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Generation sex: Reconfiguring sexual citizenship in educational film and video

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Generation sex: Reconfiguring sexual citizenship in educational film and video

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Content GENERATION SEX: RECONFIGURING SEXUAL CITIZENSHIP
IN EDUCATIONAL FILM AND VIDEO
by
Christie Milliken
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(CINEMA-TELEVISION - CRITICAL STUDIES)
August 2003
© 2003 Christie Milliken
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UMI Number: 3116756
Copyright 2003 by
Milliken, Christie
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This dissertation, written by
Christie Milliken
under the direction o f h er dissertation committee, and
approved by all its members, has been presented to and
accepted by the Director o f Graduate and Professional
Programs, in partial fulfillment o f the requirements fo r the
degree o f
d o c t o r o f p h i l o s o p h y
Director
Date A u g u st 1 2 , 2003
Dissertation Committee
Chair
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION:
Speaking of Sex
CHAPTER 1:
Progressivism and the Governmentality of Sexual Hygiene
in the World War I Era
CHAPTER 2:
Continence of the Continent: The Ideology of Disease
and Hygiene in Film of the WWII Period
CHAPTER 3:
Sex Education in the Classroom: Teen Sexuality and
the Construction of Sexual Citizenship in the Postwar Era
CHAPTER 4:
Challenging the Domestication of Sexual Consciousness:
Rebellious Youth, Misbehaving Women and Critical Pedagogy
CHAPTER 5:
Practices of Ignorance and Knowledge: Rethinking Sex
Education in the AIDS Era
CONCLUSION:
Sex Education and the Historical Present
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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36
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315
381
389
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ABSTRACT
This dissertation examines modem forms of sexuality via its representation in educational film
and video produced over the past eighty years in Canada and the United States. From the WWI
period up to the AIDS epidemic and the resulting social, economic, technological, cultural and
sexual transformations that take place over this time, I trace the historical evolution in how
sexuality is represented and taught, and how this public discourse informs our private
experience of sex. My project examines sexuality from a social constructionist perspective,
interpreting it as simultaneously a cultural, historical, public and personal experience. I
demonstrate how the under-theorized field of educational film and video organizes sex and
sexuality through a dense web of words, images, practices, beliefs, concepts and social
activities in a complex and changing history, framing our understanding of sex, sexuality and
pedagogy within culturally-specific and ever-changing constructions of human experience in
modernity.
Given that sex education film strives to define, categorize, examine, evaluate,
distinguish, standardize (and normalize) appropriate and inappropriate behavior amongst
people, one might argue that pedagogy is ultimately the most important version of reproduction
that any culture can muster. To this end, I address some of the curious coincidences between
human and mechanical reproduction, combining theoretical methodologies from feminist/gender
theory, the history of education, critical pedagogy, image literacy as well as both fiction and
nonfiction film history, theory and criticism. I concentrate on the evolution and transformations
in educational/ documentary film form; how we represent and teach sexuality in visual terms;
how this category of film relates to contemporaneous issues of educational theory; and how
these pedagogical strategies are visualized and transformed over time.
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The driving questions that remain integral to my dissertation address the ways in which
discourses of race, class and gender inform theories of sexuality. This is particularly evident in
the shift from institutionally produced films in the World War eras, to the development of
profit-driven companies in the business of producing educational materials, to the
democratizing production of alternative nonprofit media forms by a variety of communities both
inside and outside institutional contexts.
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Introduction: Speaking of Sex
Since Christianity upped the ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of
virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking
peculiarly inconsistent attitudes.
Susan Sontag “The Pornographic Imagination” (1969)1
The central issue, ...is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex, whether one
formulates prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its importance or denies its
effects, or whether one refines the words one uses to designate it; but to account for the
fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions and
viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about
it and which store and distribute the things that are said. What is at issue, briefly, is
the over-all “discursive fact,” the way in which sex is “put into discourse.”
Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume I (1978)2
Sexuality is without the importance ascribed to it in our contemporary society (Western
capitalist); it is without that importance because it does not exist as such, because there
is no such thing as sexuality; what we have experienced and are experiencing is the
fabrication of a “sexuality”, the construction of something called “sexuality” through a
set of representations - images, discourses, ways of picturing and describing - that
propose and confirm, that make up this sexuality to which we are then referred and held
in our lives, a whole sexual fix precisely.
Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (1981)3
As various historians of sexuality have recently argued, the particular construction of that
experience we call “sexuality” goes back only a little over a hundred years. This, of course, is
not to say that this “thing” we call sexuality — the human experience of the sexual — is anything
new. But the word itself, and the attendant assumptions and meanings belying that term, only
begins to appear toward the end of the nineteenth century. In The Sexual Fix, Stephen Heath
establishes this date roughly around 1889, in a set of medical treatises of Clinical Lectures on
the Diseases o f Women. In his examination of the medical source for that appearance, Heath
argues that the term “appears but has no content, no conception, no theory; it points precisely to
a problem, to something needing to be understood, not to any understanding.”4 Of course, the
implicit understanding is not only the notion of sexuality as a “problem” per se, but the
sexuality of women as the problem most pointedly. Heath goes on the argue that by the time
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2
Freud publishes his Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality in 1905, discourse on the term has
developed sufficiently to allow its inclusion in a title for a work, something that would have
been impossible in the Victorian era where essays on the subject might be called “the
reproductive function,” “the generative organs” and so on:
On the one hand, the sexual inasmuch as it can be envisaged, is a medical topic, kept
within the strict limits of reproduction, bounded by the ethics of a profession extremely
careful of its social reputation... On the other hand, there is the pressure of the sexual, a
problem, and awareness of something that is now difficult and that can only -- that
must — be understood as medical, contained ideologically and institutionally (in the
practice of doctors, for example) within medical representations as illness, disorder,
disturbance of the individual.5
Sexuality, in other words, emerges as a word at the same time that it emerges as a
problem. While Heath perhaps overstates his case by ignoring, for example, the Victorian-era
publication of one of the first treatises on sexology, Psychopathia-Sexualis, by Richard von
Krafft-Ebing originally published in 1893, his point is well-taken especially insofar as sexuality
becomes increasingly scrutinized and regulated my medical discourses by the end of the
nineteenth century. Most of the pioneering theoreticians of sex and sexuality at this time were
medical men, indeed they were white, middle-class, presumably heterosexual men, whose
standpoint has had a profound impact on the ways in which gender, sexuality, and — by
implication - race and class have been interpreted historically. For my purposes, a pivotal
moment in this history of sexual citizenship therefore begins with the pioneering work of these
men of science who developed the ‘science’ of sexology toward the end of the nineteenth
century.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the birth of cinema coincides with the birth of both
psychoanalysis and sexology movements throughout Western Europe in the end of the
nineteenth century. All share a common, historical, cultural and social background shaped by
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3
the forces of modernity. From shifts toward technological modes of production and enhanced
scientific technologies at this time, themes of social efficiency become a dominant trope in (and
justification for) sex education. Tenets of industriousness, efficiency and social engineering
embodied changes in the construction of power: not only in the physical landscape in which
people lived and worked, but also in the proliferation of discourses and forms of
individualization that segmented people into discrete attributes, behaviors and identities.
Because it highlights the tensions both within and between political traditions, sex education
simultaneously brings into relief the complex interplay of ideologies that negotiate the
boundaries of state intervention. While the politics of sexuality responds to both real and
symbolic issues (with sex frequently attached to social concerns related to hygiene, purity,
contamination and disorder), political movements attempting to change sexual values and
practices appear to flourish when an older socioeconomic system is dismantling and a new one
is taking shape.
The development and growth of the social sciences during this era is indicative of the
ways in which empiricist, “objectivist knowledge” came to be used as a classificatory system by
means of which individuals were increasingly governed and self-regulated. That this period
saw the development of such regulatory systems as the science of sexology (which inaugurated
the use of the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in the 1890s),6 and the bell curve (also a
product of the late nineteenth century)7 as methodological approaches for statistically
measuring, quantifying and organizing “normality” makes sense. Other statistically organized
categories, such as intelligence quotients, became standardized for their use-value in
constituting a measurable category of the educated subject. Employed to an unprecedented
degree by the U.S. Army during WWI - when over 1.75 million recruits were examined -
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intelligence testing enjoyed an enormous boom in the postwar period, especially as it was
adopted by industry and by many educational systems.8 Indeed, this professional penchant for
testing and classification, described by one critic as “an orgy of tabulation”9 may have remained
largely within the educational profession had it not been for the historical intervention of World
War I and the subsequent, widespread administration of intelligence and other skills tests at that
time. From today’s perspective, many aspects of the so-called “science” of statistics-based
approaches to measuring, defining and ranking people according to their supposed genetic gifts
and limits has been heavily (and rightfully) criticized, most notably by Stephen Jay Gould in his
book, The Mismeasure o f Man, for being profoundly sexist, racist, classist and thus
fundamentally aw/Z-democratic.1 0 Within the social, political and economic contexts of earlier
decades of the last century, however, these debates were somewhat less transparent.
The idea “knowable man,” of deploying measurable, examinatory procedures to do so,
the statistical measure of population, the study of “life”, medicine and the history of sexuality
all evoke the work of Michel Foucault whose ideas influence this project in a range of ways
beyond measure. While his unfinished series on the history of sexuality is a more obvious
influence from the outset, other projects such as Foucault’s work on govemmentality and the
carceral — particularly Discipline and Punish — have also offered innumerable insights that
inform, indeed shape the project I undertake here. This dissertation examines modem forms of
sexuality via its representation in educational film and video produced over the past eighty
years in Canada and the United States. Beginning with the WWI period and the resulting
social, economic, cultural and sexual transformations that took place in this era, I trace the
historical evolution in how sexuality is represented and taught, and how this public discourse
informs our private experience of sex. Grounded on the idea that sexuality is simultaneously a
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
cultural, historical, public and personal experience, I demonstrate how the under-theorized field
of educational film and video organizes sex and sexuality through a dense web of words,
images, practices, beliefs, concepts and social activities in a complex and changing history. My
analysis of sex education films enables me to situate our understanding of sex, sexuality and
pedagogy within culturally-specific and ever-changing constructions of human experience in
modernity.
Sex education film strives to define, categorize, examine, evaluate, distinguish,
standardize (and normalize) appropriate and inappropriate behavior amongst people. One
might argue that pedagogy is ultimately the most important version of reproduction that any
culture can muster. To this end, my dissertation addresses some of the curious coincidences
between human and mechanical reproduction, combining theoretical methodologies from
feminist/gender theory, the history of education, critical pedagogy, image literacy as well as
both fiction and nonfiction film history, theory and criticism. I discuss the evolution and
transformation in educational/documentary film form; how we represent and teach sexuality in
visual terms; how this category of film relates to contemporaneous issues of educational theory;
and how these pedagogical strategies are visualized and transformed over time. The driving
questions that remain integral to this project address the ways in which discourses of race, class
and gender inform theories of sexuality. This is particularly evident in the shift from
institutionally-produced films in the World War eras to the development of profit-driven
companies in the business of producing educational materials, to the democratizing production
of alternative nonprofit media forms by a variety of communities both inside and outside
institutional contexts. Alongside these questions are the concerns I engage regarding cultural
practices vis a vis education and critical pedagogy. For example, to what extent have theories
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of critical pedagogy taken us beyond the commonsensical notion of education as the production
and dissemination of knowledge? What role can media studies/image literacy play both inside
and outside the classroom? In terms of sex education more specifically, how do the various
subgroups of films/videos reflect the sociological and cultural shifts in our conception of how
we learn? How do changing theories of pedagogy coincide with changing conceptions of
identity and, by implication, sexuality? Given the recent trends which show an upsurge in HIV
transmission statistics in North America, in what ways has AIDS education forced us to
reconceive these models?
Beyond these questions are those which circulate around film/video representation more
broadly. If we take one of the foundational principles of Western philosophy — that the
acquisition of knowledge is fundamentally linked to the visual from Plato’s luminous, shadowy
cave onward, what can we say about the pedagogical “value” of an apparatus so predominantly
(and problematically) contingent upon ways of seeing? Indeed, Plato’s cave metaphor has been
taken up by many film theorists, most notably Jean-Louis Baudry’s ideological critique of
passive spectatorship vis a vis narrative cinema.1 1 Yet in the context of educational film and
video practices which incorporate both fiction and nonfictional modes, does pedagogical value
rest more properly within the domain of “documentary” value? Indeed, is not the cinema
studies/cultural studies field precisely about ways o f seeing and thus, by implication, ways o f
learning? Is the primacy of vision that we accord to knowledge in Western culture at the heart
of pedagogic vision? What of the cinematographic apparatuses deployed in the service of such
“enlightenment,” especially given the often-overlooked fact that early cinema was largely
inspired by the scientific potential of the medium?1 2 What can we make of these recurring
metaphors which link knowledge acquisition to light, luminosity and enlightenment? Given the
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technological advances in medical science and imaging technologies which have taken place
over the course of the past century and a half, how has the primacy accorded to the visual been
undermined by the shift away from mere clinical observation to techniques of immunology,
microbiology, microscopy, and the like? We assume that the contemporary commercialization
of sexuality, which has made images so much more available to the public over the course of
the twentieth century, to have changed our ideas about sex and sexuality, but how? Is sexuality
really such a “special case” as Susan Sontag maintains?
(Auto)biography and Experience
I suspect like all dissertations (and other projects, research or preoccupations of similar
duration and magnitude), this one is tinged with the biographical. The transition from (relative)
ignorance to self-knowledge or from innocence to experience is an auto-biographical trope and a
cliche that circumscribes our lives generally and sexual lives more specifically. As I researched
the history of sexuality in more depth, I found that transformative moments in the confrontation
between ignorance and knowledge have probably been the primary provocations for such widely
known, influential “sex educators” as Marie Stopes and Alfred Kinsey. As a product the
Progressive era ideologies, Stopes for example, became widely known in Great Britain and
North America after the publication of her 1918 books, Married Love and Wise Parenthood
which advocated birth control and the right for women to achieve sexual satisfaction in
marriage. Curiously, Stopes’s interest in such subjects came from her prior ignorance.
Although she was from an upper middle-class, English family and highly educated (she was the
first Englishwomen ever to receive a doctorate in palaeobotany), Stopes came to an
understanding of sex rather late in life, a circumstance which says something about a more
general ignorance even among college-educated women with respect to such matters at this
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time.1 3 A year after her marriage in 1912, Stopes began to run into some difficulty and
eventually, in 1914, started proceedings for divorce as she grew to learn that her husband was
impotent and that their marriage had never been consummated. Ostensibly shocked by her own
ignorance, she thus began the serious study of sexuality, traveling throughout Europe and North
America as an activist/educator, and went on to open one of the first birth control centers in the
UK, the Mothers’ Clinic in Holloway Road, London in 1921.
A recent biography on Alfred Kinsey suggests that his entry into marriage was marked
by similar ignorance about sex.1 4 Kinsey’s academic training was actually in entomology.
After obtaining his doctorate from Harvard and developing expertise on the gall wasp, he took a
professorship in zoology at the University of Indiana in 1920 where he met and married an
undergraduate chemistry major, Clara McMillen. Unable to consummate their marriage — and
only then after four months and a surgical procedure Clara had to undergo - Kinsey later
confided to a friend that they were both equally ignorant and naive about sexual matters and
blamed Victorian prudery for this lack of knowledge. He and Clara went on to have four
children and, beyond that of course, he famously founded the Institute for Sex Research in
Bloomington after becoming increasingly invested in the topic following his experiences
teaching marriage and family living courses at the university. Vociferous proponents of sex
education for the rest of their lives, the Kinseys enjoyed a “companionate marriage” which
included extramarital sexual relationships and the active promotion of sex education in both the
public and private spheres, dispensing information (beyond the Institute’s more national reach)
to their friends and family, not to mention their own children.1 5
Figures such as Stopes, Kinsey, and American birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger
clearly illustrate what Foucault would characterize as “a ‘political economy’ of a will to
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knowledge” regarding sexuality.1 6 As he argues in The History o f Sexuality, modem western
culture has placed sexuality in an increasingly privileged relation to our most prized constructs
of identity, truth and knowledge:
What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this
opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to
link together enlightenment, liberation, and manifold pleasures; to pronounce a
discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws,
and the longing for the garden of earthly delights.1 7
Foucault goes on to posit that in contemporary society, sex serves “as a support for the ancient
form - so familiar and important to the West - of preaching.”1 8 For my purposes, “preaching”
is easily substituted (and imbricated) with “teaching” and the secularized democratic promise
which undergirds the project of education in our culture.
My impulse to weave together films produced in both Canada and the United States is
an aspect of this project which is indubitably tied to my own experience as a Canadian.
Moreover, the fact that Canada has a longstanding documentary and educational film tradition
which has produced a range of material shown both here and in the United States (and amassed
in archives and collections on both sides of the border) induced me to combine material
produced and distributed in both countries. I have no desire to efface the differences between
Canadian and American “national identities,” nor to erase the significant differences between
Canada and the U.S. socially, culturally, historically, economically or politically, but merely to
proffer that a sustained examination of what constitutes national identity and cultural difference
in a nationalist context is not my goal here. In much the same way that Benedict Anderson has
famously theorized national identity and nation-hood as a form of imagined community, I will
be operating on an assumption that sexuality, similarly, inspires and invents communities (i.e.
gay, straight, queer) that do not exist per se, communities that “are to be distinguished, not by
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their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.”1 9 Interestingly, in his
discussion of the paradoxes that theorists of nationalism have encountered, Anderson remarks
on the universality of nationality as a socio-cultural concept in the modem world in which
“everyone can, should, will ‘have’ a nationality just as he or she ‘has’ a gender - vs. the
irremediable particularity of its concrete manifestations, such that, by definition, ‘Greek’
nationality is sui generis.”2 0 To this I would add that my project here is to examine ways in
which sexual identity is powerfully and complexly interwoven with gender discourse.
Just as Anderson demonstrates that national identity is a historical construct subject to
the vagaries of politics, economics, and power, I subscribe to the social constructionist view
that sexuality and sexual identity are also relatively modem concepts subject to similar leaps of
faith, which can be theorized as imaginary styles subject to similar discursive effects. To
paraphrase Stephen Heath’s quotation from the beginning of this chapter, sexuality only exists
insofar as it is indeed imagined, regulated, fabricated and put into discourse. This social
constructionist model of sex owes much to the groundbreaking work of Michel Foucault’s three
volumes on the history of sexuality, particularly the first volume but also including volumes II
and III, The Use o f Pleasure and Care o f the Self translated into English and originally
published in 1978, 1985 and 1986 respectively.2 1 In these works, Foucault argues that desires
are constituted in the course of historically specific social practices, and supports this view by
tracing the major discontinuities between older kinship-based systems of sexuality and its more
modem forms beginning in what he calls the “classical period” more commonly referred to as
the Enlightenment.2 2 This model emphasizes the generative aspects of the social organization of
sex rather than its repressive elements by arguing that new sexualities are continually being
produced in culture.
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With this in mind, I will take as axiomatic that a shared western capitalist cultural
tradition has generated enough similarities in a value system pertaining to sex and sexuality in
both the U.S. and Canada that I can discuss these two traditions and the pedagogical models
they have deployed with respect to educational filmmaking practices alongside one another.
Since regional differences are impossible to adequately assess in a project of this scope, I would
also add that I am not exploring the differences between French and English Canadian sex
educational material. While early silent films, especially those produced by the American
Social Hygiene Association, were subtitled and distributed in both official languages, the
archival research that I have undertaken has not involved extensive research into French
Canadian sex ed texts which were produced increasingly in the post-WWII era. To be sure,
many National Film Board projects were shot with both French and English language versions,
though I have not extensively assessed that material to ascertain whether content is significantly
altered in the process. This would be an interesting avenue to explore, but one which would
take me in a dramatically different direction from the one I want to pursue here. That said, I
also want to preface my remarks on the important links between Canadian and U.S. sex
educational films vis a vis their form, content and pedagogical tactics, with the acknowledgment
that Canada and the U.S. have very different film cultures.
While a cross-fertilization of practices is probably the best way to establish their
alliances within the educational film canon, one cannot ignore the fact that U.S. film production
has profited from the worldwide domination of Hollywood and its fictional narrational
strategies following WWI. In contrast, one might say that from the inception of the National
Film Board in 1939 under one of documentary film’s chief pioneers, John Grierson, Canada has
had a significant and far-reaching, (arguably global) impact on nonfiction film practices and
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aesthetics. In fact, it was via nonfiction work at the NFB that many of Canada’s fiction
filmmakers initially acquired their technical expertise in an industry that is still relatively
nascent but which certainly showed comparatively little significant development until the
1950s.2 3 Where relevant, issues pertaining to national identity and those attendant cultural
differences in the filmmaking traditions of both countries will be addressed here and, in fact,
can be usefully foregrounded in several of the film and video texts I analyze from the Second
World War in particular. Nevertheless, even in the case of the pioneering use of films to
educate the armed services about venereal disease in the U.S. during WWI, it is important to
note that these films were shown explicitly as educational vehicles for Canadian troops as well.
In this respect, one could argue that sexual citizenship surpasses national boundaries.
Not only were educational films produced for “students” in one country used to inform those in
another, but as companies which specialized in the production of educational films began to
flourish, particularly in the post WWII period with American organizations such as Coronet,
Churchill Films, Encyclopedia Britannica Films and, in Canada, the National Film Board,
Crawley Films, Moreland-Latchford and Associated Screen Studios, there is strong evidence to
suggest remarkable fluidity in the classroom use of educational film across Canadian and U.S.
borders. Film production divisions of publishing houses such as McGraw-Hill were operative
in both countries and routinely produced educational films using experts, technicians and talent
from both countries for use in the classrooms and lecture halls in either side of the 49th parallel.
In fact, some companies, like McGraw-Hill, made a habit of coproducing films using actors,
technicians and educators from both countries, especially with films that were produced to
accompany their textbooks distributed for classroom use simultaneously in the U.S. and
Canada. For example, a 1953 film entitled Social Sex Attitudes in Adolescence (discussed in
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Chapter 3), was shot it both Canada and the U.S., using actors from both countries, and
marketed in conjunction with a McGraw-Hill psychology textbook entitled Adolescent
Development by Elizabeth B. Hurlock (Ph.D.).
From little seen archival material I have viewed at USC, UCLA, the Academy of
Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the L.A. Public Library Film Collection, Library of
Congress and National Archive (in Washington, D.C.), Archive Prelinger (in New York), and
the National Archives and National Film Board of Canada (in Ottawa), I have acquired a broad
perspective on a fascinating area that has been largely ignored by film scholars as well as
education/pedagogy theorists, sociologists, historians and anthropologists. My enthusiasm has
been fueled by the recent publication of Sex Ed: Film, Video and the Framework o f Desire by
Robert Eberwein, which offers a useful catalogue alongside side a sociohistoric approach to a
broad range of film and video texts.2 4 While Eberwein’s book has been very important to my
own research, and several of our chapters inevitably evaluate many of the same (archived) film
texts, my project here pursues areas left unexplored in his book, most notably ideas related to
nonfiction film and educational theory. My examination of the social, historical and political
specificity of various categories of sex education film and video attempts to show how the
cultural specificity of sex is importantly wedded to how and why it is taught to us. It is my
hope that this research and the exchange of ideas that it will precipitate can enhance our
understanding of sex and sexuality as a culturally specific and ever-changing construction of
human experience. To be sure, the recirculation of many sex education films through the
Prelinger Archive as well as commercial outlets such as Something Weird Video in Seattle and
compilation texts from Fantomas Videos among others have led to renewed exposure to this
material. Ken Smith’s recent book, Mental Hygiene, offers a useful filmography of a vast
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output of educational film (including sex ed films) from the 1940s and 1950s, suggesting that
these films may well take on a new life, emerging from the dustbin of history.2 5 While an aspect
of this resurrection is no doubt connected to their entertainment value as glimpses of social
mores that may appear dated, naive or downright outrageous to today’s viewers, I would argue
that the recirculation of these texts may also suggest an important process of cultural
“refunctioning.”
Laura Kipnis describes this process as a form of contestation which, while implicated
in capitalist culture’s perpetual capacity for assimilation, consumption and entertainment, may
also function politically as a means of transforming or interrogating “what is already there.”2 6
The recirculation of these texts beyond the classroom for “entertainment” value or as historical
“curiosity” immediately suggests a shift in their function. While footage from old sex ed films
has shown up in a range films as varied as Standish Lawder’s Dangling Participle (1970),
Heavy Petting (Obie Benz 1989), or Su Friedrich’s Hide and Seek (1996), the purchase or
rental of these old texts for home video consumption suggests a reinterpretation and
transformation of their original “function.” Prelinger has marketed CD Roms of this
“ephemeral” material for the sometimes sinister, always provocative glimpse of social and
cultural history that it provides. I would argue that whatever degree of amusement or
entertainment is provided by these films — some of which are indeed quite funny to watch today
-- they are also suggestible in so many other ways, whether as a “barometer” of how things
have and haven’t changed; the degree to which concepts such as gender but also sex are socially
constructed; the changing view of the nuclear family, even of anatomy and disease. For
example, the clitoris doesn’t show up in anatomical sketches of the female body depicted in sex
ed films until the 1960s. This says much about the influence of such things as the women’s
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liberation movement, as well as the publication of the Masters and Johnson report, Human
Sexual Response (1966), which enables far greater latitude in the public discourse of female
desire.2 7
The concept of refunctioning also invites a consideration of the various metaphors that
have been deployed in the theorization of film. For example, one metaphor derived from the
formalist view seeks to explain the particulars of cinema’s pleasures and powers via the screen
as frame. An idea espoused by people like Sergei Eisenstein, Bela Balazs and V. I. Pudovkin,
the screen as frame reads the contours of the screen image as a template for juxtapositions both
between and within images where montage functions prominently. The screen as a window on
the world is an idea derived from realist film theory’s most famous proponent, Andre Bazin but
is also appropriated to a lessor extent by people such as Rudolph Amheim. John Grierson will
read film as a hammer, the tool metaphor being powerfully implicated in his view of
documentary film’s didactic, transformative sociopolitical potential. Another popular metaphor
used in more recent years has been the screen as mirror, the dominant theme of psychoanalytic
film theory in the Lacanian tradition from Christian Metz, Jean-Louis Baudry, Laura Mulvey
and others. In my project which is so integrally linked to film’s educational function, I
appropriate something from the dark cavernous space of Plato’s cave and its implications for
pedagogy through a metaphor for the screen which suggests its alliance to the blackboard, that
prop long associated with the scene of instruction. Like the blackboard, which is an imperfect
technology, saturated often with chalk dust and interminable erasures evoking the studium and
punctum of Barthes photographic traces,2 8 so the screen as chalkboard reminds us that
education, in a sense, has always been visual; that sex education is an imperfect, highly
mediated set of discursive practices at considerable remove (and yet simultaneously
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indistinguishable) from sex itself, the “act” itself. In the context of sex education film and
video, the image very often functions as simultaneously a screen of vision and concealment, or
dispersion-avoidance, by frequently offering a very singular, normalizing and unavoidably
mediated perspective on the subject of sex.2 9
Sexual Citizenship and the Problem of Truth
At the heart of this western capitalist tradition lie very similar ideas and expectations about the
nature and value of education, a similarity which highlights powerful connections between
pedagogical practices and traditions which have come to shape the meanings we have attached
to sexuality in the past and the present with an eye to the future. In fact, one might say that an
analysis of social practices historically can show the degree to which the sexual is an
overdetermined aspect of the social. This connects to an idea from Jeffrey Weeks in which he
frames history (more pointedly, sexual history) precisely as politics. In Sexuality and Its
Discontents, Weeks argues that understanding the current state of sex and sexuality discourses
is to read them as a particular combination of historical forces. In other words, the attempt to
understand what sexuality means in our culture is “to find out how our current political
dilemmas have arisen, to provide a historical perspective on political decisions, and the see the
present as historical.” In a framework owing much to Foucault, Weeks continues:
If, as I want to suggest, the sexual only exists in and through the modes of its
organization and representation [a point allied with Heath’s epigraph at the beginning
of this chapter], if it only has relevant meaning via cultural forms, then no search for a
founding moment of oppression, nor glory in past struggles around it, can contribute to
an analysis of its current hold on our thought, action and politics. What is needed is a
history of the historical present as a site of definition, regulation and resistance.
