Not only are young people today getting indoctrinated with abstinence-only miseducation, but the videos they’re watching in health class come from the days of the Feminine Mystique.
(Let me quickly add that this article is kind of irritating. I’m pretty sure it’s written by the same woman (if I remember right) who wrote the “Is Feminism Dead?” article for Time Magazine a few years back, and it gets a little condescending).
During the 50-plus years that sex education films have attempted to decode the mystery of adolescence, their informational content has remained relatively unchanged. In current versions, nods to the apparent sophistication of today’s young people are rarely invoked. Although 12-year-old girls today often dress as if they were college freshman during sorority rush week, the films confine themselves to the subjects of growth and menarche, never dealing with sex beyond a discussion of its clerically prescribed purpose — health education as if determined by the marketers of American Girl.
The consistency of the message, educators believe, reflects the fact that even in a culture where young adult novels include explicit references to sex, children’s ignorance about their own bodies has not diminished over time. Similarly, parents seem as reluctant to initiate the necessary conversations as they have ever been.
Of course, we can’t write an article on adolescent sexuality without referencing this apparent trend of younger girls dressing like sluts. But it does make some important points about films from back in the day… which, unfortunately, are still true of modern sex education:
“Traditionally,” said Rick Prelinger, an archivist who has collected sex education films over the years, “the boys’ films speak of pleasure and the girls’ films speak of puberty as a set of conditions to be endured.”