hymen" idea is explored in A Song Of Ice And Fire. It seems to be commonly believed. But Cersei notes that Margaery, being very fond of horse-riding, most likely broke her hymen for perfectly innocent reasons - not that it stops her from framing Margaery as an adulteress with this as evidence. (She's married to a seven-year old.)
The part about the broken hymen is averted in Spine of The World - a girl who slept with a man other than her fiancee doesn't think it will raise any suspicion with all the physical activities of village girls. Pregnancy, on the other hand...
In The Traitor's Hand, Ciaphas Cain HERO OF THE IMPERIUM comes across a room in a Slaaneshi cultist hideout decorated with images one trooper doesn't believe are possible.
- Justified in that the whole point of Slaanesh; horrible, forbidden pleasures.

Live Action TV

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 6. So very much.
The final episode of the second season of The IT Crowd featured Douglas accidentally drinking a "love potion", intended for Jen, which actually turned out to be Rohypnol. Douglas became extremely aroused and chased Moss and Roy around his office.
- Lampshaded in the third season, when a voice-over recapping the events in question pointed out that Rohypnol "would really only make you sleepy".
Glee, Finn is convinced by Quinn that she is pregnant with his child... because he ejaculated at the hot tub that they are in.

Video Games

Here's a little game: try to find an H Game, any H-game, that soundly averts all of the subtropes mentioned above.
- Or H-Anime - bigger pool to pick from, probably same number of total aversions.
  - Or H-Manga. One ridiculously egregious example is the Monzetsu series. '''NIPPLES DO NOT WORK THAT WAY'''
- But if you did, would you really want to play it?
  - Agreed. It could be that the whole point of this is because you can't do it like that in real life.

Web Comics

Parodied in this Questionable Content strip.
Softcore porn fails at Sex Ed, according to Rayne Summers.

Web Original

Oh. Ouch. Clearly the author in question has never even seen a penis...
- This one is worse. Much worse.
- As is this. I'm, sorry, a woman measuring 800-two-400? Inches? Gives a new meaning to the phrase "hourglass figure".
  - For anyone wondering exactly what those numbers mean (in terms of size) that would be 66 2/3 feet-2 inches-33 1/3 feet. To put it simply, her redwood tree sized breasts are being supported by a waist the size of a sharpie and her hips are the size of a large tree. She has grotesque breasts and fat hips (not my idea of attractive).
Cracked has the articles "Seven Supposedly Fun (And Actually Awful) Sex Ideas" and "9 Awesome Places to Have Sex (And the Horrific Consequences)" discuss this.
A significant proportion of Weepingcock posts are about this trope. The other posts are about interesting typos in sex scenes, highly unusual fetishes(we're talking fetishizing the thought of drinking-ale-that-has-been-used-for-an-enema levels of unusual), seriously cracked exclamations(Oh JEEBEEFEESUS!), unintentionally strange descriptions (comparing a woman's vagina to "goo running out of a large sewer pipe" will not endear you to your female readers), and bizarre combinations of all five.
Protectors Of The Plot Continuum have to actually watch the anatomical impossibilities described in the fics they're killing, which goes some way towards explaining why they're all Ax Crazy.
"Did he just-"
"Yes, he did."
"Stick his thing-"
"Yes. He did."
"Into the other guy's thi-"
"YES, DEUCE! HE DID!"

Real Life

Jacob Zuma, ~~a South African politician~~ the President of South Africa who was in charge of solving the country's huge AIDS problem, raped one of his HIV-positive employees without wearing a condom. He then dispensed some unasked for sex advice, saying the risk was low and he took a shower later which "prevented transmission." Because he is a powerful politician (who later become president), he got off scott-free. South Africa has one of the world's highest AIDS rates, partly because a lot of politicians are utterly clueless about it. Horrendously tragically, one of the biggest misconceptions in the country is that if a male HIV victim rapes a female virgin, his HIV will be cured. Needless to say, this leads to untold amounts of suffering, both mental and physical.
- One can only assume, however, that he'll get his just desserts (i.e., showering doesn't cure you of AIDS).
Joshuah Welch, a gay male contestant on Big Brother, once claimed that he didn't have to wear condoms, since he was on the top and only bottoms could catch STDs.
There's this joke that starts sex is just like pizza...
- If it doesn't come in thirty minutes it's free?
- Best hot?
- It involves a topping with delicious sausage?
- Awesome but likely to make a mess?
- Greasy & bad for you heart?
- Great when shared with lots of friends?
- It's round and it's flat and comes in slices?
- Is best enjoyed on a table?
- Can be savoured with utensils or one's two hands?
- After it's done you feel terrible about what it's going to do to your line?
- Even when it's bad, it's still kinda good?
- And when it's good, it's great?
- If you get it delivered to your house it costs more than if you just went out and got it?
- You take it if it's free, even if it's not all that good?
- Takes a while to make and you have to clean up afterward?
- It's better than not having any at all?
- Is often cheesy?
- It's best if you make it with an Italian?
- You need a cutting implement to slice things into manageable pieces?
- You can dunk it in marinara sauce for added flavor?
- Some like it round, some like it square, but the end result is something that gives you indigestion?
- It comes with breadsticks and a big bottle of soda?
- It's tasty, but you'll need some veggies to go with it?
- Is a baked good?
- It's even better when it's cold the next morning?
- It's awesome when you first have it but probably not worth all the possible complications?
- It tends to get stale after a while?
- Observe.
- This troper now really, really wants to make a "loli haet pizza" joke.