History and politics on this reading are not uneasy bedfellows: they are essential
partners.3 0
This interdependence of history and politics will be used to highlight the degree to
which sexuality — far from being a private practice/experience as it is so often described — is
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very much a constituent of the public sphere as well: a product of discourses, images,
representations, regulations, sanctions, prohibitions and scrutinies in and around the subject of
sex. In fact, the history of sexuality over the past several centuries has largely been
characterized by a series of very public panics ranging from childhood sexuality, prostitution,
promiscuity, hygiene and venereal diseases, homosexuality, public decency, pornography,
censorship and, more recently, genital herpes and HIV/AIDS. From this politicized position, I
incorporate the feminist dictum that the personal is political and moreover propose here,
following Foucault, that the sexual has become so provocative a political issue over the past
several hundred years and a vehicle for the contestation of wider social anxieties precisely
because is has come to be so closely associated with the “truth of our beings.” Although
Foucault has famously said little about the specificity of gender relations in this history,3 1 I
argue that to become educated about sex, therefore, seems bound up in processes of
remembering and forgetting, of becoming governed and disciplined according to such processes,
and of assuming identities and activities normalized through discursive practices that are
predicated on assumptions undergirded by notions of sexual and gendered difference.
As Foucault has famously postulated, from the nineteenth century capitalist,
industrialized cultural context of the West, sexuality has emerged under the rubric of a scientia
sexualis (a clinical codification of the inducement to speak of its modulations, frequently via
what he calls the “medicalization of the effects of confession”). This scientia sexualis is
fundamentally linked to a cultural compulsion to speak about sex, as if sex harbors some
fundamental secret at the heart of our being which, in turn, would lead to its becoming an object
of increasing scrutiny:
Thus sex gradually became an object of great suspicion; the general and disquieting
meaning that pervades our conduct and our existence, in spite of ourselves; the point of
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weakness where evil portents reach through to us; the fragment of darkness that we
each carry within us; a general signification, a universal secret, an omnipresent cause, a
fear that never ends. And so, in this “question” of sex (in both senses: as interrogation
and problematization, and as the need for confession and integration into a field of
rationality), two processes emerge, the one always conditioning the other: we demand
that sex speak the truth (but, since it is the secret and is oblivious to its own nature, we
reserve for ourselves the function of telling the truth of its truth, revealed and
deciphered at last)....As unlikely as this may seem, it should not surprise us when we
think of the long history of the Christian and juridical confession, of the shifts and
transformations this form of knowledge-power, so important in the West, has
undergone: the ever narrowing circles, around the question of sex. Causality in the
subject, the unconscious of the subject, the truth of the subject in the other who knows,
the knowledge he holds unbeknown to him, all this found an opportunity to deploy itself
in the discourse of sex. Not...by reason of some natural property inherent in sex itself,
but by virtue of the tactics of power immanent in this discourse.3 2
Foucault’s rejection of the repressive hypothesis is an acknowledgment of its discursive
dominance in distracting us from sexuality as a target of power. Behind the image of the
repressed Victorian prude and his/her restrained sexuality, Foucault sees the development of
elaborate practices of scientia sexualis, the mechanisms by which the proliferation of
discourses have generated procedures of coercion, intimidation and surveillance both by oneself
and by others. Whereas the ars erotica of older civilizations evoked the “truth” of sexual
pleasure from accumulated experience and initiation practices in a top-down economy
implemented through the sovereign will of a master (i.e. the Greek initiation/pedagogisation of
young boys into sexual knowledge and practice by older, experienced men), Foucault interprets
scientia sexualis as a political economy of sexuality based on a will to knowledge. This
knowledge operates increasingly under the rubric of science which is to deliver the “truth”
about sexuality from experts and educators in all manner of instructional discourse. Bodies in
all their dimensions become subject to new and unprecedented scrutiny: measurements are
made, symptoms and treatments are assessed and evaluated, types are catalogued, sexual acts
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are defined and categorized according to a hierarchization and stratification of acceptable
practices, and so on.
An interesting proposal that Foucault offers is the degree to which scientia sexualis
actually now functions as a form of ars erotica whereby the scientific model has multiplied and
intensified in such a way as to generate its own intrinsic pleasures:
It is often said that we have been incapable of imaging any new pleasures. We have at
least invented a different kind of pleasure: pleasure in the truth of pleasure, the pleasure
of knowing the truth, of discovering and exposing it, the fascination of seeing it and
telling it, of captivating and capturing others by it, of confiding it in secret, of luring it
out in the open -- the specific pleasure of the true discourse on pleasure.3 3
What has generally come to be regarded as the “truth” about sexuality has changed
dramatically over the past several hundred years. But if we were to try to characterize a system
of practices as universal, a system which a great many people have tended view as the “truth”
about sexuality over the last several hundred years, the picture would likely consist of an
economy of corporeal practices focused on penetrative, heterogenital, procreative sex. Just as
we have an imagined sense of nationhood which relies on an imaginary notion of shared
community and experience, sexuality has a recent history of being similarly misperceived
according to a limited range of practices imagined or universalized as working for/practiced by
everyone. Sexual citizenship is thus marked by a history of fundamentally heterosexist,
patriarchal principles and practices which have progressively appeared to become more
liberalized, largely through the rhetoric of medical, biological and scientific progress as well as
democratization over time, but which are nevertheless still subject to unequal differentiations.
Industry and Desire
The construction of sexuality upon which this project is predicated, takes as axiomatic the idea
that our culture has undergone a sexualization process as a direct result of transformations in
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the structure of capitalism.3 4 From Foucault, I argue that there has been a heightened
preoccupation with sexuality in all manner of implicit, explicit and diverse forms which has
effectively saturated Western populations over the past several hundred years with a range of
power/knowledge practices ripe for commodification. An argument regarding the
commodification and the consumption of sexuality is forcefully developed by Lawrence
Birken’s analysis of sexology entitled Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence
o f a Culture o f Abundance, 1871-1914. In his book, Birken positions sexology within a range
of nineteenth century scientific developments and traces its evolution through a distinction he
makes between early and later forms of capitalism, between what he calls protoindustrialist and
industrialist cultures. The protoindustrialist phase (from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth
centuries), predates the coming of steam power, mass production and the proliferation of
consumerism and advertising and is marked by the idea of social improvement and an
investment in the value of the machine to facilitate progress and productivity.
Gradually, machines for everything became part of a productivist economic
perspective, particularly during the latter half of the century. According to this model, early
capitalism was structured on the “macroeconomic,” on tasks related to the strengthening of the
ruler and his/her army, then gradually as an end in themselves. As Birken summarizes:
....classical political economy began with production, emphasizing reinvestment and
growth instead of personal consumption. In the course of the nineteenth century, the
culminative effect of this emphasis on production and progress was a series of startling
breakthroughs in technology; steam, rail, telegraph, electricity, and steel were the
prerequisites for an industrial mass culture that began to appear in widely dispersed
areas in both Western Europe and North America....The development in productive
capacity and technology was registered in a shift toward the production of consumer
goods and in a new emphasis on “microeconomics.”3 5
New technologies, for example, in metallurgy and chemistry made possible the mass production
of an increasing variety of necessarily lowcost household goods. Birken illustrates the way in
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which the widespread popularity of the bicycle beginning around 1870 is emblematic of a kind
of “democratization of goods” characteristic of the era. Like the automobile in the twentieth
century, the bicycle in the nineteenth marked a rupture with the past and the beginning of a new
social order which accorded women and children a form of newfound emancipation (since it
disrupted, like the car, the power adults could exert by democratizing space), thus
“necessitating newer and perhaps more subtle forms of control, which took the shape of
ideology.”3 6 Other examples of the democratization of goods which, for my purposes, are
particularly relevant would be the technological shift from celluloid to video and, most recently,
the widespread use of the home computer which now offers the seemingly limitless and
labrynthine pedagogical possibilities of the World Wide Web.
As with the democratizing effect of the bicycle, another important transformation
beginning to take place in the 1870s, is the beginning of what we now know as spectator sports
activities which similarly reflected a new cultural emphasis on leisure, entertainment and the
body. In his historical mapping of the evolution of modem sports, Benjamin Rader argues that
since around 1890, organized sports have gradually evolved from a more “player centered”
mode (what Birken describes as “production-oriented”) to a “spectator-centered” (consumer-
oriented) one.3 7 This, argues Birken, is part of a new stress on spectacle, sensation and play —
embodying both productivist and consumerist values — with a greater emphasis on a
consumerist economic model and its attendant stress on leisure and the body.3 8 This
transformation was integrally tied to the reorientation of economic life and, gradually, the
introduction to issues pertaining to the body, desire and the erotic in everyday culture. From an
insistent ethic of work, asceticism and productivity, capitalism began to shift its emphasis
toward consumption of goods designed to appeal to individual desire and taste and to facilitate
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the creation of ever more leisure time. By the 1920s, items such as automobiles, radios,
telephones, home appliances, processed foods and ready-made clothing propelled the economy
increasingly toward the area of consumption as the work week shortened and work was no
longer perceived as an end in itself, but rather as a means to something else.3 9
This increasing stress on leisure and the body reveals the ever increasing emphasis put
on consumption as a means to absorb the greatly increased productive capacity of industrialized
economies. This point is exemplified by the degree to which advertising came into its own as an
industry in the 1920s, one of the key components of which was (and still is) the incitement of
desire. In their historical survey of sexuality in America, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman
posit that the advertising industry in particular helped to shape a new conception of womanhood
around this time by encouraging women to spend by emphasizing the personal allure which
consumer items would obtain for them. The advertising industry even went so far as to invent
diseases and problems which particular products could then remedy. For example, the Lambert
Pharmaceutical Company made Listerine antiseptic a common household product by inventing
a new disease, halitosis, and then playing upon the romantic fears and desires of female
readers.4 0 Around this time as well, the cosmetics industry showed a huge escalation in profits
by inducing women to purchase products exclusively for the enhancement of their personal
allure, as it rocketed from a $16 million industry in 1914 to $141 million in 1925. From
Hollywood movies, to metropolitan newspaper advertisements (including their advice columns
on love and romance), the advertising industry began to penetrate culture with images
increasingly and particularly designed to incite male desire as well. “More and more of life,”
D’Emilio and Freedman observe, seemed “intent on keeping Americans in a state of constant
sexual excitement.”4 1
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T. J. Jackson Lears has talked about the development of “the culture of consumption”
beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century as reflective of an ideological shift from a
Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial toward a therapeutic ethos stressing self-
realization. This therapeutic ethos, he maintains, is “characterized by an almost obsessive
concern with psychic and physical health defined in sweeping terms.”4 2 Lears sees the genesis
of this therapeutic ethos in the profes-sionalization and growing authority of medicine which,
during the late nineteenth century, became far more pronounced as scientific developments
(especially in germ theory and immunology) greatly enhanced the prestige accorded to medical
practitioners. As he posits:
While urban ministers’ authority waned, doctors of body and mind became
professionalized into therapeutic elites. This meant a growth in influence not only for
traditional M.D.s but also for neurologists, psychologists, social scientists and
panaceas for a sick society, and even for mind curists on the penumbra of
respectability. Ministers and other moralists began increasingly to conform to medical
models in making judgements and dispensing advice.4 3
From an older ethic requiring “self-direction” or “inner-direction’ through adherence to an
internalized morality of repression and self-control, Lears sees a transformation to a newer ethic
of “other-direction” which undermines the solidity of a fixed, core selfhood by “presenting the
self as an empty vessel to be filled and refilled according to the expectations of others and the
needs of the moment.”4 4
This position links to Foucault’s ideas regarding the carceral texture of society in which
he talks about a shift from the age of “inquisitorial” justice to our current age of “examinatory”
justice. The implications of this shift in terms of scientia sexualis are quite apparent, since the
spread of a more examinatory form of justice is powerfully suggested by the growth of the so-
called “sciences of man.” Alongside this carceral network, the ubiquitous mainstreaming of a
sexual sell had the effect of not only alleviating the hold of nineteenth century obscenity codes,
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but also became part of a cultural milieu in which discussion of sexual matters dramatically
increased in the culture at large. Of course, this proliferation of discourses surrounding sexual
matters also led to increased scrutiny and regulation about precisely how the context and
content of the topic was broached. As he proclaims in Discipline and Punish :
I am not saying that the human sciences emerged from the prison. But, if they have
been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in the episteme, it is
because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality of power: a certain
policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men [sic] docile and useful.
This policy required the involvement of definite relations of knowledge in relations of
power; it called for a technique of overlapping subjection and objectification; it brought
with it new procedures of individualization. The carceral network constituted one of
the armatures of this power-knowledge that has made the human sciences historically
possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality, consciousness, conduct, whatever it is
called) is the object-effect of the analytical investment, of this domination-
observation.4 5
As this dissertation will show, the “policies of the body” that get circulated around sexual
practices are indeed increasingly subject to the surveillant gaze of medical and social sciences
over the course of the twentieth century.
Sex, Bio-Power and Life
Another important shift that Foucault observes is linked to a shift in processes of governance
that begin to take place in the transformation from older, more violent forms of power exercised
by monarchical regimes to a more apparently benevolent and effective form of examinatory
social control. In the final chapter of The History o f Sexuality: Volume I, Foucault first
introduces a term he calls “bio-power” to describe this phenomenon. He describes bio-power as
a concept used to designate forms of power exercised over people insofar as they are conceived
as “living beings.” The post-eighteenth century explosion of discourses on and around the
sexual, according to Foucault, was less about our contemporary notion of sexuality per se than
an instrument of examinatory domination in the modem regime of this “bio-power.” This
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deployment of sexuality is interpreted as “an indispensable element in the development of
capitalism” the latter form of which “would not have been possible without the controlled
insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of
population to economic processes.”4 6 Whereas pre-capitalist societies were characterized by
kinship patterns, possessions and wealth in essentially static structures, Foucault sees modem
societies as populations increasingly controlled by the “dynamic deployment of sexuality,” with
groups of people controlled by specific definitions of sensations, needs of the body and qualities
of pleasure. Bio-power is thus understood to be an artificial grouping together of “anatomical
elements, biological functions, conducts, sensations, and pleasures,” a fictitious unity which
came to be understood as a causal principle, “an omnipresent meaning, a secret to be discovered
everywhere.”4 7
Bio-power is exercised in two distinct but inter-related ways. The first is a more
directly disciplinary form of regulation which interprets the body as a machine to be subjected
to various forms of control. This involves the application of knowledge and power over
individual bodies, their behaviors, practices, capacities and so on. The goal of this more
interventionist mode of bio-power is to render the individual both more powerful, productive,
useful and docile. Such practices are found within institutions such as hospitals, prisons,
schools but also at a more microlevel of society within the everyday activities and habits of
individual bodies. These forms of power secure their hold not through the threat of violence or
force, but rather “by creating desires, attaching individuals to specific identities, and
establishing norms against which individuals and their behaviors and bodies are judged and
against which they police themselves.”4 8 The other form of bio-power is what Foucault calls a
“bio-politics of population,” focused on the “species body” which he defines as “the body
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imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes:
propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the
conditions that can cause these to vary.”4 9
Alongside developments in health, medicine and the treatment of disease, populations
gradually began to experience life and its duration under vastly improved circumstances.
Indeed while the specter of death obviously continues, (and indeed still targets the longevity of
the poor most particularly), Foucault argues that the rich begin to assume an interest in the
general health and welfare of the body, and through the body, to population - its birth rates;
marriage rates; its health and proclivity for disease, (especially sexual disease); concern for the
protection, welfare and education of children; the need to identify, treat and categorize
abnormalities, perversions and deviations not solely through juridical or legal interventions, but
through the normative discourses and practices of everyday knowledge and experience. Part of
this shift is described in the gradual shift to the art of government or governmentality which
makes possible the continual definition and redefinition of what we might call the mentality of
government, what is within the purview of the state and what is not, the notion of public versus
private, and so on. Governmentality, then, is the broader configuration of discourses, whose
scope is much wider than older historical forms of government, and is characterized by the shift
from an art of government or governmental rationality (as he calls it) toward political science
beginning in the eighteenth century. In this regard, governmentality seeks to include “almost all
forms of human activity, from the smallest stirrings of the soul to the largest military maneuvers
of the army.”5 0 As he described it: governmentality is “the ensemble formed by institutions,
procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics that allow the exercise of the
very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population, as its principal
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form of knowledge political economy, and as its essential technical means apparatuses of
security.”5 1
From a pedagogical point of view, the concept of governmentality enables a
reconsideration of the ways in which classification systems that define people by age, race,
class/occupation, gender, sexual preference, marital and health status serves to reconceive
individuality through “civilizing processes” which produce boundaries and permissible paths for
appropriate citizenship. This concept will be central to the driving questions which frame this
dissertation, the first chapter of which begins with the earliest genre of sex education on film,
venereal disease propaganda features produced during the First World War. Constructed as
melodramatic morality tales attempting to frame, by example, the plight of their protagonists as
they move from ignorance to knowledge about the consequences of sexual behavior, these films
frame that plight very differently along the lines of gender, with women’s peril most
emphatically positioned in terms of social reputation and moral opprobrium. Men, on the other
hand, are taught to view the specter of disease (from contaminated women) as their greatest
fear. Threaded through many of these dramas are ideas related to eugenics, which enjoyed
particular currency around this time, wending its way into a number of didactic feature films
particularly those on the topic of venereal disease, birth control and hygiene. Such films would
often deal with lower and working-class characters (hence sometimes with race and ethnicity) to
include illegitimate pregnancies, misguided marriages, and so on.
The second chapter of this dissertation examines with the spate of venereal
disease/hygiene films produced during the Second World War, many of which were geared to
those in the armed services. These documentaries, produced institutionally by such
governmental bodies as the Royal Canadian Air Force, the US Navy, Armed Forces, the War
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Department Training Films Division, the Health League of Canada and the American Social
Hygiene Association, are as much a reflection of constructions of racialized nationhood and
national identity as they are about gendered identity. Here I concentrate on how sex
hygiene/VD films reflect a pedagogical model (and assumption) in which the care o f the self
has come increasingly under the scrutiny and management of ideological agendas that
consistently attempt to construct uniformity and purity as constitutive of sexual citizenship. All
of these films can be linked via the relative dominance of medical and moral discourses that are
used to justify their agenda and dissemination.
The third chapter addresses sex education and dating etiquette films directed to teens
and adolescents which begin production in the late 1940s and proliferate in the 1950s and
1960s. The problematic acknowledgment and acceptance of adolescent sexuality and youth
culture is a running theme in these films, many of which concentrate on a model of adolescence
which obfuscates sexuality education by concentrating on the surveillance and regulation of
appropriate gendered behavior, dating etiquette, and conformity within the rubric of marriage
and family living curricula. Produced by various educational film companies emerging in the
post WWII era for distribution and exhibition in the public school system, these films reflect a
curricular agenda which emphatically emphasizes the mental hygiene point of view, stressing
conformity - meaning heterosexual monogamy in the context of martial relations - as well as
discourses of abstinence and “normality.” The mental hygiene point of view marked a shift
away from sex hygiene education with its emphasis on disease and sanitation to a more upbeat,
ameliorative message framed within the contours of what is famously called Family Life
Education. Of course, the social hygiene message continues, especially insofar as young girls
are taught how to be well groomed and to conform to appropriate codes of conduct. In this
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regard, young boys are clearly allowed far greater latitude with respect to sexual expression and
desire.
Effecting a break between 1950s and 1960s films, Chapter 4 evaluates shifts in teen
sex education films through the 1960s and 1970s which includes discussion of the impact of
women’s movement films of the 1970s. I argue that a shift begins to take place from a more
didactic voice-of-god educational strategy to one favoring cinema verite aesthetics, including
consciousness-raising structures and dialogic engagement. Discussion of films increasingly
produced by and for women will highlight a paradigm shift which begins to take place in sex
education more broadly insofar as these films renegotiate concerns and assumptions belying
femininity, female sexual agency, desire and gender difference through the integration of
techniques of critical pedagogy. An important aspect of this trajectory will be the way in which
the so-called “sexual revolution” leads to ideological shifts in the notion of heterosexual
conjugality and the way it is depicted. Of particular concern in relation to films dealing with
female sexuality will be the degree to which second wave feminism, gathering momentum
through these years, is reflected in the rhetorical agenda of mainstream sex education films of
the period. The complicated debates associated with the widespread popularity of the birth
control pill and its effects on sexual practices will be central to my discussion of how sex and
sexual representation is reconfigured and transformed in educational media during this period.
Another important catalyst to the shifts that take place in the structure and content of
sex education films at this time is the fact that, increasingly, they are produced by amateurs and
direct action political groups (including women, racial and sexual minorities). This has as
much to do with sociopolitical developments as with technological ones, including the
development of more affordable, lightweight, portable film cameras and sound recording
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equipment as well as the development and proliferation of video. The changes in
documentary/educational film practices and aesthetics that result from these political,
sociological and technological shifts is further explored through analysis and discussion of
AIDS activist video geared toward and produced by economically, racially and sexually diverse
communities. This final chapter of my dissertation emphasizes how educational practices have
changed considerably, particularly in relation to older VD and hygiene films and their scare
tactics where the display of infected genitalia was a prevalent didactic and strategic method of
instruction. Since HIV cannot reasonably be rendered as a “surface” phenomenon, one might
say that AIDS/HIV education must negotiate simultaneously a crisis of representation as well
as a representation of a crisis. My discussion of HIV/AIDS video also bookends with the issues
that begin the production of sex ed on film in the 1910s including issues of othering,
scapegoating, moral panics surrounding promiscuity and sexually transmitted diseases, concern
with the health of populations, and the hope of moving images to facilitate education.
From well over two hundred films and tapes I have viewed as source material, I have
continually returned to a chronological structure as a way of organizing this dissertation. This
enables me to frame the formal and thematic trends in sex education films alongside
transformations in narrative film, documentary film form, theories of pedagogy, shifting views
about sexuality and desire, and the rise of identity-based politics. The cultural history within
which I frame these films contributes to the ever-expanding theorization of documentary,
especially as it overlaps with emerging ideas about the documentary tradition and its relation to
knowledge acquisition, argument, persuasion and desire. Moreover, the troubling questions
surrounding narrativity, documentary and “the real” get deployed throughout the sex education
film/video canon via strategies such as the spectacle of diseased bodies, as well as through
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fictionalized, case studies which often function like melodramatic morality tales or (in
hindsight) amusing profiles of an unreal, bourgeois ideal.
The interpenetration of techniques ranging from the propagandistic/didactic Griersonian
documentary tradition to cinema verite to French New Wave narrational strategies shows the
breadth of filmic techniques deployed in the service of cinematic sex education. More recently,
the appeal to MTV style/music video aesthetics in videos produced for various youth
subcultures represents a significant trend which complicates outmoded attempts to read the goal
of documentary in terms of purity or minimally-mediated representations of the “the real.” Sex
ed film and video is not only a significant way of broadening the scope of documentary studies
by unearthing a whole “genre” of relatively unexplored material: this dissertation is also
contributing to scholarly trends toward interdisciplinarity. While the history of sexuality is
most obviously read in terms of social, cultural, medical and scientific history, this project
suggests a link that has all too often been ignored in film studies proper at the same time that it
is simultaneously a grounding assumption: that the study of film (documentary, narrative and
avant garde) is fundamentally about learning. To this end, theories of pedagogy are crucial to
this project and, I would argue, to media studies more generally, in spite of the fact that this link
has often been an assumed but unacknowledged or underdeveloped one. The very existence of
the Production Code, to give one famous example, is predicated on a pedagogical assumption
that film as powerfully implicated in knowledge acquisition, imitative behavioral patterns, and
the philosophical problem of conduct. It is my hope that educational theory will wend its way
into documentary studies and media studies in a more direct, perspicacious fashion. This
project represents a preliminary move in that direction.
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Notes
1. Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” Styles o f Radical Will (New York: Dell, 1969),
reprinted in A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Strauss, 1982), 213-214.
2. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume I (New York: Vintage, 1980), 11.
3. Stephen Heath, The Sexual Fix (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), 2-3.
4. Ibid., 11
5. Ibid., 13
6. Jonathan Ned Katz traces heterosexuality’s “invention” through an analysis of medical journals and
literature of the late 1890s. While Foucault has pointed out the designation of the homosexual as “a
species” in this era, Katz adds that this designation, by necessity, required the formation of attributes
and characteristics against which homosexuality was to be measured and defined. By constructing an
argument around the historical invention of heterosexuality, Katz destabilizes this “norm” against
which all other sexual practices and behaviors have been codified and measured. See The Invention o f
Heterosexuality (New York: Plume Books, 1995), 19-32.
7. See Richard J. Hernstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in
American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
8. Intelligence testing, to the disappointment of many Canadian psychiatrists, was not used extensively
within the context of Canadian expeditionary forces, nor did it enjoy the popularity within education
and industry accorded to Canada’s neighbors to the south. For more on this see Angus McLaren, Our
Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990).
9. Cited in Cremin, The Transformation o f the School (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968), 187.
10. Stephen J. Gould, The Mismeasure o f Man (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981); Paula Fass, “The
IQ: a Cultural and Historical Framework,” American Journal o f Education Volume 88, (August
1980), 431-458.
11. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Theory
and Criticism: Introductory Readings (Fifth Edition), eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 345-355.
12. F. A. Talbot’s early text, Moving Pictures: How They are Made and How They Worked first
published in 1912 points out that “in its earliest stages the value of animated photography was
conceded to be rather in the filed of science than that of amusement.” In Screening the Body, Lisa
Cartwright argues that “the long history of bodily analysis and surveillance in medicine and science is
critically tied to the development of the cinema as a popular cultural institution and a technological
apparatus.” Cartwright’s project goes on to demonstrate how the history of cinematic motion study is
powerfully implicated in the history of the human body. While her project and its Foucaultian position
has certainly informed my own, Cartwright’s emphasis is on medical films and imaging produced
specifically for a scientific audience. See F. A. Talbot, Moving Pictures (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott,
1912), 18; and Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’ s Visual Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 3. Another recent book which offers important contributions to
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reassessing film history in terms of its connection to medical and eugenic science is Martin Pemick’s
The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death o f Defective Babies in American Motion Pictures Since
1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
13. Insofar is issues of knowledge and ignorance are concerned, one might argue that it is precisely
her middle class respectability which could account Stopes’ ignorance with respect to sex. Stereotypes
of Victorian prudery and the lack of information accorded to middle class women may indeed have not
been so prevalent among the working classes, who were certainly assumed to be considerably more
knowledge about the subject. In fact, one of the main concerns of reformers in this era was the
regulation of “ill-advised, unwholesome” sexual knowledge which was perceived to have been
acquired by women in the workplace, hence by working class women in particular, since middle class
women generally worked exclusively in the private sphere on the home. For an excellent discussion of
these differing perspectives on class and sexual knowledge among women, see Cathy Peiss, Cheap
Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York, Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1986, especially Chapter 2.
14. See Alfred C. Kinsey: A Public/Private Life, by James H. Jones. (New York: W.W. Norton &
Company, 1997). In this exhaustive analysis, Jones discusses at length Kinsey’s homosexual
proclivities and his particular penchant for masochistic practices. While he concludes that the
sexologist is ultimately gay, I’m not altogether convinced that this is not a rather narrow view of what
might better be called bisexuality activity and practice.
15. An article excerpting key moments in Kinsey’s life was published by James Jones in The New
Yorker. See “Annals of Sexology: Dr. Yes,” (Aug. 25 & Sept. 1, 1997), 98-112.
16. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality Volume 1, 73
17. Ibid., 7
18. Ibid., 7
19. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 6.
20. Ibid., 5
21. My citations from The History o f Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction are from the 1980 Vintage
edition of the text originally translated by Random House in 1978. See also Michael Foucault, The
History o f Sexuality, Volume II: The Use o f Pleasure (New York: Pantheon, 1985); and The History o f
Sexuality, Volume III: Care o f the Self (New York: Pantheon, 1986).
22. For a brief discussion of this terminology see Luther H. Martin, “Foucault, Freud and the
Technologies of the Self,” Technologies o f the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, ed. Luther H.
Martin, Huck Gutman, Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 125
23. A recent text which offers a useful summary of this history is by Christopher E. Gittings entitled
Canadian National Cinema: Ideology, Difference and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2002).
24. Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video and the Framework o f Desire (New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1999).
