DVD Review: Sex (Ed): The Movie

I didn’t have sex education when I went to school, which now strikes me as peculiar since I was in school in the 1980s, a time when it might have been important. But those were the dark days, the Reagan years, when good ol’ Nancy encouraged us to just say No to everything, and Ronald believed AIDS only attacked those who somehow deserved the disease. In fifth grade, the girls in my class were taken to an assembly to learn a thing or two, and were told in no uncertain terms not to share this information with the boys. Seriously. So my friends and I had to figure stuff out on our own, which we did, with varying degrees of success. I don’t necessarily wish I’d had sex education, but I certainly would have appreciated having the documentary film Sex (Ed): The Movie.

Sex (Ed): The Movie documents the history of sex education in the United States. It often has a light, bouncy tone and a sense of fun about its subject, while simultaneously taking that subject seriously. At the beginning of the film, we enter a fifth grade classroom in a public school in Los Angeles, and we watch students watching a film on puberty (and listen to them giggling). A girl asks a very specific question after the film, and is not given a straight answer. Ah, so not much has changed.

The film features many interviews with adults who recall their own sex education, as well as footage from sex education films from various years. There’s an interesting sequence when we get a montage of the title shots from several sex education films, going farther and farther back by year. Just seeing the changing titles gives a clue as to the changing perspectives on the issue, beginning in the present with what is most familiar to us, and going backwards. The film then moves forward from the past, giving a history of how sex education was taught – or not taught – at different times.

The documentary even includes footage from early silent movies, one of which has title cards like this one: “Controlled, the sex impulse, like the horse, may be a source of power and service.” And there is footage from some of the military sex films from World War II, as well as from a Walt Disney cartoon titled The Story Of Menstruation, and a 1974 film with Marcia Brady. Perhaps even more interesting are the stills of posters that depict women as the problem, as carriers of disease. And there’s information on the different messages presented to the girls and the boys in these sexual education films. What is also interesting is how the 1970s films were more open and frank about sex, about masturbation and so on.

The narrator of the 1965 film Perversion For Profit says, “We know that once a person is perverted, it is practically impossible for that person to adjust to normal attitudes in regards to sex.” As much as I’d love to argue with that statement, it’s certainly been the case for me. And in the 1961 film Boys Beware, a boy named Jimmy hitchhikes and is picked up by a friendly man named Ralph. The narrator tells us: “What Jimmy didn’t know was that Ralph was sick, a sickness that was not visible like small pox, but no less dangerous and contagious, a sickness of the mind. You see, Ralph was a homosexual.” Ah yes, back in the early 1960s, when homosexuality was contagious. While it’s easy to laugh at some of the so-called information that was presented in the past, the film also indicates that we really haven’t come all that far in our attitudes. After all, it wasn’t all that long ago that U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was fired by Bill Clinton for her remarks on masturbation; and we still have those ridiculous abstinence programs.

Special Features

The DVD contains two archival sex education films. The first, A Respectable Neighborhood (1961) is about a girl named Emily who runs away from home. She is a tough little girl who listens to jazz and likes to sculpt, and apparently has syphilis. Meanwhile, a group is working on creating a film warning of the dangers of the disease. Ed Platt (yes, from Get Smart) plays a man investigating the outbreak of syphilis. This film is approximately twenty-three minutes, and was directed by Irvin Kershner, whom you might recall as the director of The Empire Strikes Back.

The second archival film is titled Masturbatory Story, Or Coming Of Age, and this one is totally nutty and incredibly funny. Its story is presented as a serious of stills, and the whole thing is set to a folk song. It begins with a grown man pretending to be a child in a bath tub, while the song is about the boy discovering his penis and asking his mother, “Does it know any tricks?” It then cuts to ten years later when he learns the word “masturbation” and has the hots for a girl in his class. “A hard-on in the hall draws attention,” he sings. And then approximately thirteen minutes into the film, the folk song ends, and as the boy finishes masturbating we hear the familiar sounds of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.” The stills are then of rockets and volcanoes and so forth (yes, years before The Naked Gun included that hilarious montage of images in a sex scene). The song is by Chris Morse, by the way.

The special features also include four short deleted scenes.

Sex (Ed): The Movie was directed by Brenda Goodman, and is scheduled to be released on DVD on February 3, 2015 through First Run Features.