What Dr. Sommer Knew That Your Parents Didn’t

BRAVO was the bible. The German teen magazine that ran explicit sex-ed content alongside pop star posters and reader confessions about the first time. Two pages I always went to before anything else: the one where teenagers photographed themselves naked and narrated their sexual debuts with mortifying specificity, and the one where Dr. Sommer answered questions that no one else would touch.

The Dr. Sommer column ran for decades and served as real sex education for multiple generations—because the actual sex education in schools was useless, your parents weren’t saying anything, and the internet hadn’t yet become the catastrophically overwhelming resource it eventually would. The column was actually written by a rotating team of journalists and sexologists, but the name gave it continuity and authority. Someone wrote in with a precise and embarrassing situation, and the column answered it directly, without condescension, without euphemism.

What I remember most is how seriously it took its readers. Teenagers are catastrophically underserved by most advice aimed at them—talked down to, or euphemized into incomprehension, or handed platitudes where they needed specifics. Dr. Sommer didn’t do that. It assumed that young people had real problems and deserved real answers, and it was usually right.

I never wrote in. I read it compulsively. Half the situations described I’d never encountered, and some I would never encounter, but reading them felt like building a map of the possible. What could happen. What you might feel. What you might need to say. There’s something about that kind of comprehensive, shame-free accounting of human messiness that stays with you.

The desire it served—to ask a question that’s slightly too specific, too embarrassing, too human for a general-purpose search—doesn’t go away. The question just changes. The need to have someone answer it directly, without making you feel stupid for asking, stays exactly the same.