Earlier this week, website Open Culture unearthed a video gem from Disney. The Mouse House created several educational shorts during their heyday, including animations about sex education and family planning (oddly, starring Donald Duck). We feature one of them past the break, along with other vintage clips that offer absurd and inappropriate advice about our bodies, our sex lives, and our health.
Disney’s 1946 film about… vaginas, commissioned by the International Cello-Cotton Company (now Kimberly-Clark, makers of Kotex brand feminine hygiene products), features a bizarre baby with lipstick and a girl about to have a Wild at Heart-esque breakdown in front of her mirror. Periods are crazy, y’all.
Ricky’s mom catches him masturbating and develops a case of diarrhea mouth. She just won’t leave the damn room. Mom is a bit of a creep, but she actually has a few sane things to say. The video is an excerpt from another on our list, but it deserved its own spot. You’ll see.
Once you get past the appalling fact that developmentally challenged people were once called “trainables,” behold the visual weirdness of a grown man sitting with a young boy in a dark, wood-paneled room on a ratty sofa discussing erections. Dig the smiley teacher around the 3:16 mark shouting about penises. And don’t forget, women have “three holes.” (Oh, and Ricky’s encore performance happens around the 13:10 mark.)
Wooden acting during the discussion about the “business of nocturnal emissions” seems appropriate (around the 3:44 mark).
“Say, you know something?” “No, what?” “I had a wet dream last night.” “Wet dream? What’s that?” “Oh, you know, when sperm comes out of your penis.”
Sex ed for the 40-year-old virgin from a VHS rip of a 1980’s porn. A woman advises viewers watching Young, Sweet, & Juicy:
“We’d like to point out that the actors involved in our films do not always exhibit the communication, sensitivity, or intimacy that are essential for sustaining real-life interpersonal relationships. Remember, these are fictional accounts.”
Damn those friendly homosexuals! Hitchhiking in the suburbs used to be safe.
It wasn’t unusual for sex ed films in the ’50s and ’60s to include terrible, horrible information like this.
This doctor rages out on a bunch of sailors for catching VD, and it’s glorious. Taken from a 1942 Department of Defense venereal disease training film.
Real talk (complete with cry face) about masturbation, penis size, and male ego during the Mad Men era.
A supremely melodramatic 1957 short about scandalous makeout sessions and pregnant classmates. We would have cast Joan Crawford or Bette Davis in the part of the mother who briefly, but wistfully laments her lost youth to her daughter.
Exert some control you boozy floozy. A night of dancing and drinking turns extra creepy when a jerk gets grabby and the narrator tells us, “She feels no pain.”
Bonus Video
Financier Charles Keating’s anti-porn propaganda video from 1965 argues against explicit material, which is deemed the cause of violence and depraved sexual acts. It’s unintentionally hilarious, but the funniest part of Perversion for Profit is that Keating was later involved in a massive savings and loan scandal during the 1980s that sent him to prison.