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25. Ken Smith, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-1970 (New York: Blast Books, 1999).
26. Laura Kipnis, “Repossessing Popular Culture,” Ecstacy Unlimited: On Sex, Capital, Gender and
Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 15.
27. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little, Brown,
1966).
28. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981).
29. Another metaphor which my Foucaultian perspective induces me to avoid developing at length is
the notion of the screen as “mystic writing pad” which is suggested but left undeveloped by Jean-Louis
Baudry in “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” 345. In his essay “Freud
and the Scene of Writing,” on Freud’s conception of this metaphor for the human psyche, Jacques
Derrida offers a compelling discussion of the scene of writing in terms of such a technological
apparatus. Describing the apparatus as one that does not run by itself but by means of something else
Derrida states that it is “...a mechanism without its own energy. The machine is dead. It is death.
Not because we risk death in playing with machine, but because the origin of machine is the relation of
death” (227). The unity of life and death, of inscriptions, traces, and erasures suggested in so much of
Freudian theory, is provocatively developed by Derrida in several passages he cites from Freud. One
of the most interesting ideas, for my purposes, is the link Freud offers between sex and mechanical
apparatuses: “It is highly probable that all complicated machinery and apparatuses occurring in
dreams stand for the genitals (and as a rule male genitals), in describing which dream-symbolism is as
indefatigable as the joke work.” Cited in “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” Writing and Difference
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 229. My direction, like Lisa Cartwright’s, will
privilege the motion picture apparatus and its fundamental preoccupation with the signifiers of life,
however imbricated such traces are, inevitably, with death.
30. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents: Meanings, Myths & Modern Sexualities (London:
Routledge, 1985), 10
31. For useful rereadings of his work in this regard see Jana Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault:
Feminism, Power and the Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); Biddy Martin, “Feminism, Criticism
and Foucault,” New German Critique Vol. 27 (1982), 3-30; and Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes
for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality ed. Carol S. Vance (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 267-319.
32. Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume 7,69-70
33. Ibid., 71
34. A provocative link between capitalism and sexuality is suggested by Stephen Heath when he
chronicles the history of links between sperm and money (i.e. the money shot of conventional
pornography). He points out that the common Victorian term for a climax of sexual pleasure is “to
spend”: “‘I spent’, the running theme of the most detailed sexual memoirs of the century, Walter’s My
Secret Life. ‘I spent’: sperm and money. The physiological economy of the body has its reflection in
the commerce of bodies, the prostitution of women for the expense of men.” See The Sexual Fix, 14
35. Lawrence Birken, Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence o f a Culture o f
Abundance, 1871-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 118.
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35
36. Ibid., 119
37. Benjamin Radner, American Sport, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1980.
38. Interestingly, Birken goes on to argue that these simultaneous productivist and consumerist
tendencies make sport a highly ambivalent enterprise, “upholding masculinity and self-discipline on
the one hand and transsexuality and self-indulgence on the other.” Why consumerist values become
attached, oddly enough, to transsexuality is left unexplained. In a book which otherwise has nothing
to say on the subject this is indeed a curious and problematic accusation. See Birken, Consuming
Desire, 119.
39. For a more detailed discussion of these transformations, see John D ’Emilio and Estelle B.
Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988).
40. Ibid., 278
41. Ibid., 279
42. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots
of the Consumer Culture, 1880-1930,” The Culture o f Consumption: Critical Essays in American
History, 1880-1980, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon,
1983), 4.
43. Ibid., 6
44. Ibid., 8
45. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison (New York: Vintage Books,
1979), 305
46. Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume I, 141
47. Ibid., 154
48. Sawicki, Disciplining Foucault, 68
49. Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume 1, 139
50. Paul Rabinow, “Introduction,” The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon,
1984), 15.
51. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Eds.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 102.
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Chapter 1: Progressivism and the Governmentality of Sexual Hygiene
in the World War I Era
It is one of the great failures of society...that on the subjects of rational sex hygiene,
prostitution, and venereal diseases, the very great majority of young men have no
background whatsoever, excepting one supplied by the streets and by obscene
stories....It is up to the government to supply this background not given by their civilian
life...to educate these boys on the vital subjects of reproduction, sex hygiene, and
venereal diseases, etc., in the teaching of which their parents and home communities
have been so woefully negligent.
William Zinsser, Director of CTCA Section on Men’s Work,
19181
It is...not to be expected that women will shrink from facing calmly any internal
situation which has to do with the wellbeing of the country. There is no reason to fear
that women cannot bear to know the truth concerning one of the greatest problems
which confronts our nation at this time: That is, the peril - physical, mental, moral - in
the prevalence of diseases which unfit men and women for happiness and success in
any walk of life, which disqualify thousands of young men for active duty -
temporarily or permanently - which interfere with industrial efficiency, and which
bring unhappiness and misery to countless homes. Indeed, it is the belief of many of us
that conditions never could have reached their present state if discussion on certain
questions had not been taboo and if it had not been held for so many generations - for
centuries even - that women should not know the real truth in regard to sexual
relationships and the perils of sexual irregularities.
Katherine Bement Davis, “Social Hygiene and the War II:
Women’s Part in Social Hygiene,” 19182
In this chapter, I will focus on Progressive reform issues of hygiene, sex education and
government interventions into practices of everyday life. While I discuss several commercially
produced films deemed to be edifying and educative in these respects, I will end the chapter by
concentrating more specifically on two government sponsored sex hygiene films produced
during the First World War, Fit to Fight/Fit to Win and The End o f the Road. Although these
are certainly not the first films to be made on the topic o f sex hygiene, as I will discuss in the
pages to follow, I hope to demonstrate how the production of government-sponsored hygiene
and venereal disease training films during this era conforms to the expanding rationalization and
instrumental reasoning that underlies modernity, what Foucault calls the “productivity” of
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power. This power, I argue, is implicated in the Progressive era’s faith in scientific progress
and management at the same time that it is grounded in a moralizing discourse that harks back
to a nineteenth century melodramatic mode of narration.
By connecting the interests of government to the public health of its citizens, I will
frame these works in the context of Foucault’s notion of governmentality. As I argue in my
introduction, Foucault describes this evolution as a series of tactical shifts which make possible
the continual definition and redefinition a mentality of government which extend beyond the
mere reach of juridical procedures to the regulation of population even at the microlevels of
self-surveillance and household governance. As he puts it:
Governing a household, a family, does not essentially mean safeguarding the family
property; what concerns it is the individuals that compose the family, their wealth and
prosperity. It means to reckon with all the possible events that may intervene, such as
births and deaths, and with all the things that can be done, such as possible alliances
with other families; it is this general form of management that is characteristic of
government...3
In this regard, governmentality is an ensemble which allows the exercise of power in the
interests of the “common good,” which Foucault says basically refers to a state of affairs where
all subjects “obey the laws, accomplish the tasks expected of them, practise the trade to which
they are assigned, and respect the established order so far as this order conforms to the laws
imposed by God on nature and men.”4
Since governmental interest in issues related to venereal disease and hygiene was
precipitated by the fear of large numbers of military personnel who would potentially be
rendered ineffective due to disease, we might understand the proliferation of sex and hygiene
instruction which took place particularly during the two World Wars in its relation to the
phenomena of population, national security and governance. Under the rubric of national
defense (or to use Foucault’s term “apparatuses of security”) and the preservation of national
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identity and values (since the war effort necessitated patriotic emphasis on the nation over the
individual), sex education became implemented and standardized to an unprecedented degree via
discourses surrounding population and its control -- how it is measured, organized, statistically
arranged, and categorically defined within a range of power/knowledge systems. From a
pedagogical point of view, the concept of governmentality encompasses ideas about how
classification systems that define people by age, race, class/occupation, gender, sexual
preference, marital and health status serve to reconceive individuality through the common
good of civilizing processes which produce boundaries and permissible paths for appropriate
citizenship.
Alongside the development of new technologies and discourses for measuring people,
film begins to be utilized in this period as an educational resource for the governance and
organization of populations. With the outbreak of World War I, nationwide efforts in both
Canada and the U.S. to control venereal disease were spurred after both governments
discovered its widespread incidence among draftees. The Canadian Expeditionary Force
(CEF), notoriously, had the highest rate of infection among the troops in the Western European
theater as the war began in 1914.5 While both governments deployed pedagogical tactics such
as lectures, pamphlets, and, in the case of the U.S. camps, stereomotographs,6 when the United
States entered into the War in 1917, the U.S. Congress enacted a comprehensive venereal
disease program and began to experiment with the use of films to educate draftees and enlisted
men about hygiene and venereal contamination.7 As the U.S. Assistant Surgeon to the Navy
Department Commission on Training Camp Activities argues, “The ‘movie’ maintains its
unique reputation of entertainment-educator. A great amount of ‘education’ which the public
will not otherwise swallow is today successfully administered via the sugar-coated
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cinematograph pill.”8 Moreover, this medical doctor also cites Progressive era research to
defend the benefits of visual education:
Psychologists have demonstrated that about seven-tenths of all knowledge is acquired
through the eye, and that three-sevenths of such knowledge is remembered, whereas
only one-seventh of knowledge gained through other channels is remembered. The
shortest route to the brain is via the optic nerve.9
Assistant Surgeon Kleinschmidt’s remarks here reflect the profound faith in scientific and
statistical measure so characteristic of Progressive ideology convinced, as he is, of psychology’s
capacity of calculate knowledge acquisition down to quantifiable fractions.
The graphic sensationalism which is characteristic of so many venereal disease
propaganda films relies very heavily on what Ben Singer characterizes as modernity’s
“aesthetic of astonishment.”1 0 Singer cites the work of Stephen Kern in this regard, who
isolates the period from around 1880 to the end of World War I as “a watershed moment in
which ‘a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of
thinking about and experiencing time and space.’”1 1 As Singer surmises of the marvels of
modernity:
These decades saw the most profound and striking explosion of industrialization,
urbanization, migration, transportation, economic rationalisation, bureaucratization,
military mechanization, mass communication, mass amusement, and mass
consumerism. Given cinema’s birth amidst this context, not surprisingly this is the
temporal definition of modernity that most recent film scholars have stressed in thinking
about “cinema and the invention of modem life.”1 2
The power accorded to the visual, indeed the visual sensation of the motion picture as a mode of
instmction is implicated in a moralizing tone which mns through many (indeed most) films of
this sort where a prominent pedagogical tactic is one of fear. This fear is most efficiently
exercised through a common trope: the visualization of diseased genitals and other signifiers of
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bodily disease and decay which have the effect of standing out - in relief - against the narrative
techniques which circumscribe their spectacularity.
This graphic sensationalism is fundamentally melodramatic in its mode of address,
inviting identification, fear/agitation and identification as techniques for conveying information
in ways not unlike contemporary medical dramas. Indeed, as Kleinschmidt argues in
“Educational Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases,” the appeal to fear is a useful and essential
strategy where the appeal to reason, does not “hit the target in all cases, some men being
persuaded more readily by other influences”:
No apologies therefore are made for employing the element of fear as one of the
restraining factors. In fact, the fear of disease forms the backbone of practically every
preventative medicine educational campaign. It is primarily the fear of an enemy which
jolts us into activity and drives us into a state of defense and active warfare against that
enemy. The instinctive fear of death, destruction or disease is the basis of self-
preservation. Why neglect or refuse to employ fear, not as the only restraining
influence, but as one of them?1 3
An attempt to measure the pedagogical effect of both Fit to Win and The End o f the Road is
another reason why they will be the privileged film texts for my inquiry here. In keeping with
the Progressive era’s faith in testing, statistics and measurement, two psychologists from The
Johns Hopkins University were hired in 1919 by the U.S. Interdepartmental Social Hygiene
Board to investigate the informational and educative effects of these films in the campaigns for
control, repression and elimination of venereal diseases. Their report, published in the Journal
o f Social Hygiene as “A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal
Disease Campaigns,”1 4 is best examined in the framework of progressivism’s powerful
investment in the rubrics of science.
In the spirit of Foucault’s argument in Discipline and Punish — that the inventions of
the “examination” and other forms of statistical measure in the modem period enabled the
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development of the “calculable person” as a particular product of quantifiable power/knowledge
relations1 5 — I want to investigate the various discourses surrounding these films, and explore
how these texts invite individuals to act, see, think and see themselves in the world in
specifically coded ways. Before addressing these films, however, some contextualization of the
prevailing ideologies in the early decades of this century surrounding education in general, and
sex education/venereal disease in particular is needed. The main ideas that will be central to
this discussion of the Progressive era will necessitate some discussion how governmentality is
part of the experience of modernity more broadly and how these films reflect that project, most
notably through their deployment of a melodramatic mode which, as I will show, is also
fundamentally pedagogical.
Progressivist Progress?
The search for ways to solve the problem of venereal disease was influenced by several
developments in the relationship between medicine and society, including the professionalization
of medical practitioners who gained unprecedented sociocultural status around toward the end
of the nineteenth century as they became better organized and consolidated as a group bidding
for control of medical education and practice. Another significant development in this era was
the rise in public health movements, a shift very much related to governmentality, and which is
vitally linked to a growing awareness of the way medical problems affected not just individuals
but communities on a broader scale. All of these shifts in the relationship between medicine and
society are integrally connected to the rise of social reform movements which began in the late
nineteenth century and gathered particular momentum at its turn to the twentieth. As one
historian states:
...progressives were enamored of the idea that the modem state could help solve social
problems through rational planning and policy making, an idea they applied to the
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problems of sexually transmitted diseases, unwanted pregnancies, population control,
and the improvement of the genetic stock of the population (racial hygiene or
eugenics).1 6
The “Progressive Era,” beginning roughly in the 1880s in both Canada and the United
States,1 7 is characterized by the profound social, structural and historical shifts brought about
by economic changes within industrialized modes of production. These shifts became
standardized through such devices as technologies of verification (statistics, quotas), and in
processes of governance (including psychological self-governance). Defined loosely here,
progressivism is a nationwide response by the middle class to the vast changes provoked by
industrial capitalism. While it is by no means a unified movement, progressivism may best be
understood as a diverse (even contradictory) configuration of principles, practices and ideas for
social reformation. These reform ideas attracted a range of thinkers across a broad spectrum of
disciplines. For example, though differing markedly in their approaches, the two key figures
associated with the North American brand of progressive reform in the context of educational
philosophy are John Dewey and William James. Whereas James, a longtime professor of
psychology at Harvard, is noted for his incorporation of the emerging “science” of psychology
with Peircian pragmatism into his pedagogical method, Dewey is most famously associated with
his 1916 treatise entitled Democracy and Education (still in print) which argues that the basis
for all democratic education must be scientific.1 8
Progressive reform is most notable for its reliance on science, for its secular rather than
religious orientation; for its attempt to represent “modem,” rational, pragmatic scientific
approaches to understanding and dealing with social problems, and for its unstinting
middleclassness. It is this acceptance of bourgeois (i.e. white male hetero-sexual) culture for
which progressivism is most frequently (and easily) criticized, particularly the degree to which
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this involved acceptance of many traditional, conservative values. Nevertheless, progressive
reform encouraged an unprecedented degree of state intervention within a range of social and
economic practices in the first fifty years of this century. In their book, Intimate Matters: A
History o f Sexuality in America, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman argue that progressive
reform fruitfully addressed a wide range of issues, from the need for playgrounds and housing
codes in urban slums to checking the power of monopolistic trusts:
...the Progressive movement embodies sharply conflicting impulses - social order as
well as social justice, efficiency along with uplift, faith in the power of education as
well as determination to coerce the recalcitrant. Issues of sexual behavior and morality
lent themselves to these contrasting tendencies. Some reformers urged education to
check the spread of vice and disease, while others organized campaigns of repression.
Calls for rehabilitating the victims of commercialized prostitution coexisted with efforts
to punish sexual delinquents. Sponsorship of healthful amusements occurred
simultaneously with movements of censorship. But, however diverse the program, the
Progressive era witnessed the emergence of a full-blown sexual politics.1 9
Progressive education really evolves out of this impulse. As Lawrence Cremin argues,
“progressive education began as part of a vast humanitarian effort to apply the promise of
American life - the ideal of government, by, of, and for the people - to the puzzling new urban-
industrial civilization that came into being during the latter half of the nineteenth century.”2 0 To
this end, the project of education transformed and broadened to enable the school to play a
much more direct role in health, family and community life as well as vocational training. This
included the increased use of pedagogical ideas derived from new scientific research in the
social sciences and most particularly, the new discipline of psychology.
The privileging of “scientific” discourses, akin to Foucault’s notion of a scientia
sexualis as we shall see, is a characteristic linking a wide array of sex education strategies of
the period. Unlike sexual reform efforts of the previous century which had relied heavily on the
logic of moral suasion and the rhetoric of individual self control, D’Emilio and Freedman argue
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that many twentieth century crusaders sought state regulation and intervention to achieve their
goals. This, of course, is not to say that governmental legislation was divorced from moralizing
precepts. The turn to government intervention in practices of everyday life which characterizes
progressive reform is perhaps less about a shift in morality per se than in finding alternative
procedures to implement specific morals and standards in an increasingly urbanized,
industrialized cultural context. Where traditional solutions of community pressure (including
religious inculcation) no longer succeeded as they had in the past, reformers sought both old and
new methods for adapting to life in the modem world.
While reform developments in both Canada and the United States sought to sort out
social and economic developments so as to enhance so-called ‘good’ and eliminate ‘bad’
features of society, they simultaneously and paradoxically sought to preserve the best features
of traditional values and the old way of doing things. This curious mixture of positive and
negative, liberal and conservative measures which characterized progressive reform reflects the
complex conditions of society in transition. Whether the reform impulse was an attempt to
reaffirm and secure old social and moral values (the more conservative side of the reform
mentality), or a more adaptive response of new developments attempting to reorder, restructure
and rearrange the affairs of society (the more liberal side of the reform mentality), both types of
reform are characterized by an increased stress on education. In his book, The Secret Plague:
Venereal Disease in Canada 1838-1939, Jay Cassel positions the reform impetus in relation to
pedagogy:
Reformers believed that if people were better informed they would lead better lives.
Education was thought to be the best way to extend and implement the new wisdom
developed by specialists. It was also seen as the best means to improve social
behavior; it could shape individual conduct by influencing what knowledge individuals
received.2 1
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One of the important consequences of the reform impulse with respect to sex education
is the shift it proposed from the family as the site/scene of such instruction to various
institutional apparatuses as the primary source for the transmission of information. This shift
at the source, as it were, meant not only that the instructors of sex changed, but the conditions,
context, environment and techniques of instruction changed as well. The shift in
power/knowledge procedures meant that not only the how of sex education was altered, but the
what, the subject matter itself, was also subject to new and unprecedented scrutiny. While sex
education did not formally enter into school curriculum at this time, progressivism’s high
profile public discussion of the value of such education won many important alliances to its
cause. The National Education Association, for example, would endorse sex education in
principle in 1912, though it was not until well into the 1920s and beyond that sex education
would begin to enter into school curriculum in a formalized way. As Michael Imber has
argued, the part that progressive era doctors and reformers came to play in the education of
troops (and to a lesser extent, the civilian population) during WWI had the effect of legitimizing
sex education for youth who were the demographic most frequently attached to the problem of
venereal disease by such organizations as the American Social Hygiene Association.2 2 In the
meantime, via such measures as mandatory reporting laws and the widespread implementation
of blood testing before marriage, the primary agents of instruction in the progressive era were
teacher-reformers, activists and the medical profession.
Family Matters: Practices of Medicine and the “Science” of Eugenics
Although sex education began to move out of the familial sphere during the progressive era, it
does not follow that the family itself was exactly surpassed with respect to this matter. In fact,
one of the structures increasingly subjected to governmental intervention to an unprecedented
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degree in this era was the family institution. During the Victorian era, the middle-class family
had developed into an institution primarily devoted to child-rearing and the maintenance of the
home. The development of discourses surrounding childhood which evolved during this period
led to a reconstitution of the family from a primarily economic function (which characterized its
organization in earlier periods) to its increased privatization, given over to the cults of
motherhood, childhood and domesticity.
In an essay entitled “Motherhood, Feminism and Representation,” E. Ann Kaplan
argues that this reconstitution of the conception of motherhood resulted in part from “the
economically necessary transition of certain women out of their role as producers in the old pre
industrial economy into that as middle-class consumers in the bourgeois home. The new
Mother ideology accompanying this transition” she argues, “was to ensure the success of
capitalism as it moved from its work-oriented stage to what would become its twentieth-century
consumer style.”2 3 A key text articulating this new role for motherhood comes from Rousseau’s
Emile (1762) which Kaplan argues, “first articulated the modem Mother ideology in a
comprehensive way.” Written as capitalism was being put into place, Emile introduces a “new
Mother discourse” resulting from the creation of a new social class, the bourgeoisie, which
created the need to “articulate appropriate male/female sex-roles for the changed situation.”
Part of this new Mother discourse included a different view of childhood, since mothering was
now seen to have a profound effect on the formation/creation of future citizens. Of course, the
profound sexism of Rousseau’s position is not lost on Kaplan:
For Rousseau, it is only because the early education of man is in woman’s hands that
her education is important. The girl’s biological processes shape her to be a mother
and require a special attention that has no parallel function for the boy. The very
survival of the human race depends on the woman’s function in cementing the family
through her skills in emotions and relationships. “Naturally” the complement, the
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pleasure and the Mother of man, women should only learn what is “suitable” for her
given role.2 4
Part of the assumed responsibilities of motherhood was the transmission of important sex and
social hygiene information, especially to daughters. Yet even into the twentieth century, the
education of girls continued to exalt procreation as their most important function at the same
time, ironically, that many sought to protect middle-class women from the facts of sexuality. In
sum, girls’ sexual - or more pointedly - gender education was expected to instill this ethos of
middle-class domesticity and the cult of true motherhood. Of course, this ethos was hardly
monolithic.
As the nineteenth century progressed, many observers began to see trends within the
structure of the family which began to threaten this ideal. Alongside a growing tendency
toward later marriages and smaller families was the precipitous rise in divorces in both Canada
and the United States. Many progressive reformers decried these trends as indicative of the
demise of the middle-class family as the foundation of society. Threatened by these heightened
tensions between the sexes, the growing threat of an increasingly consumer-based industrialized
economy and the perceived threat of accelerated immigration, progressive reform sought to
recast Victorian notions of domesticity and individualism by means of increased
external/governmental regulations.
D’Emilio and Freedman argue that the dominant meaning attached to sex and sexuality
undergoes a significant shift from the colonial era (the eighteenth century when it was primarily
concerned with reproduction located more or less exclusively within the institution of marriage)
to the present day. From the emergent middle class in the nineteenth century came a new
association of sexuality with personal intimacy alongside a sharp reduction in that class’s rate
of reproduction. As commercial growth brought sex into the marketplace in the twentieth
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48
century (especially for working-class women and men of all classes), the power of the family
was weakened even further. Individuals rather than families became the primary economic unit
at the foundation of society and the tie between sexuality and reproduction weakened even
further. Moreover, with developments in psychology, the science of sexology and the growing
power of the media (especially cinema), men and women gradually began to adopt the view that
personal happiness was the primary goal of sexual relations2 5 .
In No Magic Bullet: A Social History o f Venereal Disease in the United States, Alan
Brandt summarizes the tenor of these concerns as critics and reformers began to focus on the
decline of the familial institution as their site of concern. Many charged that the American
family, in a flight of selfishness, was failing in its primary responsibility, the reproduction of the
race:
When social scientists reported that couples of Anglo-Saxon descent were falling
behind their immigrant counterparts in producing children, Theodore Roosevelt raised
the pitch of concern by proclaiming that the great white middle class was committing
“race suicide,” borrowing a phrase from the noted sociologist E. A. Ross. Roosevelt
argued that men and women were ‘shirking’ their most important duty to the state.2 6
While these admonitions were addressed equally to both genders, Roosevelt agreed with most
observers, particularly physicians, who suggested that the demise of familial life was largely the
fault of women and their modem denial of the “maternal instinct.”2 7 A key aspect of this
reconstitution of the family came from the “voluntary motherhood movement” of the Victorian
period in which women sought emancipatory control over their reproductive capacities and
began to control/limit unwanted pregnancies.2 8 Although Brandt is speaking specifically of the
context in the U.S. and the recriminations of a former American president, his summary here
applies to similar socioeconomic conditions in Canada as well. Roosevelt’s racist
admonishment of the white middle classes and their failure to fulfil their reproductive duties can
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be read in the context of prevailing progressivist ideologies allied with the eugenics movement
which gained impetus in both countries in the early decades of the twentieth century.
The contradictory issues of voluntary motherhood, birth control, abortion and eugenics
coalesce in a film written and directed by Lois Weber from 1916 which was clearly designed to
help advance the campaign for educational reform. Where Are My Children? presents the story
of District Attorney Richard Walton (played by Tyrone Power), a “great believer in eugenics”
who yearns for a family of his own and his wife, (played by Helen Riaume), who does not want
children. Of course, the films depicts her desire as selfish and she and her bourgeois friends as
frivolous socialites who rely on abortionists to prevent them from dealing with the consequences
and responsibilities of bearing children. Early in the film, Walton defends a man on trial for
distributing “indecent literature” on birth control. This is certainly reflective of the
progressivist arguments in favor of such transmission of information against the old Comstock
Law of 1873 whose powers, beginning in 1915, were slowly eroding.2 9 The film’s agenda,
proclaimed in the prologue, to “Let us stop the slaughter of the unborn and save the lives of
unwilling mothers” is punctuated by scenes depicting the consequences of unwanted pregnancy,
including the didactic spectacle of an insane woman sitting with her malnourished child in an
impoverished tenement as well as a suicide, and an embittered, fighting couple. The narrative
reaches a climax when Walton successfully convicts an abortionist, Dr. Malfit, who is on trial
for murder for his connection to the death of a young woman seeking his services. When the
abortionist is found guilty, he accuses the D A. of hypocrisy and bitterly reveals to Walton that
his own wife had been one of his clients, a revelation which leads to the lawyer’s irate expulsion
of the foolish friends from their home and to the “tragic” discovery that his wife’s previous
abortions have left her sterile. After Walton accuses his wife of murdering his unborn children,
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she repents, though the couple is doomed to endure a childless, lonely existence. As an intertitle
explains, the wife, “having perverted Nature so often...found herself physically unable to wear
the diadem of motherhood.” The flashforward that ends the film shows their long, unhappy life
stretch out miserably before them.
Where Are My Children?, a Universal production where Weber and her husband,
producer Philips Smalley were under contract, was a huge popular and critical success.3 0 While
containing a plea for the legalization of contraception and contraceptive information, the film is
clearly an indictment of abortion, most pointedly its use as a birth control method among
middle-class women, as the scenes depicting unwanted children among the lower classes makes
evident. Weber and Smalley followed the success of this film with another Universal film in
1917 entitled The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (now lost), which failed to meet with similar
praise. The film clearly evoked the then current situation of birth control advocate Margaret
Sanger, as Mrs. Broome (played by Weber) is investigated and later arrested by police for
spreading literature to the poor which advocates birth control. Owing to the influence of Dr.
Broome (played by Smalley), Mrs. Broome is pardoned, continues with her political work, is
rearrested and eventually pardoned again. The film ends with Mrs. Broome and her family
reading that a bill on birth control may pass the Senate of a certain, unnamed state. As Eric
Schaefer points out, the latter film was much more pointed regarding the issue of class in its
melodramatic display of the dire consequences that lack of birth control information has upon
the poor.3 1 This film, coupled with the criticism lodged against a film entitled Birth Control
(1917, now lost)3 2 in which Sanger herself appeared, meant that this volatile topic would be
removed from the commercial motion picture screen for some time, as a consequence of various
“obscenity” accusations and scandals that coalesce around Hollywood films and their stars,
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leading to the implementation of self-censorship that will eventually take the shape of the
Production Code. Nevertheless, the complex alliance between the eugenics and birth control
movements in this period remained.
