Germans take sex education far more seriously than Americans. That is to say, they go ahead and bite the bullet and do real sex education rather than stuffing their fingers in their ears and humming loudly whenever anyone brings up the issue. This was made loud and clear to me in my recent time in Germany.

I spent the majority of my time on vacation in small, quaint German villages. Here’s a view of one of them from the window of a ruined castle.

And here’s another view that I saw posted everywhere through the same small, quaint village.

The top center means something along the lines of “Safety makes it more fun!,” in the lower right “Make it with it,” and in the lower left “Don’t give AIDS a chance.”

Now, not only do we almost never see condom advertisements in public in the US, we certainly never see them posted all over small towns. I’m delighted by this open conversation, and supported by humor! (I mean, really, condoms are supposed to go on bananas, not lemons, yes?)

And, as a fun side note, I found this image while searching for a good reproduction of the advertisement above and just had to include it. Gotta love that pubic hair!