Many of the films that are shown today focus on advocating chastity and upholding traditional family roles-often eschewing science in the process. states require their schools to have sex-ed programs.
Even though polls consistently show more than 80 percent of Americans support comprehensive sex education, less than half of all U.S. But the most open-minded and detailed classroom sex-ed films were made and screened in the ’70s, and many of those are banned as pornographic now. Today, you’d think that we’d have a much more evolved point of view, embracing films that teach youth about safe, healthy, and respectful expression of diverse sexuality. In the beginning, sex-ed films for teenagers served to reinforce middle-class norms, specifically the belief that sex is only for procreation in the context of a heterosexual marriage.
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Film proved an ideal instructional medium for topics that made people blush, and over the century, movies were made with a wide range of agendas-to prevent VDs from weakening our military forces, to teach teens how to date, to promote birth control in the developing world, and to ward children away from sexual predators.Īfter watching more than 500 sex-ed films spanning 100 years, Brenda Goodman produced a documentary this year called “ Sex(Ed): The Movie” (not to be confused with the recent raunchy romantic comedy “Sex Ed”) that follows the medium’s trajectory in America through the good, bad, and ridiculous. When the first sex-ed films appeared in 1914, no one wanted to talk about sex, but venereal diseases, like syphilis and gonorrhea, were wreaking so much havoc on the American public, filmmakers took on the burden of educating adults about them. (Pamphlet courtesy of the Prelinger Archives) Above: Pamphlets entitled “Growing Up and Liking It!” were distributed to schoolgirls who watched Modess’ film on menustration in the 1960s.
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Top: The 1938 movie “Human Wreckage: They Must Be Told” (later re-released as “Sex Madness”) tells the story of a chorus girl who is promiscuous with both men and women and contracts venereal disease. But sex education actually has its roots in moralizing: American sex-ed films emerged from concerns that social morals and the family structure were breaking down. The movies, in particular, tend to stick in our minds. Screening films at school to teach kids how babies are made has always been a touchy issue, particularly for people who fear such knowledge will steer their children toward sexual behavior.
Today, most American adults can call up some memory of sex ed in their school, whether it was watching corny menstruation movies or seeing their school nurse demonstrate putting a condom on a banana.
How uncool did you have to be to announce the arrival of your period to the whole house? Is it really something you want your dad and brother discussing over potatoes? After all, our school felt girls had to be separated from the boys in our class just to watch this movie. I saw this film in a middle-school sex-education class in 1988, and even though I’d read, “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret,” the movie seemed embarrassingly old and this scene particularly laughable. After excusing herself from the dinner table, the 13-year-old girl begins to shout, her excited voice ringing through her family’s Mid-Century Modern home, “I got it! I got it!!” Her mother, in a Donna Reed-type dress, beams, while her 10-year-old brother looks up quizzically and asks, “Got what?” The boy’s father turns to him and says, brusquely, “She got her period, son!”