The term eugenics was first coined in 1885 by Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911), a
cousin to Charles Darwin, whose theory of sex selection is credited with the emergence of more
scientific interest in sexual matters beginning in the late nineteenth century. Galton’s 1869
book, Hereditary Genius won him considerable public attention with its argument that
intellectual abilities were transmitted over time. In fact, he was among the first to assert that
“intelligence” was a scientifically meaningful and measurable concept subject to the vagaries of
inheritance. He used the term “eugenics” to describe “the study of the agencies under social
control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or
mentally,” asserting that a statistical approach to populations — if used to encourage selective
breeding -- might solve the social issues and dilemmas that beset his native Britain.3 3 Galton’s
work tended to concentrate more on judicious marriages, encouraging large families among the
wealthy and gifted. While it was others who would take this line of thinking to a much further
extreme, arguing that high birth rates of the poor and less intellectually endowed were a threat
to civilization, the momentum behind eugenics was nevertheless based on a crisis of the middle
class; on concern over the differential in birth rates between native-born citizens and vast
numbers of newly arriving immigrants that seemed to plague many social reformers of the
period.
Since the ostensible function of eugenics was the promotion of public health —
including the reproduction of a healthy, prosperous race and the improvement of the inborn
qualities of offspring via hereditarian selection — it is no surprise that the medical profession
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came to take an active role the advocacy of these ideas. In his book, Our Own Master Race:
Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945, Angus McLaren suggests that physicians had much to gain
by linking hereditarian concerns with public health issues. Historicizing the doctor-patient
relationship over time, McLaren outlines the low social status accorded to the medical
profession in the early 1800s, where working classes either could not afford their help or
shunned their services altogether, and middle class patients frequently had more confidence in
home remedies than in the ministrations of physicians.3 4 By the late nineteenth century,
however, the doctor-patient relationship underwent a dramatic transformation. With the
discovery and popularization of germ theory (and ensuing discoveries in microbiology and
pathology) toward the end of the nineteenth century, doctors were suddenly provided with the
sort of evidence they needed to support their contention that they were scientifically and
uniquely qualified to make pronouncements on the real causes of disease.3 5 Proving themselves
adept at securing what was close to a monopoly in providing medical services by the turn of the
century, they simply extended their power in benefitting from the startling advances made in the
biological sciences, which stressed more and more complex processes underlying the spread of
disease. Quick to point out the fact that by no means all medical practitioners were attracted to
the eugenic cause, McLaren proposes that those who were drawn to its argument were
nonetheless as much fueled by preoccupations with professional power as by disinterested
scientific curiosity.3 6
Though venereal diseases were not transmitted through germ plasms or genes in a
strictly hereditarian sense, many doctors began to frame them as a eugenic interest because of
their influence on the future of the race. Indeed, it is interesting to note how venereal disease, as
a social construct, became the locus for so much activism and organization in the progressive
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era. In effect, venereal disease was framed as the cause of many of the social dilemmas that
reformers sought to address. As a result, fears about the impact of venereal diseases on the
future of the family led many doctors to ally with the eugenics movement in the first decades of
the twentieth century. One of the chief motivations for the enactment of “eugenic marriage
laws” in both Canada and the United Sates at this time is concern with the spread of venereal
disease although, to be sure, the reproduction of the “feeble-minded”3 7 and those predisposed to
epilepsy, deaf-mutism, tuberculosis and other diseases is also a part of this impetus.
All of this added to the growing power accorded to the medical profession which
capitalized on public preoccupations with these diseases/ailments to argue that even those
contemplating marriage should consult a doctor. Allan Brandt cites a 1911 editorial in
American Medicine which states:
No apology will be required for presenting certain phases of the question [of marriage]
as topics for medical discussion, and it will be freely conceded that the modem
physician should be as concerned with these as with anything else that has any bearing
whatsoever on the mental and moral as well as the physical welfare of human beings.”3 8
This editorial goes on to suggest that the new trend for women to seek careers outside the home
severely reduces the numbers of “suitable” brides, concluding that marriage of these particular
women should be actively encouraged. This tripartite domain of the mental, moral and physical
to which many physicians attached themselves was particularly fueled by the specter of
venereal diseases in light of increased knowledge of their etiology and procedures of diagnoses,
as well as growing awareness of the impact of these diseases on the family.3 9 It was primarily
out of fears about the impact of venereal disease on marriage and the family that many
physicians considered it their responsibility to protect the institution and to ally themselves with
various social and moral reform movements gaining momentum during the period.
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The Black Stork (1916, currently existing in a paper print only)4 0 is a film that deals
with both eugenics and venereal disease. In a book length study on eugenics and the complex
interplay between early motion pictures, medicine, and public health issues, Martin Pemick
describes the film in ways that conform to progressivism’s complex and contradictory linkages
between medicine and morals, as the film opens with a prologue which depicts “defectives” as a
“repulsive, dangerous, and costly menace to society”:
The film dramatizes a centuries-old argument for selective human mating, visually
contrasting care in breeding livestock with neglect of human health and eugenics.
Through statistic-filled titles and striking visual juxtapositions, these scenes combine an
argument for making the success of livestock breeding a model for human selection,
with a critique of the government for spending more money on veterinary than on
human health, and an equation of human defectives with subhuman beasts.4 1
The main narrative then goes on to follow the contrasting lives of two couples. Despite a stem
warning from his doctor, Claude decides to marry his sweetheart Anne. Claude, it seems, has
an unnamed “hereditary” disease resulting from his grandfather’s affair with a “vile filthy”
slave which clearly attaches an “othered” class, race and gender bias to the specter of disease.
The contrasting story presents upright, middle-class Miriam, who believes her mother to have
had hereditary epilepsy and so refuses to marry her boyfriend, Tom. Of course the outcome for
Miriam’s “prudent restraint” is that she discovers it was only her stepmother, not her biological
mother who had epilepsy, so she is free with her “new, clean pedigree” to pursue her marriage
and to produce a clean healthy baby. Claude’s selfish refusal to listen to Dr. Dickey’s stem
warnings leads to the birth of his and Anne’s defective baby on whom the doctor refuses to
perform surgery, claiming: “There are times when saving a life is a greater crime than taking
one.”
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Pemick describes how the decision provokes “an angry bedside confrontation with two
representatives of the local medical society shown wearing old-fashioned frock morning coats in
contrast to Dr. Dickey’s more modem dress”:
Anne is uncertain what to do, until she receives from God a vision of the baby’s future
- a childhood of misery and rejection and an adult life of poverty and crime, passed on
to a brood of defective offspring, an outcome the film seems to blame on Catholic
opposition to both birth control and eugenic sterilization. Her son’s feeble mind finally
snaps under the burden of his deformities. He shoots to death the doctor who had
operated to save him in infancy, the doctor who had “condemned me to live.”
Horrified by this premonition, Anne agrees to withhold treatment and the
infant’s tiny soul leaps into the arms of a waiting Jesus.4 2
While Claude and the baby’s malady remain unnamed, there is a convincing implication that the
disease Claude has contracted from his grandfather is a venereal one, probably congenital
syphilis. That the film simultaneously advocates the secular “faith” in science and medicine to
guide reproduction is ironically underscored by Anne’s premonition of the baby’s future and an
appeal to religious faith in the “justice” of letting the baby die with a vision of his celestial
afterlife.
Venereal disease was frequently linked to issues pertaining to infant mortality and birth
defects at this time, since it was viewed as a major contributor not only to preventing the birth
of viable infants, but to causing the births of many mentally defective children. Indeed many
reformers argued that the prevention of ‘feeblemindedness’ could best be secured by putting an
end to VD.4 3 As part of prevention efforts they had organized around the rhetoric of advocating
purity and denouncing promiscuity and prostitution, social hygienists developed strategies of
trying to tackle VD by targeting ‘foreigners,’ prostitutes, and the ‘feeble-minded’ as sources of
infection. Indeed, many commentators have observed that discourses of venereal disease and
eugenics became so inextricably bound to one another in the context of progressive reform
efforts as to seem inseparable.
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Disease and Disorder: The Politics of Prophylaxis
Venereal disease appears to have been around since recorded history began. The term
“venereal” related this particular form of disease to sex, since the term comes from “venery”
which means the pursuit of Venus, goddess of love.4 4 More specifically, gonorrhea appears to
have existed long before Galen invented the term in the second century A.D. and is derived from
Greek roots meaning “a flow of seed.” Other forms of venereal disease such as chancroid,
lymphogranuloma venereum, and granuloma inguinale also have a long history, though they
have been confused with other diseases such as leprosy and elephantiasis in past centuries. The
most infamous venereal disease is probably syphilis. According to some sources, the first
recorded reference to what subsequently been diagnosed as syphilis occurred in Naples in
1494-95 when French soldiers garrisoned in that city reported the incidence of tumors on their
genitals. From this, the disease was often referred to as “the French sickness” or “French pox”
and is notable from reaching epidemic proportions during the sixteenth century. As Sander
Gilman notes of iconography depicting those afflicted by the disease at this time, “the syphilitic
is seen as isolated, visually recognizable by his signs and symptoms, and sexually deviant.”4 5
Its name is attributed to Girolamo Fracastoro, a poet, physicist, physician and geologist from
Verona (c. 1478-1553) who published a poem about the disease which recounted its origin in a
blight sent by the gods as retribution for the disloyalty of a shepherd known as “Syphilis” who
lived on the island of Hispaniola (Haiti).4 6
The origins of syphilis have been, like AIDS, clouded in a controversial debate about
its origins. Of course, there are interpretations of the disease as a plague/ punishment cast upon
humanity by some divine force. Another school of thought argues that the disease was brought
from America by Columbus, while others suggests that it has a far older history predating
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European colonization of that continent. As Bullough and Bullough argue, part of the difficulty
in ascertaining its origins lies in the fact that while we recognize that Europeans brought such
diseases as smallpox, measles, typhus, and tuberculosis to the Native Americans, no one wants
to retain the dubious honor of introducing it, given is sexualized connotation in a sex-negative
culture. As they argue:
This reluctance is evident from the numerous attempts to name the disease after others.
In its first outbreak....it was called the “French sickness” although the French insisted
on calling it the “Neapolitan disease.” The Italians and English, nonetheless, insisted
on labeling it “the French pox.” The Turks called in “the Christian disease,” the
Chinese knew it as “the Portugese disease,” and it has also been called the German,
American, Spanish, Syrian, Egyptian and English disease...4 7
Other names associated with the disease beyond nationalized attribution, such as “great pox”
were historically used with some frequency, especially to contrast the disease by the
comparatively less stigmatized “smallpox.”
While theories of its origin were varied and there is a long history of divergent ideas
regarding the sources of infection, that many of these diseases displayed a symptomatology
directly linked to the genitals quickly led to theories that sexual contact was one possible route.
Gilman points out that pre-Enlightenment imagery tends to depict the syphilis via male sufferers
who are understood to be a victim. He argues:
Only in the Enlightenment does the image of the syphilitic patient shift from male to
female, but then only with the female as the image of the source of infection. In the
high Middle Ages, woman was already understood to be both seductive and physically
corrupt...By the eighteenth century, the image of the patient, the individual bearing the
signs and stigmata of syphilis becomes that of the corrupts female.4 8
This association will have a long history into the twentieth century with the scapegoating of
prostitutes as reservoirs for disease. The moral panic surrounding the syphilis epidemic of the
1490s and beyond facilitated by the limited medical knowledge, histories of anger and terror at
disease and its association with Christianity’s ancient and profound anxieties about sex. So
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profound was the stagmatization of syphilis that even the famous public hospital, the Hotel
Dieu in Paris - an institution far more tolerant than almost any other in the fifteen and sixteen
centuries -- took in not only Christian patients, but even Moslems and Jews, but nevertheless
refused anyone with this dreaded disease access to the hospital’s services.4 9 Of course, the fact
that babies and faithful wives also contracted VD meant that a sharp divide began to get
circumscribed around those victims viewed as “innocent” and those viewed as “guilty” for their
sinful behavior. This is a situation replicated in the AIDS crisis as I will show in Chapter 5.
Until modem germ theory (beginning in the 1860s and 70s with the diagnosis of
cardiovascular syphilis) enabled us to understand how syphilis affected the internal organs, the
seriousness of the disease was grossly underestimated. In addition to this, that VD retained this
longstanding stigma as a moral scourge and source of shame tended to mean that it remained
undiscussed in the public sphere in the Victorian era. In fact, it is widely believed that many
physicians (to protect surviving family members of the shame of such diagnoses) would
frequently (mis)attribute many deaths of their patients to causes other than VD, making any
kind of statistical analysis of its history and prevalence in this period virtually impossible. A
particularly odious ramification of VD’s signification as a morally defined malady was the fact
that many Victorian physicians felt that knowledge of its effects and prevalence should be
barred from women, since it would consequently be understood in relation to so many of their
gynecological ailments and hence lead to fewer and fewer marriages.5 0
Another problem was linked to issues pertaining to prognosis. Throughout the
nineteenth century, mercury was relied upon as the primary method for treating syphilis. In
fact, mercury was one of the oldest remedies in use for this and various other diseases from the
sixteenth century onward. That mercury is a poison and could produce severe side effects was
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only part of the problem. Since initial symptoms of syphilis always disappear on their own,
many assumed mercury’s effectivity without the evidence of any hard science to back it up.
When the German physician and researcher Paul Ehrlich discovered a new and more
satisfactory drug for syphilis in 1910, medical science was given a kind of authority over the
disease which it had previously not experienced. Salvarsan, the brand name given to the drug
discovered by Ehrlich, appeared to combat the syphilis spirochete, though only when injected
repeatedly over a long course of treatment (sometimes up to several years). Not surprisingly, it
was often difficult to get patients to follow through with an entire course of expensive
treatment, especially when symptoms seemed to vanish so soon after the first injection.
Educating the general public about the availability and need for treatment, then, became another
project of progressive reform efforts as doctors turned to the progress of science to lend
credence to their claims.
Thus, alongside the growing ranks of moral reformers, charity organizations, church
groups and physicians who began to participate in the social and sexual hygiene movements in
this period, it was the participation of the medical establishment which most particularly helped
to thread together two of the most significant aspects of progressivism’s complex ideology: the
desire for a rigorously defined moral order and a growing reliance on technical/scientific
expertise to maintain it. As Angus McLaren writes:
If doctors came to play an ever more important role in social planning, it was not
simply due to their own efforts. They were increasingly turned to by those in authority
who hoped that the medical sciences could provide more efficient methods of social
management. That the state required such new methods seemed to be demonstrated by
the threats posed by urbanization, industrialization, declining Anglo-Saxon fertility, and
massive foreign immigration. Just as industry was acknowledging the benefits of
scientific studies, so, too, the state was beginning to accept the need of employing
professionals to deal with threatening social problems. World War One offered doctors
a golden opportunity to show the variety of ways in which they could make themselves
useful to government in providing a healthy, disciplined military...5 1
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In Canada, the United States and elsewhere in the Western world, the early twentieth century
marked the triumph of medical authority and concomitant rise in the social and political power
of the medical practitioner. This professionalization of medicine shows up not only in the
eugenic cause, but in the birth of sexology (the first practitioners of which were medical men) at
the end of the nineteenth century, as well as in the social and sexual hygiene movements in the
early twentieth century.
Hygiene, as is the case with the term “health” today, clearly meant more historically
than the absence of pathogens. It contained socially negotiated directives that went beyond the
bounds of scientific study of pathogenic activity per se. Indeed, the social and sexual hygiene
movements in Canada and the U.S. evolved from a combination of the social purity movements
of the late nineteenth century (i.e., Comstock, Y.M.C.A., Y.W.C.A., and the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union)5 2 alongside the socioeconomic and cultural shifts provoked by
urbanization and industrial capitalism. Social hygiene was an approach to venereal disease
prevention including sexual and moral education developed by middle-class reformers in the
early decades of this century. As many historians have noted, social hygiene involved a
complex interplay of “medicine and morals” ranging from such practices as grooming,
etiquette, appearance, eugenics, human growth and development as well as marriage and family
living. These standardized practices or discourses are grounded in an ideological perspective
which relies on the political economy of the body as defined by its social utility. In the same
way, the discourses of “sex hygiene” which pertains more particularly to body cleanliness,
disease and sanitation were embedded with values that, while seemingly neutral, objective, and
scientific, clearly interpreted what it meant to live in a sexually “healthy” manner.
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Both social and sexual hygiene discourses are predicated on the overarching
pedagogical presupposition that knowledge of such matters could provide order to social living
in an increasingly pluralistic society, a progressivist approach framed within democratic
principles undergirded by scientific advancement and statistical measure. While a perceived
“crisis” in white middle-class morality was at the heart of hygiene crusades against venereal
disease by virtue of that demographic’s declining fertility rates and increases in divorce, the
social and sexual hygiene movements were predicated on anxieties about the heterogeneity and
unhygienic nature of burgeoning cities. Part of these crusades included an outright assault on
prostitution which was believed to be running rampant in North American cities at this time.
One outcome of this was the “white slave” panics between 1908 and 1914, a highly
sensationalized series of allegations regarding the widespread traffic in women which led,
among other things, to Congress passing the Mann Act (1910) which forbade the transportation
of women across state lines for “immoral” purposes.
The specter of an international traffic in women added to popular progressivist
sentiments allied both with eugenic causes and with demands for restricting immigration around
this time. In her book, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the
Nickelodeon, Shelley Stamp discusses the widespread popularity of various white slave films
produced during this era, most notably Traffic in Souls from 1913. Stamp described the
curious paradox at the heart of this genre which decries the inherent dangers to women of big
cities and urban spaces at the same time that it panders to an audience ~ largely women — who
went to see these films in precisely those spaces (movie theaters in big cities) where such crimes
were perceived to occur.5 3 U.S. and Canadian legislation on the subject of immigration
frequently touched upon issues of prostitution which meant that prostitutes were not only
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blamed as the source for the spread of infection (venereal and otherwise), but they were also
frequently believed to be immigrant women (naive, poor and desperate). Indeed progressive
unease about hygiene, contagion and cleanliness would frequently be framed as a manichean
battle between poor, working class, unhygienic immigrants and white, middle class, clean,
“natives,” all of which highlights the degree to which venereal disease came, as Alan Brandt
puts it, to be characterized as a “disease of the ‘other,’ be it race, the other class, the other
ethnic group.”5 4
In her book, Cinema, Censorship, Sexuality (1909-1925), Annette Kuhn points out
that both eugenicists and sexologists (such as Havelock Ellis) adopted the term social hygiene to
characterize their approach to social reform. Such a label, she maintains, “had the merit of
imbuing their activities with overtones of scientificity, while stripping them of the philanthropic
and moralizing (in short, the ‘unscientific’) connotations of earlier conceptualizations of social
reform.”5 5 Havelock Ellis pointedly suggests that social hygiene is a positive evolutionary
development of what was formerly known as “Social Reform.” Facilitated by new biological
and medical discoveries, social hygiene is rooted in the sciences of the socio-sexual, combining
eugenics to deal with the problems of the falling birth rate (and feminism’s deleterious effects
upon maternity) and sexology to promote sexual instruction, to inform the legal regulation of
certain sexual behaviors, and a combination of the two to handle the question of married love.
Kuhn goes on to surmise:
The domain of social hygiene, then, is exactly the socio-sexual, which is regarded as an
area to be discovered, described, mapped, understood, and finally reformed with the
assistance of science. Science, in this view, offered a superior approach to the
betterment of society because it was diagnostic: it could predict, and therefore it could
prevent.5 6
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Along precisely these lines, the American Social Hygiene Association was originally
organized in 1913 as a hybrid of the social purity and sex education movements.5 7 In March
1914, ASHA was incorporated as the legal union of the American Vigilance Association (AVA)
and the American Federation for Sex Hygiene (founded in 1905 by a New York City physician
named Dr. Prince Morrow and originally called the Society of Sanitary and Moral
Prophylaxis).5 8 At their inaugural meeting organized by philanthropist John D. Rockefeller in
October 1913, the two groups merged (in accordance with his financial pledge)5 9 to establish
the ASHA with the distinctive objectives of providing “sex education, the suppression of
prostitution and the reduction of venereal disease.”6 0 The Union of these two groups is
characterized by Stacie Colwell as part of a series of mergers undertaken in the Progressive era
“zeitgeist of efficiency” reflecting a radical transformation from the “Comstockery” of the late
nineteenth century and the movement of discussions of sex increasingly into the public
domain.6 1
In spite of the fact that Canadian mobilization takes place slightly later, the history of
U.S. and Canadian social and sex hygiene movements follow similar trajectories. The
Canadian Social Hygiene Council (CSHC, so-named in 1922) was originally called the
Canadian National Council for Combating Venereal Disease, formed as a volunteer
organization in Toronto by Dr. Gordon Bates in 1919. Like Morrow, Bates had been a popular
and outspoken proponent of sex education immediately following his graduation from medical
school at the University of Toronto in 1907. Interestingly, Bates appropriated the
organization’s first title from the U.K. which had its own organization of the same name but
was inspired to change the name of the group following his attendance of the first International
Social Hygiene Conference in New York City in 1918, a nominal shift which might read as
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indicative of the closer ideological ties between U.S. hygiene movements and the tenor of
political organizing which took place in Canada.
Another example which would support this view of the closer sociopolitical alliance
between Canada and the U.S. with respect to sexual practices would be a provision added to the
Defense of Canada Act in June 1917 which made it illegal “for any woman suffering from VD
in a communicable form to have sexual intercourse with any member of His Majesty’s forces or
to solicit or invite any member of said forces to have sexual intercourse.”6 2 When U.S.
Congress passed the Draft Act in 1917, it included a similar provisions which forbade
prostitution within five miles of a military post. Along these lines, a Defense of the Realm Act
was approved in England in 1918 as an answer to the demands of the dominions, especially
Canada, to keep suspect women away from their camps. That this provision was rarely
invoked in the UK is indicative of a somewhat different set of sexual standards in place.
Whereas Canadian and U.S. strategies for the control of VD were based on a social reformist
stance of repression of prostitution and sex hygiene education, those in effect in Europe tended
to place emphasis on prevention and control of disease through medical measures.
The CSHC remained active after the First World War in a variety of sex education
efforts, many of which were informed by the work of Canadian eugenicists. In fact, Bates was
a prominent promoter of the eugenic cause, as general director of the Health League of Canada,
and a member of the Canadian National Council for Mental Hygiene (created in 1918). Bates
based his model for the CSHC on the agenda set by Havelock Ellis in his famous text, The Task
o f Social Hygiene (1912) which implicated the efforts of social and sexual hygiene within the
eugenic cause of building up the race.6 3 As a captain in charge of the venereal disease section
of a military hospital in Toronto during WWI, Bates pressed for a national system of free
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treatment clinics where infected persons (both military and civilian) could obtain treatment. It
was largely over concern about VD therefore, coupled with Canada’s statistically high infant
mortality rate, that the National Department of Health was formed in 1919.
Silence and Speech
The progressivist precepts advocating public health, education and awareness surrounding
venereal disease lead to dramatic transformations in the knowledge of its effects on the sexual
citizenship of Americans and Canadians during the first decades of this century. In fact, it is
largely the impetus of this movement which led to the development of more formalized sex
education efforts in the public sphere whereas previously sex education had taken place
primarily within the private sphere of the family, and through word of mouth, including
exchanges of gossip and superstition.6 4 Indeed the progressive attack against venereal disease is
largely responsible for lifting the “conspiracy of silence” that had surrounded the malady during
the Victorian era and in the early years of the twentieth century. A particularly telling example
of the prevailing morality at this time is the famous instance in which Ladies Home Journal
published a series of articles on VD in 1906 which sparked an outrage leading to the
cancellation of some 75,000 subscriptions.
When Margaret Sanger first distributed her pamphlet entitled What Every Girl Should
Know in 1912, Anthony Comstock confiscated copies being circulated through the U.S. Post
Office by invoking the Comstock Law to declare the document “obscene.” The obscenity, he
charged, was Sanger’s references to syphilis and gonorrhea (though the Post Office was
pressured to lift the ban several weeks later). In 1915, Sanger went on to establish the first
birth control clinic in the U.S. for which she was arrested and later (briefly) jailed in 1916.6 5
Nevertheless, her educational agenda and her pioneering efforts to educate both women and men
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about reproductive choice represents a pivotal moment in the transformations that were
beginning to take place within sexual politics at this time, not the least of which was the
increasing acknowledgment that sex was not strictly or exclusively practiced for purposes of
reproduction. Gradually, as we shall see, the restrictive barriers placed on the dissemination of
birth control information were whittled away — facilitated by Comstock’s death in 1915.
Margaret Sanger’s message was heard far and wide. In Vancouver, for example, a
Canadian Birth Control League was formed as a result of interest engendered by Sanger’s visit
to that city in 1923. Various locations in eastern Canada were quick to follow. On the eve of
WWI, however, the public support for Margaret Sanger and her agenda suggests that the U.S.
and Canada were entering a new sexual era, as the charges levied against her stimulated public
protests and scores of letters of support from people all over the world, including one from
President Woodrow Wilson.6 6 In fact it was the unexpected positive publicity generated in
support of her that led to the charges against Sanger’s “obscene” dissemination of information
being dropped. She became a household name with her first lecture tour in 1916 during which
she turned her defense of birth control into a free speech issue. Birth Control, the 1917 lost
film in which she features, would appear to have incorporated images of her lecturing to crowds
and spreading her message.
As has already been suggested, another important contribution to the changing climate
with respect to discussion of sex, reproduction and venereal disease initiated by reformers in
this period was no doubt the social and political circumstances prompted by World War I. In
his social history of venereal disease, Allan Brandt points out that whereas peacetime generally
sees a silence around the subject of venereal diseases (with the tenor of the discussion
concentrating on moralistic judgements against those who carry and transmit disease),
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twentieth-century wartime activities show a precipitous increase in public discussion of this
taboo subject. Moreover, wartime circumstances generally lead to more pragmatic campaigns
against venereal disease, which concentrate on medical and scientific facts, often downplaying
the sexual significance of VD in order to encourage men to seek early medical treatment. As
part of progressivist practices of govemmentality, the mobilization for war brought renewed
national attention to protecting the health and fighting efficiency of soldiers in the interests of
both population and its regulation as well as national security.
In keeping with the basic tenets of progressive reform, those in charge of the Social
Hygiene Instruction Division of the Committee on Training Camp Activities (CTCA, discussed
below) directed an educational campaign predicated on the essential mutability (i.e.
educatability) of human nature.6 7 This reformist view privileged an educational view of the sex
urge which promoted continence and offered positive rewards for sexual repression in
counterpoint to older beliefs that the sex urge was (for men at least) a primitive and untrainable
instinct. This view is, of course, implicated in nineteenth century, Victorian beliefs which
promoted training in self-control and restraint as cardinal principles of a chaste life, but also of
an economic life as well. In his overview of the sex education movement from 1890-1920
Bryan Strong summaries this philosophy:
If a man were pure, he would also be frugal, hard working, temperate, and governed by
habit. If, on the other hand, he were impure, he would also be a spendthrift, disposed to
speculation, whiskey-drinking, and ruled by his impulses. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in
fact, created in his essay “Wealth” an elaborate pun on the verb “to spend,” the
nineteenth century colloquialism for “to climax” which suggests that there was a
general understanding that sexual behavior was a model for behavior in other spheres
of life.6 8
The intimate relation suggested between sex, character and society becomes the primary
motivator for justifying sexual repression, but also for the equation of a chaste life with specific
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expectations and measures for the political economy of the body. Even the popular use (indeed
advocacy) of the term “continence” at this time (to indicate the restraint which a person
imposes upon his/her desires and passions) is highly suggestive of the ways in which national
defense gets elided with ideas of sexual self-governance.
VD Propaganda and Progressivist Crusades for Cinematic Sexual O rder
As an offshoot of the social purity movement, films about venereal disease and sex hygiene
predate even the veritable flood of films produced during and immediately after the First World
War. Sex hygiene films get established as a common melodramatic morality tale among a
range of films dealing with such hot progressive reform topics as white slavery, birth control,
illegitimacy, eugenics and prostitution. The most famous of these early films is Damaged
Goods from 1914, adapted from a hugely popular 1913 stage play about syphilis (which was
also remade twice, in Britain in 1919 and in the U.S. in 1937). The stage version of Damaged
Goods is reputed to be the first in America to utter the word “syphilis” on stage. That the play
was produced under the auspices of the Medical Review o f Reviews in order to avoid public
protests shows the degree to which such subject matter relied on the legitimacy of science (here
medicine) to secure its acceptance.6 9 Moreover, the interpenetration of modernity and
melodrama is highlighted by this “scandalous” utterance. If we take Peter Brooks’ position -
that the desire to express is a fundamental characteristic of the melodramatic mode, clearly
these films advocating public discussion/education about previously silenced subjects
(frequently attached to moral panics), are fundamentally melodramatic in both form and mode.
