Last week, in a happy news event that combined both important information about our children’s futures and the opportunity for newspapers to prints loads of pictures of top hot birds with their funbags out, Ofsted — the schools inspectorate — declared that “lads’ mags” are a good source of sex education. “Magazines aimed at young men . . . have helped to redress the balance of advice available to young people,” Ofsted said, momentarily looking up from a picture of foxtress Hayley Parsons, High Street Honey of 2006, and her triumphal tits.

“The problem pages in magazines remain a very positive source of advice and reassurance for many young people,” it continued, no doubt idly perusing Zoo ’s “Booty Bank”, where female readers can send in pictures of their bottoms, clad in candy-coloured pants. “The range of topics and the explicitness in dealing with them have increased in many magazines read by young people,” Ofsted concluded. It then presumably whistled “And how!”, like Mickey Rooney contemplating a stacked dame, with a hat pushed right to the back of his head.

For those of us who got our sex education in an era before Nuts, Zoo and cheerful teenage girls willing to text photographs of their cleavage to multinational publishing companies — with no thought as to copyright ownership — our recollections are apt to bring to mind the Yorkshiremen sketch from Monty Python . Let’s face it: when it came to learning about the wonders of sex, anyone born before 1982 never had it so bad. Women in their seventies will recall that all they were told was “Never let the coalman see your twinkle”, and left to fathom the further business of adolescence, menarche, physical union, climax and conception from there. Men who served in the Second World War, meanwhile, will have had Nature’s greatest wonders covered by little more than a series of horrifying information shorts on the clap, and dispensation to carry a wipe-clean photograph of Lana Turner when on leave.

I have an uncle who, in 1964, was approached by a man on a bus and informed darkly that “Ginger lasses’ got teeth in them”. And those who reached adolescence in the 1980s will have received confused messages from the high-profile ad campaigns of the time and formed a misty impression that sex involved a combination of condoms, gravestones, Aids and the launch of the Apple Mac. (I think this explains the success of the iPod among my generation; we secretly think it’s a sextoy, but don’t quite know why.)

For myself, coming of age in 1991 to oddly coy parents (“We thought you’d already picked it all up off Minder ,” they explained later, vaguely), there still wasn’t — even in the era of Julian Clary’s Sticky Moments — a great deal of sex information out there. What little I understood at the age of 16 came from a mere six sources, three of them novels by Jilly Cooper. I suspect I am scarcely alone in this. I gather that most “old” people’s formative sexual impulses come from maybe fewer than half-a-dozen saucy images, viewed at a developmentally crucial time, later nursed in a bath of potent hormones, until they pretty much comprise the entirety of someone’s sexual preferences. For me, at 16, my sexuality comprised the following:

1. Herbert Viola singing Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing to Miss DiPesto in the TV series Moonlighting — the magic of which moment was ruined by my mother walking in while I was watching it, and my having to talk very loudly so that she couldn’t hear what was actually going on.

2. Emily Lloyd’s character being molested by a naughty uncle in the shed in Wish You Were Here . She was wearing a really well-cut cotton sundress, chewing gum, rolling her eyes and whispering: “You dirty sod.” I’ve based pretty much my entire sexual persona on that, I realise in retrospect.

3. A picture of two hippies really going for it, in “The Wheelbarrow Position”, in my parents’ copy of The Whole Earth Catalogue . You can imagine my relief when I finally learnt about the missionary position, at the age of 23. I was able to abandon the neck-brace mere days afterwards.

4. The complete works of Jilly Cooper. My knowledge of the workings of the female body, meanwhile, had been gleaned from the leaflet supplied with a box of Tampax, which had been stuffed in the hedge outside our house by a sixth-former, and which I read with mounting disbelief. From what I could gather, every month half of the Earth’s population suffered complete mechanical failure and had to be patched together with crude bandages. Indeed, it was merely disbelief, rather than horror, because I inexplicably, yet comfortingly, believed that the whole process would, somehow, be optional, and that I could simply choose not to begin menstruation if I so wished. As you can imagine, on the eventual day of reckoning, I was extremely vexed.

To be frank, compared with mankind’s previously woeful attempts to instruct its young adults in the affairs of the loins — and without everyone concerned dying of embarrassment — lads’ mags really are the best solution so far. Obviously it’s a shame that such knowledge comes at the expense of women being portrayed as hairless, orange, dipsomaniac slop-buckets whose rightful place is on all fours, but I suppose it’s all one step at a time.

All the views not fit to print

All this discussion of sexual matters makes one realise that, in reality, it is not lads’ mags that have fuelled this understanding of sexuality but the internet. In an era when anyone can get access to Google, no question on a sexual matter need go unanswered. No one need flounder in ignorance, or feel alone in his/her sexual preferences, no matter how much of a stark raving filthy lock-upable pervert freak he/she is. Obviously, this has well-publicised downsides, but it has considerable upsides, too. For gays, transsexuals, the elderly, the shy, the isolated, the nervous, the insecure, the disabled and those who might wish to spend all afternoon looking for pictures of Alfred Molina as the evil, multi-armed Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, it has undoubtedly allowed a freedom of expression previously unimaginable. Not that I would know anyone who would do that last thing. That would be very odd.

Arms and the man

Check the web for my favourite shots of Alfred Molina as evil, multi-armed Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2:

tinyurl.com/2ql3ez

tinyurl.com/2p4sj6

tinyurl.com/ 2uacdh

tinyurl.com/2pus4r

I think the best one is the fourth, in which Doc has an amazing fifth arm. Face it: no man has ever been so hot that having extra arms would be a bad thing. I also like his expression in the first picture. He’s clearly spent an enjoyable day being evil, then had a moment of quiet reflection in the evening on realising how problematic finding a well-fitting jacket for a formal event is going to be.

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