My own sex education was scant. My mother presented me with a leaflet on how banana flies do or don’t copulate. Later, on asking: ‘Mummy, what’s an erection?’ the reply came: ‘It’s when they put a building up.’ Most of my useful sex education took place in the playground.
My own sex education was scant. My mother presented me with a leaflet on how banana flies do or don’t copulate. Later, on asking: ‘Mummy, what’s an erection?’ the reply came: ‘It’s when they put a building up.’ Most of my useful sex education took place in the playground.
However, explicit sex education lessons can be tricky both for teacher and pupil. So videos such as The Lover’s Guide and Seeds of Love could serve a useful purpose at school and beyond.
After watching these two videos, I do not believe they will make any valuable contribution to sex education. The Lover’s Guide is the longer of the two. Dr Andrew Stanway, looking like some suburban dentist with a peculiar hairline, dodgy teeth and badly dubbed words, introduces it. He says he wants to try to get people talking about sex, to banish a little ignorance, guilt and fear. It opens with hairspray-ad couples bouncing through the fields with tinny music.
The tone is naive, the voice-over condescending. The video ranges from boring to truly dreadful with its unintelligent commentary.
We’re served everything from explicit oral sex to intercourse with tinkling background harp – the elevator music is relentless – and commentary that sounds as if it comes from a management training video of How to Get the Best Out of Your Department. All under headings like Arousal, and Fantasy.
Seeds of Love comes as a welcome relief, not least in its mellifluous voice-over. It is much more like a traditional biology lesson. ‘Ignorance of our sexuality is a major contributor to sexual difficulties in later life,’ says Dr Russell Reid, a consultant psychiatrist who wears a white coat and treats psycho-sexual disorders.
His video covers the spectrum of pre-marital sex, promising to look at homosexuality, gender issues and so on in future films. It starts with shots of multiracial kiddies and moves on to five-year-olds playing doctors and nurses; a look at the developing stages of sexuality, mostly in what would appear to be well-dressed middle-class kids who grow up to live in Docklands flats and frolic only with their clothes on until they’ve gone up the aisle.
Whether a video is helpful for sex education must be disputable, but at least this one is more tasteful, gentler, more considered and intelligent, more sympathetic and without all the ghastly music.