Brooks historicizes melodrama explicitly within the evolution and development of
modernity, citing Jean-Jacques Rousseau as a key progenitor to the genre. “Melodrama,” says
Brooks, “starts from and expresses the anxiety brought by a frightening new world in which
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traditional patterns of moral order no longer provide the necessary social glue. It plays out the
force of that anxiety with the apparent triumph of villainy, and it dissipates it with the eventual
victory of virtue.”7 0 Brooks even positions the manichaesim of melodrama and as kind of
staging of the polarization of absolutes in an almost pedagogical way:
Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the characters stand on stage and utter
the unspeakable, give voice to their deepest feeling, dramatize through their heightened
and polarized words and gestures the whole lesson of their relationship.... the narrative
creates the excitement of its drama by putting us in touch with the conflict of good and
evil played out under the surface of things - just as description of the surfaces of the
modem metropolis pierces through to a mythological realm where the imagination can
find a habitat for its play with large moral entities.7 1
Damaged Goods (now lost) was predicated on these characteristics. George Dupont, (played
by Richard Bennett) is a respectable lawyer, “a young man of excellent home” who is engaged
to marry “a prominent society bell.” George gets syphilis from a prostitute (after one night’s
transgression following a pre-nuptial bachelor party) and marries his fiancee against his
physician’s stem warnings. Inevitably and tragically, this leads to his eventually infecting his
wife and child.
Both stage and film versions tell basically the same story and one which Eric Schaefer
describes as “typical” of the sex hygiene film: middle or upper middle-class men contract
syphilis from women of questionable morality (and, of course, lower socioeconomic standing).
This reflects the progressivist mentality outlined by Brandt which establishes venereal disease
as a malady of “the other” (here “working” or working-class women)7 2 inflicted on the
bourgeoisie. The double standard of sexual ethics prevails: we are invited to sympathize with
George’s sexual transgression as relatively minor - a momentary lapse of judgement - where
the source of his infection, the prostitute is simply evil. A similar transgression by a woman, of
course, would not be depicted with such compassion. This morality tale clearly struck a chord
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with audiences at the time. Described by film historian Terry Ramsaye as a “prestige
production” made for an estimated cost of less than $50,000, the states’ rights for Damaged
Goods reputedly sold for $600,000, indicating a box office take of probably more than
$2,000,000.7 3 The film proved so popular in its initial run that it was re-released in 1917
(following U.S. military engagement along the Mexican border) and again in 1919 alongside a
succession of other sex hygiene films released in that year.7 4
Damaged Goods even received an endorsement from the secretary of the Navy, James
Keane, whose positive comments were cited in publicity for the film.7 5 The Moving Picture
World recommended to exhibitors of the film that they combine local medical and social
authorities alongside screenings with the suggestion: “Work through the local or county medical
society, through welfare workers, and others who are in a position to forward your
propaganda.”7 6 Schaefer illustrates the progressivist mentality which greets the film in a
Variety review: “See ‘Damaged Goods’ and after seeing it, tell your son or daughter to see it,
and let them tell other boys and girls, and you tell other fathers and mothers, until all the world
has seen ‘Damaged Goods ’ on the picture screen.”7 7 This admonishment is illustrative of the
reform impulse linking investigation and exposure of social ills as a fundamental part of
progressivism’s pedagogical strategy. Part of this ideology is highlighted by the label attached
to these films as they proliferated and became codified in the period between 1917 and 1919
and began to acquire the label of “propaganda film.”
While the word propaganda is today certainly fraught with — mostly — pejorative
connotations, it is important to read the use of this term in its historical context. When WWI
broke out, the Allied and Axis powers began to experiment with the use of film as a weapon for
information and propaganda. With the pressing need to mobilize opinion both at home and
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abroad, the governing bodies of many countries began to shift whatever nonfiction film
production they may have hitherto sponsored (primarily travel films for the promotion of
immigration, tourism, agriculture and industry in the case of Canada), and began to concentrate
on film production in the service of the war effort. In Britain, the governing body in charge of
such production was indeed called The War Propaganda Bureau (formed in 1914). While
commercial producers in the U.S. made an ambitious variety of war films before American
entry into WWI, soon after their entry into war in 1917, a Committee on Public Information
was established to help shape public policy on war films, monitor domestic production, and
regulate international film trade with the U.S. Shortly afterward, a photographic section of the
Signal Corps was formed to make combat and military training films, or “war propaganda
films” as they were frequently called.7 8
In the context of sex hygiene films, Annette Kuhn frames her discussion around the
broad category of “health propaganda films” where ‘health’ is understood to be a broad
reference to sex. In her discussion of works such as A Victim o f Sin (1913, now lost), both
British and American versions of Damaged Goods, Open Your Eyes, Fit to Win and The End
o f the Road (all from 1919) as VD “propaganda features,” Kuhn shows how these films are all
linked by an educational project based on the narrativization of information and knowledge
acquisition — the propagation o f knowledge through the staging of dramatic exposure of VD
and its consequences. With these films, she maintains, “[kjnowledge is guaranteed mainly by
science, specifically by science harnessed to discourses of medicine and social purity .”7 9
Pointing out that correct knowledge about VD is typically produced and delivered through the
authoritative agency of properly qualified medical practitioners (or sometimes by other
professionals such as reformers or social workers), Kuhn goes on to discuss the way in which
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such films participate in the discursive and institutional construction of public health by
authorizing science “as a means of securing the health of the public (of the social, as much as
the sexual) body. At the same time,” she argues, “the power of science and the rewards of moral
virtue are constituted as interdependent. The health of the sexual body serves in some respects
as a metaphor for the fitness and moral soundness of the social body.”8 0
While Kuhn links a range of films together in her chapter as mainstream, commercial
products, it is important to emphasize that Fight To Fight, Fit to Win and The End o f the Road
were actually produced on the margins of the commercial industry, by the American Social
Hygiene Association (ASHA), and the War Department Commission on Training Camp
Activities (CTCA). As part of the progressivist impetus advocating state intervention and
advocacy in the realm of public health and education in the context of sexual practices, the
CTCA was created in 1917 within the U.S. War Department as part of a government campaign
to combat venereal disease. Originally headed by Raymond Fosdick, a lawyer for the American
Social Hygiene Association, the CTCA consisted of a group of progressive reformers and
fellow ASHA members whose task was to oversee programs in the camps and to keep areas
around the camps “decent and respectable.”8 1
Modeled on a system of recreational activities created by Canadian camps which
Fosdick was sent to study in 1917 just prior to American entry into the War, one of the
functions of the CTCA was to provide soldiers with education and amusements to divert their
attentions and energies from more “unwholesome” distractions. Part of this agenda, as
previously mentioned, included the suppression of prostitution in the vicinity of army camps.
With each of the sixteen boot camps created on the heals of the U.S. entry into the War creating
communities of between 30,000 to 40,000 members, proper recreation to combat the “evil”
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tendencies of idleness, weariness and monotony were a high priority. The moral panic revolving
around fears of YD within America’s Armed services, prompted the CTCA to create these
venereal disease films which were designed to propagate the progressivist educational doctrine
positing knowledge acquisition as the educational prophylaxis to safeguard against disease.
While this educational prophylaxis attempted to avoid the moralism typically associated with
traditional sex education by emphasizing rationality and science, that the pedagogical
prophylaxis upon which these models were predicated is the rhetoric of social and sexual
hygiene would, of course, mean that morality was far from exempt in its pedagogical
procedures.
Fit to Win is actually a modified version of a film entitled Fit to Fight produced for
American armed troops in 1919. According to Stacie Colwell, Fit to Fight is the first ever
venereal disease education film produced with government support.8 2 Structured essentially as
an army lecture film bracketed by two reels of dramatic material following the fates of five
enlisted men, the bookend/lecture footage (some of which included graphic display of the
ravages of VD) was cut out and a new ending (indicating the passage into peace) was added
after the war in order for the film to be theatrically distributed to wider audiences.8 3 The End o f
the Road — geared to women — is a dramatic narrative chronicling the very different trajectories
of two young women as they grow to maturity, experience the ups and downs of romantic
attachments, establish careers and, inevitably, encounter the medical and social problems and
traumas associated with venereal disease. The wayward woman of the two, Vera, contracts
syphilis over the course of the narrative and is taken by her doctor (Dr. Bell) and her childhood
friend Mary (now a nurse) through a medical clinic to view firsthand the ravages of VD. The
End o f the Road thus deploys documentary or semi-documentary sequences used to convey
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information about VD by means of graphic spectacle of its effects on bodies. This spectacle is
not substantively attached to the narrative per se, which focuses on the love story that revolves
around Mary, the good girl/nurse and Dr. Bell (played by Richard Bennett), whom she
eventually marries. Virtue is rewarded as they are united on the European front, fighting for the
nation.
The U.S. government’s pioneering use of films in its anti-venereal campaigns during
WWI highlights the degree to which the medium quickly proved to be an extremely convenient,
consistent and effective way of educating large numbers of draftees in a short period of time.
Because these government sponsored sex hygiene films use narrative devices in conjunction
with their more overtly expository strategies such as graphic montage sequences showing the
deleterious effects of syphilis and gonorrhea on the body, various critics have argued that they
solicit a different kind of involvement on the spectator’s part from more mainstream fiction film
practices. Kuhn, for example states:
Whereas, say, a documentary film of a certain type might implicate the spectator in a
didactic rhetoric — the ‘facts’ would be presented in voice-over, the image would
illustrate and thus verify the content of the voice-over — the fiction film embodies a
rather less direct mode of address. In the classical narrative, the spectator is typically
asked to identify with certain characters and their fates. However, narratives of the VD
propaganda films conform only partially to the classical model, in that where
identification is solicited, fictional characters occupy a rather different place in the
identification process. At this point, the moral positioning proposed by VD propaganda
films intercepts the operations of cinematic narrativity.8 4
Kuhn views spectatorial identification in VD propaganda features as addressing audiences from
a position of ignorance and moral corruptibility as characters in the fiction, with the lack of
knowledge being supplied to both player and viewer simultaneously. Rather than identifying
with characters as in a typical narrative film, then, our position is set up in relation to
knowledge acquisition. In their “psychological assessment” of the effects of Fit to Win on a
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range of audiences, Karl Lashley and John Watson deduce that “from the standpoint of
imparting information, much space is wasted by the drama” in the film. Their accumulation of
data obtained via questionnaires administered to spectators both before and after screenings of
the film suggests that “the story form is not particularly advantageous and that unless the story
has real literary merit it detracts rather than adds to the overall effectiveness of the expository
material.”8 5 Questions as to what constitutes “literary merit” are assumed rather than explained
in the report, though clearly it would seem that the educational, propagandists aspects of
hygiene films sets them apart from the conventions of narrative filmmaking that were
consolidating at this time as industrial activity shifts from New York to Los Angeles, and the
industry increasingly stabilizes around the primary commodity of the feature-length narrative
film.
Eric Schaefer refines Kuhn’s argument in his recent book, Bold! Daring! Shocking!
True!: A History o f Exploitation Films, 1919-1959 by positioning these early hygiene films as
the progenitors of a whole tradition of exploitation filmmaking starting roughly from the 1919
onwards. Schaefer argues that spectacle is one of the central characteristics of exploitation film
practices in their promise to show the forbidden, the strange, the exotic and the scandalous. He
reads government-sponsored VD films largely within this context of exploitation, positioning
them as morality tales which telegraphed a melodramatic narrative mode (i.e. they were often
called “clap operas”) as a pedagogical technique. Schaefer argues that spectacle is one of the
central characteristics of the sex hygiene film and of exploitation practices more generally.
Central to his discussion is Tom Gunning’s model for a “cinema of attractions” which Schaefer
applies to the spectatorial effect of exploitation films, a genre grounded on “showing” much
more centrally and “telling.”
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As is now widely known, Gunning appropriates from Sergei Eisenstein the term
“attraction” to describe a “unit of impression that aggressively subjects the spectator to sensual
or psychological impact.”8 6 His “cinema of attractions” proposes a unifying thread between the
Lumiere Brothers and Georges Melies (hence between nonfiction and fiction traditions) in early
cinema as a way of “presenting a series of views to their audience, fascinating because of their
illusory power...and exoticism.”8 7 While Gunning is arguing for this “cinema of attractions” as
the dominant mode of cinema production before 1906, it does not disappear after that date in
spite of the consolidation and hegemony that begins to surround narrative film. Instead he
asserts: “it goes underground, both into certain avant-garde practices and as a component of
narrative films, more evident in some genres (e.g., the musical) than in others....Contrasted to
the voyeuristic aspect of cinema analyzed by Christian Metz, this is an exhibitionist
cinema....that displays it visibility, willing to rupture a self-enclosed fictional world for a
chance to solicit the attention of the spectator.”8 8 Drawing upon the notion of curiositas
developed by Augustine, Gunning in a later essay, will interpret curiositas - drawing the viewer
towards “unbeautiful sights” in relation to the cinematic fascination with seeing, a “lust of the
eyes” as it were, but also to “a desire for knowledge for its own sake, ending in the perversions
of magic and science”:
This attraction to the repulsive was frequently rationalized by appealing to that impulse
which Augustine found equally dubious, intellectual curiosity. Like the early film
exhibition, freak shows and other displays of curiosities were described as instructive
and informing. Similarly, a popular and longlasting genre of the cinema of attractions
consisted of educational actualities.8 9
While I will discuss Gunning’s ideas in more detail in the next chapter, these ideas connect
both with Schaefer’s reading of exploitation film as well as to educational propaganda.
Schaefer sees this merging of fiction and nonfictional strategies as the sine qua non of
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exploitation film where spectacle serves as the main organizing principle.9 0 The cinema of
attractions addresses and holds the spectator by emphasizing the act of display, attracting the
attention of the spectator through “exhibitionistic confrontation rather than diegetic
absorption.”9 1 Similarly, VD propaganda films blend fictional and expository strategies with a
spectacular display of the curious and grotesque symptoms of venereal infection staging a kind
of melodramatic collusion of medicine with the cinematic medium in the education of proper
sexual citizenship.
Education and Exploitation
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! makes a convincing case for the controversy surrounding the
sex hygiene film, (particularly The End o f the Road) as catalysts for the proliferation of an
exploitation film industry which emerged out of the mainstream, respectable industry as a
“distinct class of motion picture, existing alongside the classical Hollywood cinema from the
late teens to the late fifties.”9 2 Schaefer squarely positions the origin of exploitation films
within the progressivist mentality of the era as he demonstrates the way in which such films
“grew out of that reform impulse in which investigation and exposure of social ills were
necessary to bring about the educational process required to achieve reform. Thus the two
hallmarks of progressivism - expose and education - were at the heart of the exploitation
film.”9 3
As Schaefer points out, many of these films begin with a square-up which he defines as
“a prefatory statement about the social or moral ill the film claimed to combat.”9 4 Whereas
square-ups tended to be the exception in mainstream movies - examples being those attached to
Scarface (1932), Little Caesar (1931) and Public Enemy (1931) urging the public/spectators to
fight against the menace of gangsterism, or those which state that what we are about to see is
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based on real events and/or made with the cooperation of official bodies such as Air Force
(1943), they are a staple of exploitation films. Square-ups are a common device in sex hygiene
films as well. Damaged Goods, for example, begins with:
The Presentation of the famous French play “Damaged Goods” is the producer’s
sincere effort to co-operate in President Roosevelt’s educational campaign to rid
America of its greatest menace to health and happiness - a menace that has already
taken a toll of millions of lives and can only be curbed by bringing its discussion into
the open and ceasing to consider it unmentionable - We refer to the Great Imitator -
Syphilis.
Where Are My Children? proffers a similar provocation:
The question of birth control is now being generally discussed. All intelligent people
know that birth control is a subject of serious public interest. Newspapers, magazines
and books have treated different phases of this question. Can a subject thus dealt with
on the printed page be denied careful dramatization on the motion picture screen? The
Universal Film Mfg Company believes not...
The print of The End o f the Road at Ottawa’s National Archive contains a square-up added to
the film when is was redistributed in 1932, some fifteen years after its original release by the
Health League of Canada under the auspices of the Canadian Social Hygiene Council:
This motion picture was made in 1918 to supplant the US War and Navy department
programs for the prevention and control of syphilis and gonorrhea. The American
Social Hygiene Association and the National Board of the Young Women’s Christian
Association, the medical profession and other numerous groups including members of
the cast, cooperated to make an authentic motion picture for civilian use. While the
setting and the costumes are fifteen years old, the scientific facts, public health
measures and medical treatments are as applicable today as they were then. The
realistic presentation of incidents in the lives of the characters, particularly of the two
young woman most concerned, still stand out as an appeal to the best impulses and
aspirations toward fine manhood and womanhood.
Beyond the square-up, Schaefer argues that education is also at the axis of character
function in the sex hygiene film, providing the locus for the social issues and knowledges under
examination: “Each character functions to either receive, promote, stifle, or create the need for
education about sex and reproductive health.”9 5 The standardization and repetition of
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79
storylines, alongside the relative fixity of specific character types/functions, only adds to the
ways in which such films represent a departure from more typical fiction films. In a great many
of the venereal disease/hygiene films of the period, the figure of the doctor and his heroic
crusade against disease and ignorance is a dominant and recurring trope. Alongside the figures
that Schaefer usefully categorizes as the Innocent, the Corrupter, the Parents and the Charlatan,
is the figure of the Crusader who generally appears in these films in the guise of a physician, a
teacher, a public health officer, or a reporter. In the sex hygiene film, the Crusader is typically
a male figure who either supports birth control, battles venereal disease and abortion, or
engages in some combination of these reform efforts:
The Crusader is often in direct confrontation with the Bad Parents and local officials,
who wish to maintain the status quo by standing in the way of sex education. The
Crusader operates from a pragmatic point of view, often espousing a philosophy that
may be at odds with the community but is proved to be in everyone’s best interest in the
final analysis. He is the man with a bitter pill that must be swallowed for the good of
society. The Crusader often offers direct aid to the Innocent in his or her time of need
and addresses both the characters in the film and the audience.9 6
Schaefer argues that while these character types can be broken town into various subtypes, each
embodies “a canon of beliefs that compel the character to act in a prescribed manner and propel
the film along a fairly narrow trajectory.”9 7
The End o f the Road, co-written by director Army Lieutenant Edward H. Griffith (who
also directed Fit to Fight/Fit to Win) and sociologist Katherine Bement Davis, Director of the
War Department’s Committee on Protective Work for Girls, splits the role of Crusader in two.
Dr. Bell, of course, is a medical man who battles the scourge of venereal disease. But Mary,
under the proper tutelage of her mother who teaches her about sex from an early age as the
prologue of the film shows, is also a Crusader in her own right. When her high school
sweetheart (about whom Mary is somewhat ambivalent) proposes to her, Mary refuses his
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offer, saying they’re too young and that she must go to New York to begin her nurse’s training.
Both Vera and Mary arrive in the big city to markedly different destinations. Vera, who was
refused instruction on the necessary facts of life by her foolish, prudish mother, only goes to
New York with ambition to marry a wealthy man, under her mother’s firm directive. Rather
than the more noble profession of nursing, Vera works as a shop girl in a big department store
where, it is suggested, women are particularly susceptible to advances by disreputable men. In
fact department store life was the subject of numerous investigations by women’s reform
organizations, including the Women’s Trade Union League, the Young Women’s Christian
Association and others which had overlapping membership with the social purity movement.9 8
According to Stacie Colwell, one of the most sensational charges against department store work
was that its saleswomen were “in special peril of prostitution, whether professional or
occasional. The public nature of the stores, their atmosphere, and the low wages combined, so
the argument went, to grease the transition from bargain counter to counterpaine.”9 9 It is no
coincidence, then, that Vera’s seduction by her soon-to-be (ne’er-do-well) boyfriend Howard
takes place at the counter where he tells her: “Better quit this job. I’ll give you a real one.”
The city/country, corruption/innocence dichotomies are literalized before the narrative
of The End o f the Road even begins: “Two roads there are in life. One reaches toward the
Land of Perfect Love. The other reaches down into the Dark Valley of Despair where the sun
never shines.” The manichaean outlook cast upon the sensory environment of urban modernity
versus the pastoral vision of small town life; the film’s strong emotionalism, graphic
sensationalism, moral polarization, extreme states of being, overt villainy, imperilled
corporeality, persecution of the good, and final reward of virtue all frame it within the contours
of the melodramatic mode. Mary the Crusader will rescue Vera twice: once from a situation in
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which Howard is clearly angling to take advantage of Vera’s inebriation at a disreputable road
house, and again when the desperate Vera — abandoned by Howard who realizes he has infected
her — turns to Mary for advice about a mysterious rash that suddenly appears on her skin.
Once Vera is “instructed” by the spectacular show and tell lesson performed by Dr. Bell and
Mary on the ravages of VD, she agrees to seek treatment for her syphilis and eventually follows
a morally upright path, seeking employment in a munitions factory, “Happy in the
consciousness of doing her part in the world struggle.”
While no doubt the educational value of shots of diseased genitals and the prophylaxis
treatment (excised from Fit to Fight for its civilian release) generates more attention from
Lashley and Watson in their scientific analysis of the effects of Fit to Win, The End o f the
Road relies on more elaborate classical narrative techniques to proffer its message. Indeed as
Bement Davis states of her collaboration on the project: “The love story (believed to be
necessary to hold the interest of the young women who see the film) is skillfully interwoven and
leads to a climax in the last scenes...”1 0 0 While Lashley and Watson argue that Fit to Win's
strength is in its emphasis on both the danger of disease and the value of prophylaxis “without
stressing the moral aspects of the problem,” they nevertheless support the arousal of emotions
as a pedagogical technique. Their “scientific” measure of that film’s “effects” and their
statement of the problem posed by their “experiment” succinctly summarizes the many issues
surrounding progressive era preoccupations with objectivist knowledge, govemmentality,
melodrama and modernity that this chapter has addressed:
The problem with which the experiments reported here deal is that of the informational
and educational effects of certain motion picture films used as propaganda in venereal
disease control. Popular education in sex hygiene aims toward two educational goals:
first, it seeks to increase popular knowledge concerning the facts of sexual physiology
and psychology with a view to equipping the public for better methods of controlling
venereal disease and other sexual ills; second, it seeks to arouse an emotional attitude in
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82
the public which will stimulate real application of the information assimilated, since it
is doubtful if any amount of information without accompanying emotional factors will
lead to any significant changes in behavior.1 0 1
Unlike exploitation cinema, these government sponsored films were not market driven, so much
as motivated on the logic of a political economy of bodies, national security and defense,
protection of the family and the bourgeois accoutrements associated with that particular view of
sexual citizenship. That the scientific management and measure of emotional impact is deemed
to play so important a part in their educational effectiveness, from today’s perspective, certainly
implies a degree of emotionalism, morality and subjectivity that these reformers would hope to
deny. While these psychologists point to the inadequacy of fear as a motivational factor in sex
education, a point that will be continually redressed — particularly in the context of teen
pregnancy and AIDS pedagogy, they propose, interestingly, that “an appeal to other emotions
might be more effective in modifying conduct.”1 0 2 What those emotions might be is left
unexplored in their report, this is a subject I will revisit in the chapters to follow.
In keeping with this reformist view, members of the CTCA defended their educational
program by arguing that training camps were “national universities for war purposes” which
could produce not only better soldiers, but ultimately better citizens. Operating under the
assumption that families and communities had failed to provide draftees with necessary
information in sexual matters, the Social Hygiene Instruction Division of the CTCA provided a
barrage of posters, handbills, pamphlets, exhibits and films,1 0 3 enlisting the latest technologies
o f psychology, persuasion and education to inculcate recruits. After 1919, with the moral
panics about VD in decline (at least temporarily) and the movement from war-time mobilization
efforts, mainstream VD hygiene films went into a lull until the mid-twenties by which time,
according to Eric Schaefer, they ceased to be the product of Hollywood/mainstream production.
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83
In fact, as he argues, it is the censorship and regulation surrounding the VD hygiene film in
1919 (both Fit to Win and The End o f the Road were eventually banned from public exhibition
in the U.S. though not in Canada) that lead to the initiation, deployment and proliferation of
exploitation cinema, “occupying a plane somewhere between legitimate commercial cinema and
the socially circumscribed world of pornography.”1 0 4
While many critics have established a variety of reasons for the censorship of hygiene
films at this particular juncture, most frequently explain its decline with the desire to return to
normal life (domesticity) and the postwar disinterest in reviewing and reliving wartime policies
and moral panics.1 0 5 Schaefer proposes several additional possibilities which could contribute
to this climactic shift. For one thing, both Fit to Win and The End o f the Road, in their appeal
to “the nation” as an imagined and diverse community, do not locate the source of venereal
disease in the lower classes, as had most of the earlier films in fact or by implication.1 0 6 For
example, Colwell says that by proposing “intrabourgeois transmission” of VD, The End o f the
Road would likely have played upon widespread middle-class paranoia about race suicide,
especially given the subplot of Mrs. Ellbridge, whose philandering husband seduces and
impregnates a member of his country club while she sits at home, chronically ill from the
gonorrhea he has given her and their blind son. Her eventual hysterectomy dramatizes the
eugenic discourse equating the damaged reproductive capacity of white, bourgeois women with
the demise of civilization.1 0 7 Schaefer offers another possible reason for the hygiene film’s
exclusion from the mainstream repertoire of acceptable subjects. In contrast to the use of
spectacle in classical Hollywood film, exploitation spectacle increasingly deployed graphic
depictions of venereal disease in several of the hygiene films beginning in 1919 which had the
effect of overwhelming and obscuring the film’s ostensible narrative. In fact, he argues, it is
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84
this reliance on graphic spectacle that will remain a crucial component in the success of the
exploitation film over the next four decades.1 0 8 It is this fusion of aspects of the classical
Hollywood narrative with the visual spectacle of “forbidden sights” that positions the
exploitation film viewer in a fundamentally different way. This is also, as I will show in
Chapter 2, a fusion which characterizes many of the VD training films produced by both the
American and Canadian governments during World War II.
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85
Notes
1. Cited in Stacie Colwell, “ The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge, and the
American Campaign Against Venereal Disease During World War I,” Camera Obscura 29 (May
1992), 107.
2. Katherine Bement Davis, “Social Hygiene and the War II: Women’s Part in Social Hygiene,”
Journal o f Social Hygiene, Vol. 4 (October 1918), 526.
3. Michel Foucault, “Govemmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmental! ty,” Eds.
Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 94
4. Ibid., 95
5. Jay Cassel, The Secret Plague: Venereal Disease in Canada 1838-1939 (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1987), 122
6. Assistant Surgeon H. E. Kleinschmidt, talks at some length about the value of the stereomotograph,
which he describes as an “automatic exhibit display device based on the principle of the stereopticon.”
Operating electrically as a series of fifty-two slides shown consecutively for a duration of about twenty
seconds each, the stereomotograph has a screen measuring two feet square. See Kleinschmidt,
“Educational Prophylaxis of Venereal Diseases,” Journal o f Social Hygiene, Vol. (January 1919), 35.
7. Cassel, The Secret Plague, 123
8. Kleinschmidt, “Educational Prophylaxis,” 33
9. Ibid., 34
10. Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2001). Singer is, of course, borrowing ideas from Benjamin, Kracauer and
Gunning in making this claim.
11. Ibid., 19
12. Ibid., 19
13. Kleinschmidt, “Educational Prophylaxis,” 29
14. Karl S. Lashley and John B. Watson, “A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to
Venereal Disease Campaigns,” Journal o f Social Hygiene, Vol. 7 (1921), 181-219.
15. Michel Foucault, D isciplin e an d Punish (New York: Vintage Press, 1979).
16. Dennis L. Carlson, “Ideological Conflict and Change in the Sexuality Curriculum,” Sexuality and
the Curriculum: The Politics and Practices o f Sexuality Education (New York: Teachers College
Press, 1992), 41.
17. For a brief summary of the movement see Lynn Fendler’s essay, “What Is it Impossible to Think?
A Genealogy of the Educated Subject,” in Foucault's Challenge: Discourse, Knowledge, and Power in
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86
Education (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998), 51-53.
18. An elaboration of the impact of both James and Dewey on progressive reform in education can be
found in James Bowen, A History o f Western Education, Volume 3, (London: Methuen & Co, 1981)
408-439.
