Collector’s Weekly presents Slut Shaming, Eugenics and Donald Duck: The Scandalous History of Sex-Ed Movies, exploring the strange, often awkward and puritanical history of education about birth control and disease prevention through the years.
At one point, the Comstock Law even blocked anatomy textbooks; the idea of students learning how their own sex organs function in books was apparently scandalous to Victorians. While social purity leaders urged parents to teach their children proper sexual morals, by the end of the 1800s they were looking to school as the next-best place to teach proper behavior. In 1892, the National Education Association teacher’s union, which was proposing a standard 12-year school curriculum, passed a resolution endorsing “moral education” in schools.
Whoa. Yet by the 1910s, there were already apparently a number of graphic films about venereal diseases — and later on, films about how the “brassy”, low-income girl from under the bleachers would probably be the vector by which “nice boys” spread it to their “nice” girlfriends.
And that’s before we even get into “stranger danger” films:
Former child actor Sid Davis became the driving force behind “stranger danger” guidance films. “Sid Davis is very much his own phenomenon,” says Prelinger, who was friends with the director before his death. “He was a chancer himself. He had been a juvenile delinquent and a bit of a gambler, and he’d made fortunes and lost them. Before he died, he told me the story of how he was working as John Wayne’s stand-in on the set of ‘Red River,’ and he was talking with the Duke about a case of kidnapping and child molestation in L.A. And the Duke said, ‘Why don’t you make a film?’ and staked him money to make ‘The Dangerous Stranger’ (1950), which was the first film about abduction and sex crimes—the sex crimes being suggested, if not shown.
It’s a long read, but an educational and amusing one.