The first time I came across the word “orgasm” was in the advice column of a risqué magazine that had been abandoned by my grandmother’s lodger. As a 13-year-old in 1980, and with no one to ask about this baffling word, I finally found a Compact Oxford English Dictionary and searched for an answer. The closest word I could find was “organism” and I spent several weeks puzzling over what “an animal, plant, fungus or unicellular life” had to do with sex.

It was the legendary agony aunt Irma Kurtz who finally explained to me the real meaning of the word. Her column in Cosmopolitan became my main source of education about sex — and for the other girls of my age. My friends and I read her problems and answers aghast. “My boyfriend wants to do a 69. Is he a pervert?” and “My boyfriend tells me he is a masochist. What am I to expect?” gave us a glimpse into a mysterious adult world of sexuality that terrified and intrigued us.

In many ways women such as me — of the Cosmopolitan generation — are the lucky ones. What we learnt about sex was framed and put into perspective by Kurtz’s frank but wise words of counsel. Fifteeen years earlier there would have been only dire warnings that it would be disastrous before marriage, and possibly insufferable afterwards. Correspondents who dared to raise the topic were sharply informed that it was not fit for public consumption.

Learning about sex was made all the harder because the necessary words were often not at the disposal of the advisers. One “aunty”, Peggy Makins, revealed that the word “bottom” was forbidden in Woman during the 1950s, even if it referred to the “bottom of the garden”.

It was, naturally, the Victorians who first hijacked problem pages as a way to map out the morality of their age, even though the first had been published in 1691 in the Athenian Mercury. Agony aunts considered their primary role not to help readers, but to maintain the respectable tone of their publication and, beyond that, society as a whole. A young woman who wrote in 1935 to Family Star asking if she could give in to her fiancé’s “desires” was lectured on the virtues of “control”.

More than 20 years later nothing much had changed. A correspondent who wrote to Home Chat in 1957 to ask if she could spend the night away at a charity ball with her fiancé was told: “Going off on your own might put a strain on your emotions.”

Even as late as the 1970’s Cathy and Claire, of Jackie, denounced anything stronger than practising kissing on the back of your hand. Taking the magazine’s party line, “Always say no”, they wrote.

But as the influence of the Pill started to spread through society in the 1960s, agony aunts eventually had no choice but to move with the times. Even the sternest remonstrations were not enough to hold shut the floodgates of sexual freedom. The subsequent arrival of more plain-speaking “aunties”, such as Marjorie Proops and Anna Raeburn, meant that agony aunts’ replies become roughly recognisable as the advice we have today.

Although I often gasped, laughed and reeled in disbelief at some of the comments I read in my two years of researching my book about advice columns, I am grateful to them. Without the guiding influence of an older, wiser counsel to interpret information, I wonder what sort of lessons I would have learnt? After all, that same naive teenager searching today for the meaning of the word “orgasm” would turn to Google rather than a dictionary and would find far more than a 13-year-old needed to know.

Tanith Carey is the author of Never Kiss a Man in a Canoe, published by Macmillan, £9.99

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