19. John D ’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 203-4.
20. Cremin, The Transformation o f the School, viii
21. Jay Cassel, The Secret Plague, 103.
22. Michael Imber, “The First World War, Sex Education, and The American Social Hygiene
Association’s Campaign Against Venereal Disease,” Journal o f Educational Administration and
History, Vol. (1984), 51.
23. E. Ann Kaplan, “Mothering, Feminism and Representation: The Maternal Melodrama and the
Women’s Film, 1910-1940, Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: BFI
Publishing, 1987), 113.
24. Ibid., 114.
25. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, xv-xvi.
26. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History o f Venereal Disease in The United States Since 1880
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 7-8.
27. Ibid., Chapter 1.
28. Linda Gordon, Woman’ s Body, Woman’ s Right: A Social History o f Birth Control in America
(New York: Viking Press, 1976).
29. Anthony Comstock, agent of the US Post Office and the New York state-supported Society for the
Prevention of Vice, succeeded in having a law passed in 1873 forbidding the use of mails to
communicate any information regarding contraception or abortion, by having such materials deemed
obscene. Beyond mail traffic, the Comstock Law’s broader implications were that it was illegal to
teach, write about, use, import, produce or sell contraceptives. In other words, virtually everything to
do with the subject of sex is declared obscene.
30. For an extended discussion of the film, see Chapter 3 in Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship,
Sexuality, 1909-1925 (London and New York: Routledge, 1988).
31. Eric Schaefer, Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History o f Exploitation Films, 1919-1959
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 172.
32. Robert Eberwein cites a review from Moving Picture World which states: “the greater part of the
first reel is given over to the visualizing of an interview with Mrs. Sanger. In this many scenes from
the overcrowded slums are inserted, poverty-stricken mothers, including the story of one mother
[Helen Field] who had appealed for help and had died because the necessary knowledge had been
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87
denied her. The remaining portion of the picture tells the story of the persecution of Mrs. Sanger.”
Cited in Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video and the Framework o f Desire (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers
University Press, 1999), 56.
33. McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 (Toronto and new York:
Oxford University Press), 15
34. Ibid., 18
35. Ibid., 18
36. Ibid., 29
37. An account of the diagnosis and (by today’s standards) ruthless categorization of
“feeblemindedness” and the popular eugenicist position on how it should be addressed is found in
Chapter 2 of Mclaren, Our Own Master Race.
38. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 8
39. For a summary of diagnoses and treatments for various venereal diseases prior to the significant
developments toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, see Brandt, No Magic
Bullet, 9-11.
40. Martin Pemick, who came upon the only known copy of the print is involved in a project to
restore it back to a celluloid copy. For an account of his discovery of this and the later version of the
same film from 1927 entitled Are You Fit to Marry?, see Martin Pemick, The Black Stork: Eugenics
and the Death o f “ Defective ” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1996).
41. Pemick, The Black Stork, 143-144
42. Ibid., 144
43. Buckley and McGinnis, “Venereal Disease and Public Health Reform in Canada,” Canadian
Historical Review Vol. 63:3 (1982), 345
44. Vem Bullough and Bonnie Bullough, Sin, Sickness, and Sanity: A History o f Sexual Attitudes
(New York: New American Library, 1977), 141.
45. Sander L. Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images ofIllness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 250.
46. Bullough and Bullough, Sin, Sickness, an d Sanity, 142
47. Ibid., 144-145
48. Gilman, Disease and Representation, 253-254
49. Peter Lewis Allen, The Wages o f Sin: Sex and Disease, Past and Present (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 57.
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50. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 28
51. McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 29
52. Comstock’s efforts were greatly aided by such organizations at the Women’s Christian
Temperance Organization (WCTU) which, founded in 1874, was the largest women’s organization in
North America (with both Canadian and U.S. chapters). Originating among small-town midwestem
women, the WCTU mobilized to “uplift men to women’s standards,” by taking militant action to close
saloons, which they viewed as a major threat to their homes and familial stability via their
endorsement of liquor, gambling, prostitution and obscenity. In 1883, the WCTU formed a
Department for the Suppression of Impure Literature which worked alongside Comstock and his
associates.
53. Shelley Stamp, Movie-Struck Girls: Women and Motion Picture Culture After the Nickelodeon
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).
54. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 23
55. Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 102.
56. Ibid., 103
57. This name was retained until 1959 when the ASHA changed to the American Social Health
Association. The datedness in the rhetoric of social and sexual hygiene was likely part of this decision
and is reflected in the titular shifts of sex ed films from the 1950s to the 1960s. Whereas a number of
films produced in the 1910-1930s incorporated “hygiene” into their titles, by the late 1950s, very few
films used this terminology.
58. See D ’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 203-212 for a more detailed account of this series
of mergers. Stacie Colwell highlights the ideological differences between the moralizing stance of
social reformers of the AVA versus the medicalizing stance of the AFSH, which was comprised largely
of physicians. See Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 93. For
my purposes, these distinctions are less fruitful to emphasize especially given the moralizing stance of
so much medical advice with respect to venereal diseases during this period. Morrow’s organization
was originally called a “Society for Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis,” after all. Moreover, the mandate
of this society was “to promote the appreciation of the sacredness of human sexual relations, and
thereby to minimize the moral and physical evils resulting from ignorance and vice.”
59. Rockefeller provided $5,000 per year to the association between 1913 and 1916, and $10,000 from
1916-1918, as well as helping to raise the remainder of the ASHA’s budget. His interest in the
problems of vice and disease reputedly dates back to 1910, when he acted as foreman to a special
grand jury appointed to investigate white slave trade in New York. For a moral detailed account of his
involvement in the hygiene movement, see Brandt, No Magic Bullet, Chapter 1. E. Richard Brown
proposes that Rockefeller’s philanthropic interest in public health, guided by germ theory, allowed him
to ignore the environmental and social determinants of disease caused by (among other things)
Rockefeller’s own exploitative tactics. See Rockefeller Medicine Men: Medicine and Capitalism in
America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
60. Cited in Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 93. Original
citation is ASHA, The American Social Hygiene Association, 1914-1916, No. 41 (New York, 1916), 9.
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89
61. Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 92-93.
62. Buckley and McGinnis, “Venereal Disease and Public Health Reform in Canada,” 340
63. McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 74
64. Even gossip gets tinged with progressivism’s pedagogical fervor in the eyes of at least one reform
physician at this time who writes: “Venereal disease must be made the subject of gossip, a gossip
which must be instructive and elevating” (Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 24).
65. Sanger is credited with coining the term “birth control” as a positive description of family
limitation. See Angus McLaren, A History o f Contraception From Antiquity to the Present Day
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 216.
66. See Intimate Matters, 222-223.
67. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 61
68. Bryan Strong, “Ideas of the Early Sex Education Movement.” History o f Education Quarterly.
Vol. 12:2 (Summer 1972),130.
69. Shown first in New York, a special performance of the play was arranged for President Woodrow
Wilson and the U.S. Congress in Washington in 1913 as well.
70. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode
o f Excess (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), 20
71. Ibid., 4-5
72. In Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, Kuhn argues that “VD propaganda films, with whatever
degree of sympathy, construct sexually active women as the principle cause of venereal infection” (63).
Schaefer, borrowing from Alan Brandt’s work on the social history of venereal disease, adds that
issues of class are integral to this gendered analysis See Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 19-24)
73. Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 22-25.
74. Annette Kuhn talks about a British version of the film made in 1919 in Cinema, Censorship and
Sexuality, Chapter 4. The film was produced again in the U.S. in 1937 and re-titled and re-released
under the title Marriage Forbidden in 1938. Robert Eberwein notes at least one other title under
which the film was distributed, Forbidden Desire. See Eberwein, Sex Ed, 39. Eric Schaefer notes that
the practice of re-titling and re-releasing the same film is a common one within the context of
exploitation film strategies.
75. In Sex Ed, Robert Eberwein addresses important links between government and the world of
commercial film in many sex hygiene films of the period. For example, Open Your Eyes (1919, now
lost), a Warner Brothers film received the endorsement of the United States Public Health Service and
indeed concluded with a proviso/square-up of sorts which indicated that persons interested in the
film’s topic (venereal disease) “should get in touch with the Federal Health authorities or with the New
York Health Board.” See Eberwein, Sex Ed, 20-21.
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76. Cited in Eberwein, Sex Ed, 20.
77. Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 22-23
78. Richard Barsam points out that the U.S. government began making fdms in 1911 on the subject of
agriculture (the Bureau of Reclamation) and incentive fdms (from the civil service). The Committee
on Public Information (CPI) and the Signal Corps represent the first official efforts of the U.S.
government to make films in the service of the war effort. While the CPI was organized to provide
information about the war for Americans and about America for foreigners, Kevin Brownlow points
out that the Committee “was not convinced of the superiority of motion pictures as a propaganda
force.” This comment is suggestive not only to the positive connotation ascribed to propaganda in this
context, but also of the reluctance to accept the value of film as a pedagogical/incentive tool at this
time. See Richard Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1992), 37-38.
79. Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 58
80. Ibid., 59
81. Imber, “The First World War, Sex Education, and The American Social Hygiene Association’s
Campaign Against Venereal Disease,” 59
82. Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 91
83. Whether or not the graphic footage showing venereal disease was excised from all prints of these
films is the subject of some debate. Eric Schaefer cites several reviews and trade paper stories which
suggest that the graphic material was retained in many instances (Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 29-30) as a
counter to Stacie Colwell’s reliance on government records which indicate that all hospital footage
was cut from The End o f the Road and all prophylaxis footage excised from Fit to Fight.
84. Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 55-56
85. Lashley and Watson, “A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal Disease
Campaigns,” 211-212
86. Tom Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide
Angle, 8:3/4 (1986):66.
87. Ibid., 64
88. Ibid., 64
89. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,”
Viewing Positions: Ways o f Seeing Film. Ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994) 124. Reprinted from Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989).
90. Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 79
91. Gunning, “The Cinema of Attractions,” 66
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91
92. Schaefer, Bold! Daring!, 18
93. Ibid., 41
94. Ibid., 69
95. Ibid., 89
96. Ibid., 31
97. Ibid., 31
98. Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 101
99. Ibid., 101. She cites as her source for this discussion, Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures:
Saleswomen, Managers, and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890-1940 (Urbana:
University of Illinois, 1988) 134-135.
100. Katherine Bement Davis, “Social Hygiene and the War II: Women’s Part in Social Hygiene,”
558
101. Lashley and Watson, “A Psychological Study of Motion Pictures in Relation to Venereal
Disease Campaigns,” 182
102. Ibid., 218
103. Katherine Bement Davis and Robert Eberwein both mention a reproduction film entitled How
Life Begins which was shown extensively to male and female recruits at this time. Unfortunately, I
have been unable to locate evidence of its survival, though it would appear to be a “lecture film,” with
virtually no dramatic narrative.
104. Schaefer, “Of Hygiene and Hollywood: Origins of the Exploitation Film,” Velvet Light Trap 30
(Fall 1992): 34.
105. Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 111-116
106. Schaefer, “Of Hygiene and Hollywood,” 32
107. Colwell, “The End o f the Road: Gender, the Dissemination of Knowledge,” 117
108. Schaefer, “Of Hygiene and Hollywood,” 34
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Chapter 2: Continence of the Continent: The Ideology of
Disease and Hygiene in Films of the WWII Period
[Education] is a process by which the minds o f men are keyed to the tasks o f good
citizenship, by which they are geared to the privilege o f making a constructive
contribution, however humble, to the highest purposes o f the community.
John Grierson, “Education and the N ew Order” 19411
In the world today the Film has become a universal medium o f entertainment, and we
are just beginning to realize its possibilities in education. It is a potent instrument not
only for instruction in the narrower sense, but for the formation o f public opinion and
the moulding o f a nation’s mind. If that is true, it behooves us to do what we can to see
that it is developed on wise lines. The people’s taste must be trained to demand the
best, and facilities must be given to the public to know what is best and to obtain it
easily.
Governor-General Baron Tweedsmuir, preface to
Educational and Cultural Films in Canada, 19362
The documentarian, like his fellow craftsman in the entertainment field, is not bound by
iron regulation or custom. Contrary to the general impression, it may even employ
actors. It may deal in fantasy or fact. It may or may not possess a plot. But most
documentaries have one thing in common: each springs from a definite need; each is
conceived as an idea-weapon to strike a blow for whatever cause the originator has in
mind. In the broadest sense the documentary is almost always, therefore, an instrument
o f propaganda. And in this we can make the first major distinction between the
documentary and entertainment media.
Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood,”
Hollywood Quarterly, 1946 3
The turn to government intervention in practices o f everyday life which characterizes
progressive reform, as Chapter 1 clearly illustrates, was less about a dramatic shift in morality
per se than in finding new, alternative procedures to implement specific morals and standards in
an increasingly urbanized, industrialized cultural context. Since many progressivists placed
enormous faith in the film medium’s capacity to instruct, indoctrinate (or even coerce) large
numbers o f people with unprecedented efficiency and economy, with war mobilization in WWII
came renewed national attention to film’s potential to protect the health and fighting efficiency
o f soldiers. One important factor contributing to the increased use o f the film medium during
the Second World War was the rise o f the documentary film movement beginning in the 1920s.
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This is evidenced by the marked difference between the earlier venereal disease educational
narratives and the form which would proliferate immediately before and during WWII, aided by
technological advances such as sound, lightweight 16mm cameras and the versatility/mobility in
projection capabilities that the new technology offered. While these films certainly contain
traces of the shock and fear tactics more typical of exploitation films (most pointedly those
films made for male recruits), a number of significant differences mark their departure from this
tradition. For one thing, training and indoctrination films were short, typically twenty to forty
minutes in length, as opposed to the established ninety minutes of feature length of narratives
(though exploitation features were generally shorter than mainstream features, as Eric Schaefer
points out).4 Moreover, these films were far from “disreputable” in ways attached to the
exploitation genre and were often sponsored and sanctioned by governmental bodies with no
profit motive, to be shown and distributed in restricted viewing conditions to restricted
audiences, whether civilian or military. In fact, several of the Women’s Army Corps hygiene
films were restricted to WAC viewers only.5
As we saw in Chapter 1, the end of WWI marked a dramatic diminishment in public
discussion of and interest in venereal disease, to the extent that even government-produced films
were viewed as distasteful and unworthy of public distribution. Though eventually withdrawn
from distribution in the U.S., The End o f the Road enjoyed enormous popularity when it was
first released in Toronto in March 1920. Sixteen hundred people reportedly turned out to see it
on its first night and it played to full houses at all showings. In the spring and summer it
traveled the rest of Canada where it was viewed by an estimated 500,000 by 1921. By
Canadian standards, this is a huge success, though some critics took exception to the film’s
recuperation of Vera from a sinner to a good woman working in service of the nation.6
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Importantly, a restriction on the film’s distribution was that the Ontario Board of Censors
passed the film on the condition that it would be shown strictly as part of a VD campaign. All
showings were therefore supervised by the Canadian National Council for Combating Venereal
Disease (CNCCVD, in 1922 renamed Canadian Venereal Disease Council) and admission was
restricted to those 16 and older. As was the case with screenings in the U.S. before the film
was banned, showings were sex segregated. Another consistent aspect of the screenings was
that each was accompanied by a lecturer from the CNCCVD who would provide additional
information and distribute pamphlets about venereal diseases. In other words, they were treated
as a feature of a more general educational gathering.
Since a Canadian feature film industry was virtually nonexistent at this time7 and since
government film production was largely, through the Canadian Government Motion Picture
Bureau, committed to encouraging tourism and immigration to Canada’s “Last Best West,”8
most venereal disease films shown in Canada into the 1920s and 1930s were produced by the
American Social Hygiene Association. For example, two companion films, Social Hygiene fo r
Men (ca. 1920) and Social Hygiene for Women (ca. 1920) were both short lecture films made
by the ASHA and presented under the auspices of the CNCCVD. Another film, The Gift o f
Life (ca. 1924) is a human reproduction film made by the ASHA intended for female audiences
and shown through the Canadian Social Hygiene Council (CSHC). Simple Verites (ca. 1930)
was an ASHA film with French intertitles made for distribution in Quebec.9 Another film, The
Venereal Diseases (ca. 1930) has intertitles in both languages and is credited to Associated
Screen News of Montreal, though it contains some the same footage as Simple Verites which is
suggestive of a degree of recycling. An earlier bilingual film also entitled The Venereal
Diseases (ca.. 1920s) is credited to the Canadian Social Hygiene Council, though only one reel
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of that film survives and it is hard to ascertain if similar recycling and appropriation took place
here. What all of these films have in common is that they combine animation, diagrams and
“actuality” footage of diseased bodies in what amounts to the format of a lecture film which
clearly relies for support on the facilitation by medical “experts” and additional pamphlets to
which the titles often refer. None of these films would get theatrical release or significant press,
since they were designed to accompany lectures to small, restricted audiences and generally ran
for 30 minutes or less.
Through the 1920s and into the 1930s, attendance at public VD lectures dropped
significantly in both Canada and the United States. In part, this is attributable to a general
rejection of what had been wartime concerns of the “epidemic” and protection of the nation
which lost much of its urgency especially with the Depression in the early 1930s. In Canada,
the government discontinued its grants for the Canadian Social Hygiene Council in 1932 with
Prime Minister R.B. Bennett insisting that health care should fall on the shoulders of provincial
governments as part of a cost cutting measure.1 0 In 1934, under the government of Mackenzie
King, the Division of Venereal Disease Control disappeared altogether from the federal
government. Even while attendance at clinics continued to climb, especially in the early years
of the Depression, the topic of venereal disease would not become a major public concern in
Canada until, once again, the problem of maintaining a healthy civilian and military work force
became a primary concern with the outbreak of WWII in 1939.
The situation was in many ways similar in the U.S. Despite the considerable
momentum granted to the anti-venereal campaign during WWI, the Interdepartmental Social
Hygiene Board (ISHB, created in 1918 as part of the dismantling and restructuring of the
CTCA) was disbanded in 1922 by an act of Congress. The Venereal Disease Division of the
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Public Health Service claimed that the ISHB was an unnecessary duplication of the their
activities, despite the fact that the Division’s budget was a mere one tenth of the Board’s.1 1
Moreover, the PHS withdrew all of their films from distribution in 1922 as a result of the
aforementioned censorship controversies associated with Fit to Win and The End o f the Road.
As Allan Brandt argues, despite the apparent frivolity and liberality that we associate with the
1920s, the era “marked less of a watershed in the areas of sexual morality than has often been
assumed.”1 2
A good example of the climate at this time was the censorship of Dr. Thomas Parran,
appointed chief of the PHS Venereal Disease Division in 1926 and an established figure in
public health bureaucracy beginning in WWI. In his capacity as New York State Health
Commissioner in 1934, Parran was scheduled to make a speech on CBS radio about the future
goals of public health. When he was warned that any mention of venereal disease would be
prohibited, Parran cancelled his speech and began a renewed campaign of attack against the
moralist precepts which created public reticence to address the topic. An important part of
Parran’s project at this time was to propose that the public health establishment (namely,
medical experts) must begin to assert their authority over moralizing reformers whose ideology
had dominated much of the anti-venereal campaign, especially through the AHSA. While not
exactly attacking the moralistic precepts of social hygiene, Parran’s project was to more
distinctly situate the anti-venereal campaign within the rhetoric of medical science and public
health. In an article published in 1931, Parran states:
It is true that the control of syphilis and of other venereal diseases would be
accomplished if the ideal of a monogamous sex relationship were universally attained.
Efforts toward this ideal are eminently commendable, both on account of their influence
on the prevalence of disease and because of the sociological results involved; but it
should be possible to control syphilis by direct medical measures long before any
considerable change in the sex habits of the population normally can be
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expected...Greater progress... will be made by concentration of effort on the medical
aspect of control rather than through continued scattering of effort in an attempt to
carry out the “ideal program” of the social hygienists for moral prophylaxis.1 3
The public health project that Parran would come to symbolize attained a crowning
achievement when, in May 1938, Congress passed the National Venereal Disease Control Act,
“making explicit” the relation between unprecedented activities established during WWI and the
New Deal ideology of Roosevelt’s presidency.1 4 In recognition of the widespread rates of
venereal infection across the U.S., the Act provided federal grants to the state boards of health
to develop anti-venereal measures. As with other New Deal legislation, the National Venereal
Disease Control Act “laid the foundation for the expansion of the federal government to provide
new services and attack issues heretofore viewed within the domain of the states.” As Allan
Brandt argues, the Act resembled New Deal welfare legislation in marking “a shift of federal
responsibility for ameliorating social problems.”1 5
The tenor of Parran’s campaign and of the Act more broadly shows up in two films
made for civilians that I will be discussing in this chapter, Three Counties Against Syphilis
(1938) and To the People o f the United States (1944, in which Parran appears). These films
offer an interesting contrast with the moralizing tone of other civilian indoctrination films
including In Defense o f the Nation, an ASHA film (1941) and two Canadian films, Very
Dangerous: VD (1945, NFB and Crawley Films) and Sixteen to Twenty-Six (1945, NFB and
Crawley Films) made in consultation with the Division of Venereal Control, Department of
Health and Welfare. Where Three Counties and To the People stress the importance of blood
tests and medical advancements in treating syphilis with no overt moralizing about promiscuity,
prostitution and the threat these pose to the family, In Defense o f the Nation and Very
Dangerous (for men) concentrate on vice and immorality as primary concerns to maintaining
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the health and welfare of the national body. Even Sixteen to Twenty-Six (for women) takes a
moralizing stance - though geared toward the maintenance of hygienic living and self-respect.
Interestingly, the ties to a documentary tradition mark an important similarity between these
civilian films and those armed service films produced in Canada. While all of these
aforementioned films fall more properly into the category of what we would loosely consider
documentary film, another important aspect of VD instruction will also come from Hollywood
during WWII, as various studios begin to take part in the War effort. Since U.S. training films
were created and viewed within a film culture dominated by Hollywood, a common pedagogical
strategy for these films incorporated actuality footage with a thinly veiled narrative which
provided dramatic enactment as a means for instruction: a melodramatic lesson provided by the
evidence of experience as it were. Such films are characterized by what Richard Dyer
MacCann calls a rapprochement between “the factual needs of Washington and the dramatic
experience of Hollywood.”1 6 This so-called “wartime wedding” of fiction and documentaries
strategies results from the merging of talent and the unprecedented use of film during WWII to
efficiently and economically educate and mobilize large groups of people.
Many companies and independent producers of documentary and/or educational films
gained experience during WWII. The National Film Board of Canada was created in 1939 by
John Grierson and heavily participated in the war effort, subcontracting companies such as
Crawley Films (Ottawa) and Associated Screen Studios (Montreal) to help production demands
that the fledgling organization had neither sufficient equipment nor technical talent to provide.1 7
Hollywood’s involvement in the war effort is widely known: New York’s Astoria Studios
(originally a center for Famous Players-Lasky and later Paramount) was taken over by the War
Department from 1940-46. The First Motion Picture Unit of the U.S. Army Air Force took
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over the Hal Roach Studio in Culver City (with studio mogul Jack Warner as head) and used a
huge pool of Warners talent for its training films. Walt Disney’s participation in the war effort
was sufficient to merit at least one scholarly text, Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney
Studio During WWII (1982).1 8 Daryl F. Zanuck, head of Twentieth Century Fox, chaired the
Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which sponsored the
production of a number of training films and, in 1941, was commissioned as a lieutenant
colonel in the Army’s Signal Corp which would oversee the production of over 200 training
films.
The war effort brought about unprecedented alliances between Canada and United
States which included the exchange of film material, stock footage, combat footage, captured
enemy footage and the circulation of many training films across borders.1 9 For Your
Information (1944, Royal Canadian Air Force [RCAF] Medical Branch, Associated Screen
Pictures), a sex hygiene film made for the women of the RCAF for example, was shown to the
U.S. Women’s Army Corps and included in the List o f War Department Film, Film Strips and
Recognition Slides catalogue as an Official U.S. War Department film. While I would not
elide the social, political and cultural differences between these two nations, I want to point out
that the mission of these training films — to train, instruct, inform, or indoctrinate against a
“common enemy”2 0 — establishes potent alliances between them. Moreover, training films
produced in both Canada and the United States reflect very similar ideas about sexual
citizenship and deploy equally similar pedagogical tactics to achieve their goals. In sum, while
these films are embedded in the rhetoric of patriotism and national values specific to each
nation, we can also read them more broadly in relation to pedagogical practices in which the
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lives, thoughts, actions and behaviors of individuals and social groups come under increasing
scrutiny and management, both in the context of the war itself and modernity more generally.
Defending the Nation
One of the most famous and most widely circulated training films over which Daryl F. Zanuck
presided was John Ford’s Sex Hygiene (Research Council of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences, 1941). Its fame, no doubt, partially stems from its being directed by one of
Hollywood cinema’s great auteurs in the same way that Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series
has achieved particular attention. Moreover, Sex Hygiene is reputed to have been shown more
frequently than any other miliary training film. In Film and Propaganda in America, David
Culbert states that in the month of June 1943, of 478 films in release for troops and over
10,000 screenings of all these films, Sex Hygiene ranked first with 1,871 presentations in 16mm
format and 294 in 35 mm.2 1
Sex Hygiene begins with a lengthy square-up which takes up almost one third (10
minutes) of the film’s duration. Like those used in exploitation films and the VD propaganda
films discussed in Chapter 1, the square-up contains the justification for the film with a call that
appeals to the personal as well as the political. Part of this section reads:
If our country is to successfully defend our right to live the American way, it needs
everyone of you to be in the best possible condition. Any soldier who willfully or
through neglect, fails to maintain his body in this condition is a “shirker” who is
throwing an extra burden on his comrades by requiring them to do his work as well as
their own. The government is vitally interested in having you return to civil [sic] life
with a better and stronger body than when you entered the army.
Proclaiming the evils of prudery and false modesty in preventing young men from the
knowledge they require, the square up continues:
In this connection continence is the best of a preventive measures. The safest method
of guarding your health and that of your loved ones is by keeping yourself under
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control. The “know-it-all” person may tell you that a man must have sex relations to
keep well and develop the strength of his organ. That idea is entirely false. Medical
science has definitely proved that a man can be healthy and actually stronger if he
avoids sex relations.
In asserting this piece of medical “misinformation” (as Eberwein calls it),2 2 the film nevertheless
appears to subscribe to a view of continence which endorses the possession of voluntary control
of excretory sexual functions. In its use here, continence is suggestive of moderation as
opposed to abstinence which implies the avoidance/ forbearance of any indulgence of sexual
appetite. In other words, the pitch is to sexualized adult males who are warned against
extramarital or in any case nonmonogamous relations, especially with “contaminated” women
which the films states, most women are. In fact, the promotion of male continence has
important links to historical movements subscribing to a “perfectionist approach” to
reproductive control which has eugenics origins. For example, the Oneida Community from the
late 1940s under the leadership of John Humphrey Noyes promoted such a regimen. Part of the
theory behind this system was that refraining from ejaculation was a way of cultivating human
energy (viewed as a finite and closed circuit) by expanding the range of sexual expression in
other ways.2 3
After this extended printed material, we observe a group of men playing pool at a base
recreation room and watch their friend “Pete” leave these wholesome activities for a night off-
base and on-the-town. His departure is dramatized by an ominous close-up of an eight-ball and
a dissolve to a phonograph record, after which Pete stealthily emerges from a prostitute’s room
and picks up a cigar he has conveniently left burning beside a nude female statue. From these
not-so-subtle suggestions, we cut back to the base and learn that increased incidents of VD have
become a concern and that all soldiers have been ordered to see a film on the subject. Just prior
to the projection of this film-within-the-film, the importance of the topic is reiterated by an
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Army officer who lectures briefly on the topic. The film-within-a-film structure here is an early
example of what Robert Eberwein sees as a staple of educational films which literally thematize
vision by dramatizing the conditions of reception.2 4 Here our teacher is a military doctor
(played by Charles Trowbridge) who begins a lecture on the “woeful” ignorance of most men
about their own bodies. From a very loose narrative diegesis, the film goes on to illustrate
rather graphic images of genital chancres, pus discharging from a penis (a sign of gonorrhea),
soldiers receiving prophylaxsis treatment after intercourse as well as the proper technique for
using condoms, a filmic first according to Robert Eberwein.2 5
In his extended interviews with Peter Bogdonovich, John Ford claims to have had a
powerful reaction to this film: “I looked at it and I threw up.”2 6 For my purposes, the veracity
of this statement is of less interest than the implications to be derived from it. For one thing,
sex education and training films in general frequently made use of stock footage that would be
recycled from film to film. So, for example, much of the footage of diseased genitals in Sex
Hygiene would likely have come from a medical stock footage supplier, rather than been shot
by Ford himself. This could certainly account for his surprise/disgust in seeing the final
product. But another point to be made from his reaction allies with Tom Gunning’s
theorization of the “incredulous” spectator of early cinema discussed in Chapter 1. The alliance
between many of these VD training films and exploitation cinema revolves around their
tendency to engage the spectator through “exhibitionistic confrontation” rather than diegetic
absorption. To return to Gunning:
The aesthetic of attraction addresses the audience directly, sometimes... exaggerating
this confrontation in an experience of assault. Rather than being an involvement with
narrative action or empathy with character psychology, the cinema of attractions
solicits a highly conscious awareness of the film engaging the viewer’s curiosity. The
spectator does not get lost in a fictional world and its drama, but remains aware of the
act of looking, the excitement of curiosity and its fulfillment.2 7
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The emphasis on the act of display is foregrounded in this film through the constant staging and
dramatization of the conditions of viewing as we cut from images of diseased bodies to the
soldiers in the audience of the film-within-a-film reacting with shock and disgust (one sweats
rather copiously as well). Rather than the scopic pleasure frequently attributed to mainstream
narrative cinema, Ford’s reaction precisely expresses a sudden, intense bodily response of
agitation and disgust that may be linked to the confrontational shock of such acts of display.
This visceral response to “the gross” is developed by Linda Williams in an essay
entitled “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess” where she examines three body genres
frequently attached to the phenomenon of sensation - pornography, horror and melodrama.
Williams interprets the excesses within these generic systems - sex, violence and emotions
respectively - as fundamental to their spectacularity. Debating the incompatibility of genre
study and melodrama’s excesses which proposes that excess itself may be a competing logic to
genre (“a second voice of another organized system”), Williams goes on to discuss the corporeal
excesses of these most culturally debased genres.2 8 The gross out/horror/shock effect of VD
training films in general and Sex Hygiene most famously suggests some powerful alliances
between these films and the body genres that Williams examines. Rather than evoking the
pathos (tears) of melodrama or sexual excitement of pornography, VD films typically evoke the
horrific and the grotesque as strategies of engagement. While the genre films that Williams
examines are frequently interpreted along the lines of gender, so too do the VD hygiene films
offer different aspects of exhibitionistic confrontation along gender lines. Recall that Fit to
Fight/Fit to Win showed images of diseased genitals and prophylactic treatment whereas The
End o f the Road contained nothing so explicit.
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The graphic depictions of ravaged male bodies (most spectacularly the penis) is a
characteristic of virtually all of the armed service sex hygiene films produced for men, including
Sex Hygiene, P ick Up (1944), I t ’ s Up to You (1943), Easy to Get (1943), Three Cadets
(1944) and The Story o f D.E. 733 (1945). It is interesting to note that the comparable armed
service films for women, For Your Information and Hygiene fo r Health (1940, RCAF,
produced by Associated Screen Studios) contain nothing so graphic. Part of this has to do with
the way in which information is sex-segregated: men get information, charts, statistics and
graphic photographic evidence of how disease affects the male body while women receive
similar information about the female urogenital system and the effects of venereal disease on the
fem ale body. These differences are marked by a difference in tone which led one critic, in an
article talking of venereal disease in Canada’s armed forces, to exclaim: “The women’s film
[For Your Information] is a masterpiece in delicacy — just now copies of it are on loan to the
U.S. Navy to be shown to the WAVES. The airmen’s film [It’ s Up to You] is about as delicate
as a sock in the jaw, and has something of the same impact.”2 9
In her discussion of For Your Information, Ruth Roach Pierson points out that the
pure/impure dichotomizing of femininity meant that women were deemed to be in much greater
need of modesty and the potential for shame surrounding their sexuality. While the women’s
film placed great emphasis on the confidentiality that every woman can expect from her
attending physician while being treated for VD - going so far as to have the film’s medical
doctor pull a file from a locked cabinet to which he pockets a key, the film for men has no
comparable emphasis.3 0 Although I have thus far been unable to find an existing print of the
film, the only other restricted WAC hygiene film (beyond For Your Information) is entitled
Strictly Personal, a title which, at the very least, suggests a very similar ideological position.
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While these differences have been offered as a critique of the implied sexism in what is often
referred to as the “gentler” sex, another reason for this difference has to do precisely with the
gender-specificity of the information provided. Peirson argues that this “potentially harmful
protectiveness” avoided the explicit vernacular of films directed to men, and relied on
anatomical drawings and diagrams of the female sex organs rather than on photographic
evidence. Pierson claims that the protectiveness accorded to women is rooted in a “lingering
equation of female purity with ignorance.”3 1 While this is certainly valid, it nevertheless effaces
one of the central “problems” with female anatomy vis a vis the spread of venereal disease. The
fact that women’s sex organs are internal means that women frequently had absolutely no
awareness of infection, since they could carry and potentially spread venereal diseases with no
symptoms. While images of secondary and tertiary syphilis symptoms can be marked on the
female body and are depicted in photographs/footage in films for women (hair loss, skin rashes,
crippling), primary symptoms often remain invisible on the external parts of the female genitalia
and cannot be documented and offered up as evidence. Gonorrhea was even more difficult to
detect and nothing like the Wasserman blood test (developed for syphilis in the 1910s) could
verify its presence in the female body. At the very least, in the absence of a discharging lesion,
a pelvic exam was required and even then accurate results were not a certainty. The hiddenness
or invisibility of signifiers of infection in the female body is addressed in the training films
geared to men in all kinds of troubling ways, and foregrounds the misguided specularity
presumed at the interface between ignorance and knowledge (i.e. “She may look clean, but...”)
which gets played out in endless dichotomizing between the visible/knowable and in the
invisible/unknowable (hence mystifying and frightening), between pure and impure, inside and
outside.
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This gulf between the visible and invisible highlights one of the central problems of sex
education, particularly via audiovisual texts, which must negotiate the evidentiary status of the
visible (the knowable) at the same time that they must caution against these fundamental
precepts of knowledge acquisition. In other words, the visible can be misleading; the signfiers
of a healthy body do not always connote what one thinks; the human eye alone cannot be
trusted. What is needed is the support of expertise, here in the form of medical science —
microscopy, blood tests, radiography and the like — to explain and contain the “problem” of
female difference.
While it is easy to look at the agenda behind these training films today and see how
dated, sexist, propagandists and (sometimes) downright naive they may seem, they offer
important insights into the fascination with visibility at the heart of medicine’s “visual culture,”
an argument persuasively presented by Lisa Cartwright in Screening the Body: Tracing
Medicine’ s Visual Culture?2 In the rest of this chapter, I will continue my investigation into
how these texts are reflective of the sociocultural climate largely dictated by progressive reform
ideas, including increased government intervention into practices of everyday life. Linking
these texts to social history, military history, and medical history (since disease treatments for
VD change dramatically over the course of WWII) will provide a useful way of examining the
evolving history and politics of sex and gender. Moreover, the increased incorporation of both
nonfiction and fictional film strategies in these films can tell us much about changing views of
the medium and its pedagogical potential. This dialectic between narrative and spectacle
implies a change in address to the spectator which will be linked to the rise of documentary film
in the 1920 and 1930s and increased attention to ways in which cinema can move beyond a
form of mass entertainment and distraction to a mass medium capable of significant educational
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value to the masses. Before situating these works in the context of an evolving documentary
tradition, I want to first examine the more general discussion of film and its potential within the
reformist impulses of the period.
Film and Reform: Educational Film Movements in the Interwar Years
In an essay entitled “Reformers and Spectators: The Film Educational Movement in the
Thirties,” Lea Jacobs outlines progressivist efforts to “regulate the conditions and effects of
film viewing” in the 1930s. Comprised of several loosely related organizations which
sponsored the development of film appreciation courses, this “movement” as she calls it,
attempted to alter most particularly the film-going habits of children, adolescents, and second
generation immigrants - all of whom were deemed to be most “at risk” of being contaminated
by images of wealth, abundance, crime and vice scattered across Hollywood cinema. The
paternalistic, middle-class impulse behind this movement was informed by “quasi-scientific
analyses” of the film audience which emerged in this period. Jacobs refers to the Payne Fund
Studies, published in 1933, as “among the first audience effect studies in the field of mass
communications” which, she argues, “significantly altered the way educators theorized cinema’s
power and effects, and hence the scope of their efforts.”3 3 Funded under the auspices of the
Motion Picture Research Council, and published in twelve volumes devoted to issues as diverse
as motion pictures and standards of morality; movies, delinquency and crime; the emotional
responses of children to movies; children’s sleep and its relation to film viewing; and the social
conduct and attitudes of movie fans, the Payne Fund was spearheaded by Reverend William H.
Short to gather ammunition as part of a campaign against the film industry, particularly its
monopolistic blockbooking and blindselling tactics.3 4 To help gather greater momentum behind
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the twelve studies, Short arranged to have a popularized shorthand version of the findings
entitled Our Movie-Made Children published in 1933 in advance of the studies themselves.3 5
Citing the considerable attention devoted to these findings in various popular magazines
of the era including McCalls, The Saturday Review o f Literature, Parent’ s Magazine and The
Christian Century, Jacobs outlines the general tenor of the findings: “The Payne Fund Studies
as a whole provided an account of the cinema’s power to create internal ‘states of excitement’
in children and suggested how cinema might affect the behavior of spectators according to their
age, gender and class.”3 6 For example, one of the monographs entitled The Emotional
Responses o f Children to the Motion Picture Situation used a series of experiments measuring
skin conductivity and pulse rate of three distinct age groups to measure emotional arousal when
exposed to the same film. In Jacobs’ view, the film education movement evolves out of a
pragmatic attempt to offset the putative effects of film viewing among those sectors of the
audience which had been singled out as vulnerable to the images they saw:
The assumptions educators made about whom films addressed and how they took effect
largely determined their attempts to teach film appreciation. Through writing classes,
classroom discussion and film clips, teachers attempted to instill new habits of film
viewing and to teach their students new ways of interpreting what they saw.3 7
Though she doesn’t explore this history, Jacobs is quick to point out that there had been interest
in the deployment of audiovisual education in the classroom before this time. What was new
after 1933, however, was an emphasis on how to use and discuss mainstream Hollywood fiction
films.
Beyond instructional or factual films, two groups helped to spearhead work on
Hollywood cinema: a non-profit organization called Teaching Film Custodians and the National
Council of Teachers of English.3 8 Teaching Film Custodians (TFC) was backed by the Motion
Picture Producers and Directors of America (MPPDA, formed in 1922), the film industry’s
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public relations and trade association. Through this affiliation, TFC was able to prepare
segments from Hollywood features for classroom use. For example, the first set of films
assembled together in 1935 were distributed under the subject heading “The Secrets of
Success.” In 1936, the series was expanded under the auspices of the Progressive Education
Association to distribute a set of films known as “The Human Relations Series” which
consisted of 75 excerpts from features films. Reduced from 35 to 16mm and re-edited to form
segments lasting from 20 to 40 minutes (the length of a typical class period), the prints were
circulated with program guides to help stimulate class discussion. TFC became incorporated in
1938, produced its first catalogue for teachers in 1939 and continued to expand its collection of
titles through the 1940s. Included were segments designed to teach science, history, good
citizenship and “character education,” a category Jacobs goes on to cite from the catalogue at
length:
Possibly the most important thing we can do with these films is to extend students’
awareness of the many, many ways people live their lives....The Human Relations
Series of films was selected so that [it would] call forth discussion. The group
experience of seeing the same human beings in action combined with the discussion of
their problems and the causes of their behavior makes the film experience educative.
The film alone will not do it. The film provides the case background - the personality
study; the student discussion clarifies ideas and deepens understanding.3 9
The inducement to class discussion and participatory pedagogical practices is a characteristic of
progressive educational theory and one that I will develop more fully in Chapter 3 as it begins
to inform sex education films directed to teens particularly in the 1950s. For the purposes of
this chapter, however, it is interesting to note that the particular vision of appropriate
citizenship that guides the “Human Relations Series” is pointedly reflective of the project of
cultural uplift and moral suasion so characteristic of progressive reform practices and their
anxieties about the “problem” of outsiders/others, namely immigrant spectators and the
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delinquent youth. Along these lines, Jacobs demonstrates how the work of the National Council
of Teachers of English, though not directly affiliated with the film industry per se, reflected a
similar reform agenda of promoting a canon of approved films (often literary adaptations with
accompanying study guides) to be used for elementary and high schools that were part of an
effort to elevate cinematic “taste.”
Attempts to improve popular taste as part of the war against vice and the more general
promotion of good citizenship was similarly part of the project of Canada’s National Council of
Education (NCE, founded in 1919) and the National Film Society (NFS, founded in 1935) and
their role in the development of Canadian film culture. In an essay entitled “Mapping the
Serious and the Dangerous: Film and the National Council of Education, 1920-1939,” Charles
Acland demonstrates the NCE’s role in articulating a national educational agenda for Canadian
film. In an argument that parallels Lea Jacobs’s essay (but with a Canadian focus), Acland
points out that members of the NCE, in keeping with reformist impulses, were interested in the
“regulation of recreation and modes of popular pleasure” as vehicles for the edification of the
nation. As he asserts:
The NCE promoted “education for leisure;” its involvement with film was thus a part
of an integrated strategy to influence the leisure practices of Canadians. Like the more
widely recognized National Film Society, the NCE acted as a clearing house for
information about film and as a vehicle for the circulation of choice films, that is, those
which the NCE saw as contributing to the development of a sophisticated film culture
in Canada. As film figured in the NCE agenda of national-building, the interest
focused upon modes of reception, especially on how films were understood and
assessed critically.4 0
A preoccupation with leisure time in the modem era of industrialization and urbanization is, as
discussed in the preceding chapter, a principle concern of a range of reformist groups. In the
face of mass media including magazines, radio and film — many of which were originating from
the U.S., many Canadian educationalists became concerned to channel these new media into
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potential educational vehicles rather than mere forms of entertainment and distraction. As
Acland puts it, these groups viewed “the ‘problem’ of Canadian culture” in terms of “the
quality of public taste, public education and citizenship in the age of mass communication.”4 1
Armed in 1935 with funding from the American philanthropic organization, the
Carnegie Corporation, the National Film Society was formed that same year and headed by
Donald Buchanan. The son of a senator and a life-long cultural critic and activist, Buchanan
traveled to Europe early that year to meet with other like-minded educationalists before
assembling his report published in 1936 entitled Educational Films in Canada. In England, he
met members of the newly formed British Film Institute (BFI, founded 1933) and was so
impressed with their operation that he modeled the NFS on a similar platform to help support
and coordinate educational film activities in Canada.4 2 As Acland points out, many of the
members of the National Council of Education were also members of the National Film Society;
in other words, prominent members of the Anglo-Canadian middle-class “elite” who elected to
act as purveyors of the ethical state through culture:
As many other voluntary societies of the day, this was not a populist organization, nor
did it intend to represent popular interests. The NFS was an organization interested in
the quality of national public life. This non-elected body....acted as though it
represented the interests of society in general, always with a taste of paternalism and a
certain distance from the popular audiences about whom they claimed to know so
much.4 3
The preface to Buchanan’s report was written by Governor-General Baron Tweedsmir who was
honorary president of the NFS and whose words are cited in one of the epigrams to this chapter.
Tweedsmir’s ideas about the molding of public opinion — instructing the public on appropriate
cultural taste, is clearly the agenda of the pamphlet and of the NFS more broadly. This popular
promotion of cinema as propaganda resonates with John Grierson (discussed below) who would
eventually head up the creation of the National Film Board of Canada, a government-sponsored
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film production and distribution body. Meanwhile the NFS, acting without state support, had
to look elsewhere for funding in order to survive and prosper. Interestingly, a series of events
ultimately led to funding from the Rockefeller foundation - the chief support behind the
American Social Hygiene Association as discussed in Chapter 1, and also a central source of
funding in the formation of the MOMA Film Library in 1935.4 4
As Acland’s summation of events makes clear, the Rockefeller funding — which would
eventually persist for a period of six years beginning in 1939, prompted the formation of a
smaller Canadian Film Committee with the NFS as its executive branch. The Canadian Film
Committee (CFC) a “quasi governmental coordinating body” would eventually evolve into the
National Film Board of Canada with John Grierson as its first commissioner, following the
decline of that post by E.A. Corbett (a prominent member of both the NFS and NEC).4 5 In the
meantime, the CFC clearly operated under the assumption that the source for its funding
necessitated closer cooperation with similar American organizations and some attempt to
parallel those activities. So while the NFS was initially inspired by the infiltration of foreign
commercial films (most of which were American) and their impact on Canada’s national
culture, from Buchanan’s report and their ensuing mandate and activities, it becomes clear that
their position would concentrate more on the issue of “quality” first and the “national” second.
As a report filed by Buchanan and co-author D.S. McMullan4 6 for the Rockefeller foundation
makes clear, the NFS encouraged the free trade of foreign films, so long as there was a system
in place to adequately assess their “social worth and educational value.”4 7 In a later essay
chronicling this history, Acland points to the inclusion of several educational and documentary
films on the program list for the NFS in 1939 including twelve “March of Time” films -
Conquering Cancer (1937), Crime School (1936), New Teaching Methods in US and Canada
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(1938) as well as several government-sponsored films, most notably Three Counties Against
Syphilis (1938) produced by the Department of Agriculture and the United States Public Health
Service.4 8
In this climate, both Canada and the United States (as well as Britain and several
European counties) begin to see various organizations coalesce around an interest in film as an
educational device for the modem classroom. Beyond the use of Hollywood films for such
purposes is a growing interest in and use of documentary and nonfiction films as the Canadian
Film Council’s program here highlights. While nonfictional aspects of film have been a central
aspect of the medium from its very beginnings, the rise of the documentary film movement in
the 1920s and 1930s will have a significant impact on the ways in which educational films get
reconceived. To highlight the differences between the WWI VD propaganda and the kinds of
films that begin to get made in the 1930s and 1940s, I will link Three Counties Against
Syphilis and In Defense o f the Nation to the Griersonian interpretation of the documentary
idea.4 9
Propaganda, Progressivism, and the Documentary Idea
As a self-proclaimed educator and propagandist, John Grierson has been described by one critic
as a crusader who “encouraged a blend of non-partisan progressivism and idealism, promising a
better world to come after the war. He orchestrated a system whereby the state was to act as a
diffuser of information over all aspects of society. Through all these channels he intended to
build a national consensus and national will. It was a process he would call ‘being totalitarian
for the good,’”5 0 which suggests an extremism for which Grierson was legendary, but also
shows a kind of righteous indignation which has much in common with the progressivist
impulse. As Grierson says in 1941: “...the key to education in the modem complex no longer
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lies in what we have known as education but in what we have known as propaganda. By the
same token, propaganda, so far from being the denial of the democratic principle of education,
becomes the necessary instrument for its practical fulfillment.”5 1
While John Grierson’s authorial signature was not officially attached to any of the
Canadian hygiene/venereal disease films produced for the armed services, his influence on the
formation and implementation of film policy and production in wartime Canada extends beyond
whatever credits are attached to individual films.5 2 Indeed, many early NFB films are simply
authored as such, with no credit given to individual creators, producers and directors. As the
so-called “father of the documentary film movement in the English speaking world,”5 3 a general
overview of Grierson’s contribution to the history of nonfiction film would require considerable
explication and would take me too far afield of the agenda I have set here. Moreover, the extent
of Grierson’s contribution to the British documentary film movement via the Empire Marketing
Board (from 1927-33), and General Post Office (from 1933-37, renamed the Crown Film Unit
during WWII) in Great Britain, as well as his creation of the National Film Board o f Canada
(1939-45) has been well-documented.5 4 What I will summarize here emphasizes how
Grierson’s influence and politics relate to the formation of a documentary tradition very much
in evidence in a number of the hygiene/training films produced by the Canadian and American
governments both before and during the WWII era.
In an excellent reassessment of the myth of John Grierson and his intellectual
influences, Peter Morris situates the Scotsman within a tradition of European intellectuals of the
1930s who came of age in a period of postwar pessimism, cynicism, and disillusionment. This
generation, according to Morris, reacted against liberalism and positivism, disputing “the
rationalistic foundation of individualism and of liberal society” as they “pointed to the muddle
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in which liberal democracy had become mired.”5 5 Grierson’s political philosophy comes from
his Calvinist upbringing as well as the ideas he studied in his work at the University of Glasgow
(in their philosophy department) and the University of Chicago where he did graduate work in
the 1920s. Morris outlines the ideological position, beginning with the Calvinist sect of “Wee
Frees” to which his family belonged, that would undergird Grierson’s adult thinking:
Calvinist attitudes involve a strict sense of discipline and obligation and a precise sense
of duty to the community, combined almost paradoxically with rebellion against
establishment orthodoxy. Calvinism absolutely opposed international backing and
capitalism, yet also considered wealth a sign of the grace of God and, conversely, that
poverty was deserved.5 6
This position allies very closely with the contradictory politics of progressive reform. It relies
heavily on a notion of the rigors and positive disciplinarity of good government, or
governmentality as the foundation of civilization. As Grierson himself says: “it is only through
the State that the person and the will of the person can be greatly expressed.”5 7
Part of the intellectual tradition in which Grierson was immersed viewed the basic flaw
of liberal democracy as the flaw of human nature itself which was inherently irrational and
acted more on instinct and feeling than reason.5 8 In this view, the irrational masses were
incapable of making informed decisions about the crucial political policies of the day. A huge
influence on Grierson’s thinking in this regard is Walter Lippman, to whom he would often later
refer in much of his writing and with whom he studied at the University of Chicago. In several
texts including Public Opinion (published in 1922) and later The Phantom Public (1925),
Lippman argues that in a society in which hierarchies of specialization mean that various
experts and technocrats know more and more about the functioning of the state, the general
public - being irrational and uninformed - can easily be manipulated. In a process he calls “the
manufacture of consent,” Lippman argues that no one individual could know everything about
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the function of their state and liberals had misdirected democracy into assuming this was even
possible. As Morris summarizes: “What...was true throughout history was that leaders, with
access to information the public did not have, necessarily made choices about what the public
should know. It followed that every leader was always, in some sense, both a censor and a
propagandist.”5 9 As Lippman says in Public Opinion:
The creation of consent is not a new art. It is a very old one which was supposed to
have died out with the appearance of democracy. But it has not died out. It has, in
fact, improved enormously in technic, because it is now based on analysis rather than
rule of thumb...
Within the life of the generation now in control of affairs, persuasion has become a
self-conscious art and a regular organ of popular government. None of us begins to
understand the consequences, but it is no daring prophecy to say that the knowledge of
how to create consent will alter every political calculation and modify every political
premise.6 0
One of the primary and most effective ways of conveying ideas, says Lippman, is through
pictures. In this regard, even words take on secondary importance, since they call up pictures
in memory: “...the idea conveyed is not fully our own until we have identified ourselves with
some aspect of this picture.”6 1
In the enlisting of interest and the formation of public opinion, John Grierson will be
profoundly influenced by Lippman’s ideas about the importance of human instinct over reason,
the manufacture of consent and the potential of the motion picture medium to enable this. For
example, in an essay on the “The Documentary Idea” originally published in 1942, Grierson
proclaims:
...the documentary idea was not basically a film idea at all...The idea itself...was a new
idea for public education: its underlying concept that the world was in a phase of
drastic change affecting every manner of thought and practice, and the public
comprehension of the nature of that change vital. There it is, exploratory, experimental
and stumbling, in the films themselves: from the dramatization of the workman and his
daily work to the dramatization of modem organization and the new corporate elements
in society to the dramatization of social problems: each a step in the attempt to
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understand the stubborn raw material of our modem citizenship and wake the heart and
will to their mastery.6 2
In “Education and Total Effort,” Grierson goes on to argue that it is a dramatic approach to
education, as opposed to an “intellectualist” one that will best serve the interests of the state.
The point, he argues, it to “give the citizen a pattern o f thought and feeling which will enable
him to approach this flood of material in some useful fashion.”6 3 Here Grierson’s link between
education and propaganda from Lippman is most apparent. By determining appropriate
patterns of thought and feeling to “guide the citizen in his citizenship,” Grierson claims,
“education has to give far more direct leadership and far less opportunity for the promiscuous
exercise of mental and emotional interests.”6 4 This promiscuity can be reined in through the
“creative treatment of actuality,” Grierson’s famous definition of documentary film form.
This pedagogical strategy is very much in evidence in Three Counties Against Syphilis.
A coproduction of the Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of Health, Three
Counties is unabashedly propositional in its promotion of modem medical science and the
inspirational goodwill of government. The film begins with the image of a map of Georgia, and
goes on to situate the locale through a montage of various images of that southern state as a
voice-over intones: “...once the rendezvous of buccaneers, later the scene of rich manorial
plantations, these islands have character and charm. Witness the picturesque ruins of the old
slave hospital where negro slaves were treated more than a century ago.” That the invocation
of a slave hospital is evidence of “character and charm” is certainly disputable, though it
certainly gives a clue to the film’s mode of address and agenda. As the montage continues,
showing the city of Brunswick and its industrial centers of fisheries, canneries, pulp mills and
modem plants for the distillation of wood byproducts, the voice-over continues: “Brunswick,
center of a mral area, is typical of communities throughout America. Here a demonstration in
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syphilis control can be carried on — a test program for work in other places, north or south.
The United States Public Health Service joined with the Health Departments of Georgia and
Glynn to set up such a project. This is not the story of syphilis the disease: it is the story of
Public Health organization to stamp out syphilis.”
A series of images show various people ostensibly from the town, submitting to blood
tests, including a schoolyard image of black children who have reportedly been tested for the
disease. The voice-over explains the benevolence of the government in providing free testing
and treatment to those who are afflicted, either through free medication provided to their private
doctors, or through public health clinics set up throughout the state. In showing a series of
rural images, Three Counties Against Syphilis outlines the many problems in trying to service
more remote communities beyond the towns and doctors offices. To help those who have
neither the “means” nor the “leisure” to travel to urban centers, the Public Health Service has a
remedy, as the voice-over proclaims: “If this mountain will not come to Mohammad,
Mohammad must go to the mountain.” The heroics of these medical officials here conforms to
Linda Gordon’s analogy for the profession’s self-proclaimed image during the progressive era
as “the new ecclesiastics.”6 5 The film goes on to paint a picture of modem medicine at work in
these poor, impoverished black communities. Mostly white doctors and nurses navigate
through these windy backroads in a fully-equipped modem bus, a mobile clinic whose path is
charted with an image of a map measuring miles traveled and numbers of patients treated. The
paternalistic tone of this progressivist agenda is unmistakable as the voice-over interprets the
sentiments of a small cluster of patients who gather by the mobile clinic: “Next to church the
biggest event of the week.” As Robert Eberwein puts it, the film would have us believe that
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“African Americans served by the clinic know only two dimensions in their pathetic lives, the
comfort afforded by religion and by medicine.”6 6
Visible evidence of medicine’s heroic capacity is provided by a series of test tubes,
microscopic images and images of lab technicians and doctors performing both Kahn and
Wasserman texts. Other than proving a “dragnet for syphilis” the blood test is described by the
voice-over as an educational device: “The man who has seen the blood test loses his fear. The
man who hasn’t had one wants it. Everyone talks about it. The blood test becomes a
demonstration and a symbol!” As a series of images show townspeople talking amongst
themselves, the voice-over interprets: “Wherever workers go they tell the story of the clinic to
willing ears.” Even the grocer is shown wrapping meat in a flyer advertising “Free Tests for
Colored People.” The extent of government intervention into everyday life is perhaps best
illustrated by the presence of a testing site at a local dance hall, though the greatest help, we are
told, comes from the churches. Not only are Pastors more than willing to cooperate in the
public health efforts, but “they themselves take the blood test as a demonstration and urge their
parishioners to follow them. Such is the story of a community mobilized, a community which
met syphilis with the weapons of medicine and modem public health. Whatever you may do in
your community,” we are told, “in these three counties of Southeastern Georgia the days of
syphilis are numbered. Syphilis will be the last great plague to go!” This last line is, in fact, a
famous quotation from Thomas Parran and the title of an essay that received widespread
publication first in Survey Graphic then in Reader’ s Digest in 1936 soon after he was
appointed Surgeon General.
The musical score shifts in the end of the film from a patriotic marching tune (the same
one used in Sex Hygiene) to a choral piece by the Hampton Institute Choir and Glee Club. This
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is telegraphed in the film’s credits which claim to provide “traditional negro music” as part of
the message of uplift. The choral piece, “Walking in the light of God,” is played over the film’s
final montage sequence which shows black people (young and old) walking, busing, even
traveling by ox and cart to the clinic which will help serve (and save) them. The uplifting racial
message links medicine to a kind of religious power that demonstrates a harmonious gesture of
public interest and government self-interest. That this film was produced around the same time
that another syphilis experiment - the infamous Tuskegee County Alabama experiment (starting
in 1932) where treatment to roughly 600 African American men was misrepresented so that
researchers from the Public Health Service could study the effects of untreated syphilis - is an
ironic counterpoint to Three Counties ’ propagandistic message.
The expository mode of the film’s address and its deployment of a voice-of-god
narrational style in its creative treatment of actuality is characteristic of the Griersonian
tradition which evolved from the 1920s onward. Bill Nichols describes this form of
documentary as taking shape around commentary directed toward the viewer and whereby
images serve as illustration or counterpoint. As he writes in Representing Reality.
Nonsynchronous sound prevails (expository representation prevailed before location
sound recording in sync became reasonably manageable around 1960). The rhetoric of
the commentator’s argument serves as the textual dominant, moving the text forward in
service of its persuasive needs. (The “logic” of the text is a subordinated logic; as in
law, persuasive effect tends to override the adherence to the strictest standards of
reasoning.) Editing in the expository mode generally serves to establish and maintain
rhetorical continuity more than spatial or temporary continuity....Similarly cuts that
produce unexpected juxtapositions generally serve to establish fresh insights or new
metaphors that the filmmaker wishes to propose.6 7
Grierson’s vision of documentary film is precisely this kind of exposition. As he defends film’s
unique importance to the “new world of education,” Grierson claims that documentary “does
not teach the new world by analyzing it. Uniquely and for the first time it communicates the
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new world by showing it in its corporate and living nature.”6 8 This privileging of “showing”
over “telling” is akin to the exploitation tradition, though the propagandistic message in this and
other WWII hygiene films would appear to be operating under the assumption that showing is a
form of telling. As Grierson puts it: “...particularly in times of crisis - men crave a moral
imperative: and I greatly doubt if education will mean a thing or will be listened to, unless it
acquires a moral imperative.”6 9 While the message of Three Counties refrains from any direct
commentary on the need of continence, the threat to families posed by VD, or even
admonishments of prostitution and promiscuity, the moral imperative it supports is a white
middle-class hygienic message to the disenfranchised black community. The subtext here is
clear: promiscuous black sexuality is in dire need of the medical management of the white
community which heroically comes to its aid.
The drama of venereal disease and the battle against it gets played out rather differently
in In Defense o f the Nation. Produced by the American Social Hygiene Association and
directed by Jam Handy,7 0 this film comes much closer to the reformist precepts of earlier VD
films. With the mobilization to war, the film suggests, social instability and carefully
orchestrated vice racketeering coalesce to create chaos and disease. As was the case in WWI,
the American Social Hygiene Association consistently equated venereal disease with
immorality, vice and prostitution by presenting America’s fighting men as innocent victims of
disease and simultaneously scapegoating prostitutes as the guilty spreaders of infection.
Declaring avoidance of prostitutes as a litmus test of patriotic zeal, this rhetoric reflects the
tendency to define social problems through statistical calculation, making a vast and often
grossly exaggerated compendium of detailed information about commercialized vice and lost
manpower due to its ravages. The film begins with a montage of images showing the American
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flag, the Declaration of Independence, a nuclear family, President Roosevelt and so on, as it
proclaims the necessity of Americans to protect their rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness.” Over a series of images showing industrial laborers, farmers, and the enlistment of
men for armed service, the voice-over (Ben Grauer) intones:
To these young men comes a radical change in their way of life as home ties are broken
and families, fiends and loved ones are left behind. Quickly they adapt themselves to
army and navy routine which transforms them into soldiers and sailors, the armed
forces which guard our security. Physical conditioning, discipline, military training
with wholesome leisure activity build the sound health and high morale which is
essential to strong fighting men.
The narration goes on to argue that it is “especially our community’s job to guard those men”
against venereal disease as images are shown of recruits receiving bloods tests. It is, we are
told, imperative that we especially “combat prostitution and promiscuity, spreaders of the
disease.” With this, the film goes presents a series of charts and statistics about how war
mobilization so frequently leads to increases in VD statistics. The appeal to efficiency as well
as security gets reinforced with a vast compendium of how, in WWI for example, the toll on
soldiers of these diseases amounted to the equivalent of an entire army division; enough days
lost to man nine destroyers or six airplanes carriers for an entire year. In sum, 7,000,000 days
were lost to the nation as the number is superimposed in bold white lettering across the screen.
As was the case in the First World War, World War II once saw a repetition of
arguments in favor of the suppression of prostitution as a central concern with respect to
venereal control. When localized law enforcement seemed inadequate to this task, Congress
once again took action. In January 1941, Representative Andrew J. May introduced legislation
that made vice activities within a five-mile radius of military installations a federal offense. The
so-named May Act became law in July 1941 and a popular propaganda campaign ensured with
such slogans as “Prostitution is an axis partner” and “Sex exposure without prophylaxis is help
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to the Axis” according to an Army Medical Corps poster.7 1 Venereal education deliberately
sought to create “syphilophobia” among men, as two medical officers indicated:
Fear is the dominant theme of many of the appeals that have been successfully used.
We realize that much of pedagogical and medical opinion will differ with us on the
value of fear as a motivation; yet we have found that it operates in the minds of the
soldiers as one of the most potent reasons for the avoidance of venereal disease.7 2
In early 1940 a joint meeting of the military medical services, the Public Health Service, and the
ASHA was held to develop plans for controlling venereal disease in the event of war. A
resolution entitled the Eight Point Agreement resulted and was soon approved by the
Confederation of Territorial and State Health Officers. The agreement endorsed an essentially
conventional approach to VD control: a combination of education, repression of prostitution,
medical treatment of the infected, and rigorous case-finding and contact tracing.7 3
Fear tactics are deployed throughout In Defense o f the Nation in ways that certainly
appear amusing today, though the film (as with Three Counties), has no images of disease
ravaged bodies as part of its strategy. During the discussion of vice and prostitution, for
example, a “business man” sits at his desk with a U.S. Defense Map as he is shown charting
target locations to a group of leggy women who listen to and nod at his every word. The single
suggestion of vice in this rather business-like scenario is signaled by a leopard skin rug on the
floor of the office which is emphasized by a panning shot that moves upward toward the
compliant women. The voice-over interprets: “The most deadly and damaging part of this
sordid business is organized with cold-blooded cunning and operated with one object only: to
make money.” As these women are shown with suitcases in hand waiting at a bus stop the
voice-over continues: “Women and girls are sent out according to carefully laid plans to
brothels, to low cafes and bars, and to the streets where they spread venereal disease and
disorder among those upon whom the defense of the nation depends.”
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The attachment of morality to disease in this film and its propagandists promotion of
“wholesome” leisure activities for troops and the women who entertain them is very typical of
the ways in which ASHA films avoid broader issues of sex education in their promotion of
hygiene and continence. The ASHA, for example, was pointedly opposed to prophylaxis
education, believing knowledge of such matters would encourage promiscuity. Indeed it was
the promotion of prophylaxis in Fit to Fight in WWI which posed a significant concern to the
organization and which was excised from the civilian film.
Training for War
The need to promote efficiency and good health during WWII meant that prophylaxis would get
reintroduced as an important preventative measure in training films made for male recruits.
Moreover, major campaigns to promote both chemical treatments were supplemented by the
promotion of condom use as well, in a joint program called early preventative treatment (EPT).
“If you can’t say no take a pro,” was a popular motto of both the U.S. and Canadian anti-
venereal campaigns. As Allan Brandt points out, “The provision of condoms...marked an
important reversal of World War I military policy. This policy constituted an implicit
recognition of the inability of officials to control the troops’ sexual drives.”7 4 In Canada, the
ration of condoms at three per man per month at the beginning of the war in 1939 became “free
on demand as required by user” by 1944.7 5
For women recruits, the situation was dramatically different. As Ruth Roach Peirson
states, “A woman exposed to VD...was left to become a casualty. Women were not issued any
contraceptive devices and they were not provided with any chemical or other means to cleanse
themselves after possible exposure to infection.”7 6 Even where education was the mainstay for
the Canadian Women’s Army Corp, never would the birth control or anti-venereal benefits of
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the condom be taught. Similarly, while the U.S. Army Surgeon General had hoped to apply the
same education to male and female troops - and therefore to provide WAAC members with
condom and prophylactic information, Col. Oveta Culp Hobby, WAACAVAC director from
1942 to 1945 believed that the assumption of heterosexual activity applied to the program for
men would seriously damage the reputation of the corp if applied to women. As Leisa Meyer
argues in Creating G.l. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women’ s Army Corps During World
War II:
To discuss the possibility of venereal disease as a problem among servicewomen was in
Hobby’s estimation a direct assault on Wacs’ respectability, comparable to a slander
campaign itself. The distribution of condoms and prophylactic information to
unmarried women in the WAC, she argued, would be seen by the public and the
families of servicewomen as both encouraging heterosexual promiscuity and subjecting
enlisted women to sexual victimization at the hands of male officers.7 7
In a climate in which even the American Medical Association had been reluctant to endorse the
benefits of birth control until at late as 1937, clearly a view of female sexual agency and
independence was too much for many to face at this time.7 8 Interestingly, even Thomas Parran
who was himself a Catholic, stopped short of support of condom use for men and women.
The degree to which chastity was the model of feminine behavior is indicated in the
double standard that shows up in labels such as “Victory Girls” “Pick Ups” and “ Patriotutes.”
- defined as girls who “want to give the boys a good time.”7 9 The net of definition of these
labels, as Ruth Roach Pierson argues, gets cast very wide: “According to the ‘Outline V.D.
Lecture for Soldiers Awaiting Repatriation,’ a ‘pick-up’ was defined as ‘any girl you can pick
up or who picks you up and lets you have intercourse with her.’”8 0 An RCAF report on alleged
contacts for venereal infection enumerates in order the list of named contacts as “waitresses,
office workers, factory workers, domestic help, prostitutes, and housewives.”8 1 For Your
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Information, the Royal Canadian Air Force film for women makes clear that alcohol is the
most common and easiest facilitator to becoming a “contact.”
In the beginning of For Your Information (1944, RCAF Medical Branch), a sex
hygiene film made for the women of the Royal Canadian Air Force, a male voice-over (Corey
Thompson) establishes a dialogic relationship between the imagined film spectator and the text
much like the one established in the end of Three Counties Against Syphilis or throughout In
Defense o f the Nation. Alongside a series of images showing women in service marching and
saluting, working in munitions factories, mess halls, nursing stations, Red Cross depots and so
on, the voice-over intones: ‘Tom are now doing valuable work on active service, thereby
releasing large numbers of men for fighting on the front line. And especially on the home front,
you women of the RCAF serve that men may fly.” Such an introduction, an inducement to a
gender-specific (and often service-specific) audience is typical of World War II training films.
The gender-specificity shows up in various ways of attributing disease to the “other” sex, class,
or race. For example, training films produced for male recruits attribute the source of venereal
disease infection to “dirty women” while films produced for enlisted women, do precisely the
opposite — declaring sex with diseased men as the scourge to avoid. Indeed, it is sex itself
which is fundamentally discouraged in the promotion of continence as the most patriotic of all
behaviors.
While all sex hygiene training films advocate individual self-control, they position the
problem as a far greater “battle” for men whose sex drive is assumed to be higher, and who
also, under particular pressures coincident with wartime activities, may be more in need of
“pleasurable releases.” An exchange between two characters in Pick-Up (1944, U.S. Army
Signal Corps) highlights this and other concerns. Corporal Green (the film’s “protagonist”)
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meets an attractive young woman (Ann) at the train station where he goes to purchase a ticket
for an upcoming furlough. After a casual conversation, Corporal Green (Johnny) invites Ann
out to a juke joint where they drink and dance late into the evening. Eventually, things heat up,
Ann gets nervous and Johnny says: “Hey look, I’ve been around. We like each other don’t we?
What’s wrong with being nice. There’s a war on, honey; we’ve gotta do everything faster.”
Ann expresses her stereotypically gendered position: “I know, but a girl has to have some self-
respect.” Self-respect is precisely what Ann apparently does not have, it turns out, since she
infects Johnny with gonorrhea, forcing him to cancel his furlough and consequently miss his last
opportunity to see his family and his “girl” back home before going overseas for combat. This
little morality tale ends with a close-up of our depressed, beleaguered (but cured) soldier going
off to war — paying the price of his misjudgment. The narrative never addresses the moral issue
of Johnny’s infidelity to his girlfriend back home, nor does it return to Ann and her fate.
Nevertheless, the medical officer who advises Johnny makes the textual interpretation of her
behavior clear: “Most of you men have sense enough to let the women who look like real tarts
alone. It’s the clean kids that worry us. That’s our problem today; to keep you men from
playing around with the so-called nice girls.”
Although maintenance of self-respect is a recurring theme/issue for women in these
training films, it never has the same resonance for men, who are typically positioned as victims
of diseased female bodies (most notably in the case of willing engagement with pick-ups or
prostitutes), but who themselves are not deemed “disreputable” as a result of contracting a
venereal disease. While the pedagogical message of these films may appear to be grounded on
the same principle of hygienic living, there is a fundamental contrast in the underlying message
along the lines of gender that we saw in training films from WWI as well. As we saw, Fit to
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Fight/Fit to Win positions the contraction of VD as profoundly unpatriotic, equating bodily
health, moral purity and fighting fitness on the same plane. The End o f the Road, while
similarly dedicated to education, knowledge and prevention, is concerned with prevention not so
much of infection as with sexual activity itself. As Annette Kuhn says of the film: “it is
chastity which is presented as the one sure way of avoiding diseases - and disgrace: for active
sexuality, disease and disgrace lie in wait together on the only other road open to women.”8 2
Despite the obvious differences between the films geared to men and to women, several
things unite them. Not only do most of these films typically engage both fictional (a moral
story of one or several characters who encounter disease) and nonfictional narrational
principles (charts, statistics, animated sketches, photographs), but the primary source of
knowledge offered in the films comes through medical expertise and the deployment of war
metaphors in the delivery of their pedagogical message. For example, the montage imagery and
patriotic marching music beginning For Your Information shifts to a doctor’s office where a
male officer/medical doctor (played by Jack Ralph) offers the justification for the lesson the
viewer is about to receive: “In order to win this war, we must not only fight our enemies on the
battle fronts, but also on the home front. We have to fight not only a visible one, but an
invisible one. This is not an enemy in the form of troops or tanks or guns, but it is an enemy
destructive and dangerous to our war effort. The enemy which we all face is ‘venereal
disease.’”
The juxtaposition between images connoting political patriotism and the doctor’s office
as classroom are devices commonly deployed for the sex education that these films provide and
which is clearly embroiled in conflicting ideas about the social meanings and moral evaluation
of sexual behaviors characteristic of progressivism’s conflicting ideologies. Other U.S. training
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films, including Pick Up (1944), Easy to Get (1944, a film for African-American soldiers) and
Three Cadets (1944), all incorporate narrative strategies to chronicle the fate of enlisted men
with respect to their sexual practices and experience of disease. At the same time, their use of
medical diagrams, diseased genitalia, and statistical instruction about VD and prophylactic use
consistently performs an erasure of the boundaries between fictional and nonfictional modes.
One of the consequences of this conflation is the extent to which the constructions of nationhood
and national identity become enmeshed with gendered identity. This collapse of nation and
gender vis a vis pedagogical practices in which care o f the self is imbricated in ideological
agendas attempts to construct uniformity and purity as constitutive of sexual (and national)
citizenship. Because sex education is always a gendered debate, it is not surprising that
considerable scapegoating goes on in the these training films which operate under a facile
strategy which posits education as a confrontation between ignorance as innocence and
knowledge as power. Such dichotomizing allows for the typical distinctions made between
virgins/good girls/wives on the one hand and whores/pick ups/victory girls (also referred to as
“patriotutes”) on the other.
The Story o f D.E. 733 is, in many ways, typical of many films produced by Hollywood
studios in service of the war effort. Early in the film, the executive officer of the ship
(MacGregor) reports on the “failure” of his ship to endure battle. From here a flashback
structure is deployed which offers MacGregor’s voice-over reflections on the doomed fate of the
D .E. 733, chronicling the dramatic (and fatal) consequences of a ship manned by too many
naval officers rendered “impotent” by disease and unable to avoid a torpedo attack due to loss
of manpower. MacGregor declares that the problems besetting the DE 733 were not in the
design of the ship but rather a failure of his pedagogical method. Urged by the ship’s doctor to
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lecture his crew on the travails of venereal disease just before one of their port stops,
MacGregor lists the “factual” “statistical” characteristics of chancres, bacterial infection,
prophylaxis, syphilis, gonorrhea, and condom use, promoting continence as the best and only
sure method to stay healthy. Of course, the crew largely ignores this rhetoric. After their port
stop, various officers visit the ship’s doctor in a montage sequence which provides graphic
display of a wide variety of consequent venereal diseases that beseige the men. When
reprimanded by the ship’s captain, MacGregor is offered an alternative pedagogical trope.
After stating that venereal disease is neither a medical nor moral problem, the caption declares
that “It’s a line problem” affecting everyone on ship. He bluntly dismisses the officer and then
suddenly beckons him back saying: “Oh MacGregor, do you know why men call a ship a she?”
because men at war suffer the loss of a woman’s companionship. We’re lonely for
women. We need a woman, so we make our ship one. A substitute. If you want to be
psychological, a love object. The love a man would ordinarily give a woman he gives a
ship. I want you to tell the crew that when a man brings disease aboard this ship, he is
endangering her as though she were his wife.
As this conversation ends, warning bells ring and the ship is eventually unable, due to
loss of manpower, to prevent an enemy attack. The phallocentrism of the torpedo’s invasion of
the ship only emphasizes the crudity of the metaphor and illustrates the highly problematic
conflations which collapse gender with nation vis a vis the motherland, displaying an absurdly
dated conception of femininity as simultaneously vessel, receptacle and dutiful (not to mention
sanitary) wife in need of protection. What is of particular interest in the context of pedagogy
and govemmentality, however, is the ship captain’s overt suggestion to deflect attention away
from sexual hygiene as either a medical or moral problem, and to reflect upon it in terms of
manpower and patriotism (population, political economy and apparatuses of security). The
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lesson to be learned is not medical or moral, “It’s a line problem,” says the captain. Of course,
we all know otherwise.
That MacGregor views his sex education lesson as a failure is suggestive of the kind of
marriage of factual and fictional modes that many of these films deploy. The presentation of
facts alone did not adequately convince the soldiers that they must modify their behavior.
Instead, the film is offered up as a dramatization of the consequences of failing to learn the
“right” lesson. The appeal to emotions, to dramatization as a superior pedagogical technique, is
aligned with the Griersonian creative treatment of actuality, and to the persuasive power of
images over words to modify behavioral. In other words, it conforms to Grierson’s privileging
of the dramatic approach over the “intellectualist.” As MacGregor learns, the facts are not
enough. The message that this conveys is not unlike the one proposed in a Sight and Sound
article from 1940 on training and indoctrination films:
Training for War is a matter of Education and must be done in accordance with sound
principles of teaching. The grim necessity is before us and unfortunately we have to
apply what is one of the supreme arts of peace to warlike purposes. Furthermore there
is no fundamental difference between good teaching methods for older children and
those suitable for the men in our armed forces.8 3
That men and children would be in need of the same pedagogical techniques is certainly open to
debate, though the propagandists nature of these films certainly seems to suggest otherwise.
Put another way, this pedagogical strategy operates under the assumption that “telling” is not
enough; “showing” must include dramatizations, inducements and a decidedly propositional
tone to properly convey their message. This is less a technique designed to provoke thought and
analysis and more a method of inspiring appropriate behavioral techniques through illustration
leading to conformity.
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132
Sexual Others
Another point that the metaphor of battleship as woman and the painful loss of women’s
company offered as its explanation points toward is the issue of sex segregated com-munities
and sexual practices. To be sure, no mention is ever made of homosexuality in any of these
films, which typically refer to the opposite sex every time sexual activity is discussed. Anti
sodomy laws on the books in many states and provinces in both the U.S. and Canada would
also account for why that practice never shows up as a possible route of venereal transmission
in the sex education lessons these films provide. In a way, this makes of homosexuality a
structuring absence, since community, comraderie and confinement are recurring themes in
these films. To be sure, a queer reading of these films is possible (for example, D.E. 733 shows
the naval officers enthusiastically practicing swing dancing among themselves), but not a
direction I will pursue at this point. The two venereal disease armed service films made for
Canadian recruits, For Your Information and I t ’ s Up to You probably come closest to allowing
for some (albeit limited) latitude in the interpretation of sexual relations. In their reiteration of
means of transmission both state that VD is obtained by having sexual relations with “an
infected person” and hence avoid gender specificity. Nevertheless, I t ’ s Up to You ends with a
vision of peacetime family life for the solider who maintains his good health: a happy husband
reading his newspaper by the hearth, his wife knitting in a chair opposite him, and a young child
playing contentedly on the ground by their feet. Similarly, For Your Information ends with the
suggestion that since “...many of you will want to get married” in peacetime, avoidance of
infection and maintenance of self-respect are crucial. The non-venereal sex hygiene film
produced for Canadian women of the RCAF, Hygiene for Health is a more general hygiene
lesson (provided by a male voice-over) covering proper maintenance of skin, hair, teeth, feet
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and the female reproductive system. In other words, it proffers a more general lesson in
grooming and etiquette which aims to provide lessons on appropriate feminine behavior with the
goal of being “attractive to the opposite sex.”
While overt discussion of homosexuality clearly doesn’t make it onto the screen here,
many concerns were raised bout the issue on both sides of the border. As Leisa D. Meyer has
so persuasively argued in Creating G.I. Jane, striking the right balance of femininity and
professional competence in a service so powerfully associated with masculinity was a constant
challenge for WACs. The image of mannish women and its cultural associations with
lesbianism runs though much of the criticism of women’s participation in WAC and the war
effort more generally:
The nonoverlapping categories of “woman” and “soldier” informed popular connections
between lesbianism and women’s entrance into the military. Cultural associations
between masculine women and female homosexuality formed the basis for suspicions
that at least some female soldiers would be lesbians....Within this framework, a
women’s entrance into the WAC and her donning a masculine dress seemed a clear
example of cross-gender behavior and therefore a possible indication of lesbianism.8 4
As historians John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman have observed, the theories of Sigmund
Freud, Havelock Ellis and Kraft-Ebbing all linked “proper sexual development” to conventional
definitions of “femininity” and “masculinity.” Within such a framework, women’s deviations
from prescribed “feminine” gender norms were frequently interpreted as a possible sign of
female homosexuality.8 5 In cultural conditions as pervasive as these, Canadian and American
army propaganda for women took great pains to highlight the femininity of recruits and their
attractiveness to men. As a Saturday Evening Post article on the WACs states: “soldiering
hasn’t transformed these Wacs into Amazons - far from it. They have retained their
femininity.”8 6 The feminine subordination of women gets reflected in mottos propagated for the
women of the Canadian armed forces. Excluded as they were from combat, the CWAC
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134
adopted the phrase “We serve that men may fight” while the airwomen’s slogan became “We
serve that men may fly.” Even more reflective of the secondary status and supporting role
played by women was the slogan for enlistment ads: “The C.W.A.C. Girls - the Girls behind the
Boys behind the Guns.”8 7 Interestingly, while fraternization with male recruits appears to have
been discouraged rather actively in the WAC, it was actually condoned in the RCAF and
CWAC which even (with permission of commanding officers) allowed for some marriages to
take place during service. As Ruth Roach Pierson points out in “They ’ re Still Women After
A ll”: The Second World War and Canadian Womanhood (the suggestiveness of the book’s
title is quite transparent), official Army, Navy and Air Force photographers were frequently
commissioned to take wedding pictures for release to the press.8 8
The case for homosexuality among men is best characterized by Dr. Joel T. Boone, a
captain in the Medical Corp for the U.S. Navy in a 1941 article entitled “The Sexual Aspects of
Military Personnel.” After listing a series of educational techniques for indoctrinating troops
into appropriate sexual behavior including “startling them with movies,” Boone states:
One thing further I would like to stress. History paints in lurid pictures abnormal
sexual practices which become associated with men at sea for long periods. Jokes and
filthy stories say that the world’s navies are composed of characters from the pages of
Kraft-Ebbing or Forel. This is a ridiculous attitude. Some men with abnormal defects
of personality do filter into the naval service. That cannot be denied, but it is axiomatic
that a healthy man is normal sexually and it is startling to see how soon the healthy men
realize the offender in the group and usher him peremptorily out of the service. Men
who would die before they would betray the confidence of a shipmate, look with
loathing and utter contempt on such bizarre characters and make every effort to see that
the Medical Officer learns there is among the crew one who is not a male in the healthy
sense of the word. We have no place in the service for the homosexualist, the panderer
or the pederast. He is - as soon as discovered - and this happens with amazing speed,
taken to one of the naval psychiatric institutions for treatment.8 9
The bifurcation of health and disease, heterosexual and homosexual and the suggested need of
medical science/intervention to treat the unhealthy is part of an all-too-typical equation of
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homosexuality with perversion which prevailed in many circles at this time. To be sure, Allan
Berube’s Coming Out Under Fire: The History o f Gay Men and Women in World War Two
makes clear that homosexuality nevertheless survived and thrived in these and other
communities at the time.9 0 Nevertheless, discrimination against homosexual practices was a
significant part of the regulation, scrutiny and management of military personnel in a culture in
which white heteronormativity reigned supreme.
Racial Others
The problem of patriotism takes on a markedly different connotation in Easy to Get, a training
film made for African-American soldiers. Robert Eberwein identifies the film as “a disgraceful
reminder of the segregation of the troops during World War II” and chastises its racial politics
for using a white male voice-over offering commentary on the “ignorance” of the characters in
the film.9 1 While I can hardly disagree with the former point, the latter is somewhat less
convincing. For one thing, the theme of ignorance, as I have argued, is a recurring theme in all
of these films based, as they are, on knowledge acquisition. Moreover, training and other
educational films characteristically use a voice-over commentary either to explain or ascribe
motives and psychological complexity to behavior, as is the case with Pick-Up and I t ’ s Up to
You. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is the economic advantage it
affords to the whole film production process.9 2 Beyond this, I would argue that the use of
African-American role models as incentive marks a curious departure in the politics of this film
as compared to the others mentioned here. While Easy to Get uses a typical melodramatic,
fictional component that follows the fates of Corporal Baker and Private Anderson as they
contract disease (from a friendly girl-next-door “pick-up” and a prostitute respectively), the film
introduces real-life figures in the film’s final minutes.
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After a montage sequence highlighting the achievements of several African- American
athletes at the 1936 Berlin Olympic games, one of these athletes, Ralph Metcalf (now in the
army himself) speaks to the audience in direct addresses about the need to remain responsible
and disease-free. After this, the voice-over introduces Paul Robeson, described as enjoying “the
respect and recognition of the entire world. From his college days when he was an all-American
end through his great career as singer, actor, and world traveler, Mr. Robeson has done as
much for our people as any man alive. Listen to him.” While precisely who “our people”
refers to remains unspoken, the montage sequence (and the film itself) suggests that this means
the African-American men for whom the film was made. That Robeson goes on to make a plea
for the spectator to heed the advice of the film and remember his responsibilities “to our
communities, our families and ourselves” rather than to the nation more generally is
suggestive. Indeed the rhetoric of Easy to Get may be read as outside (or on the margins) of
national/patriotic inducements in its efforts to proffer allegiance to a group constituted/imagined
by race perhaps because the experience of racism and segregation that the film’s existence
makes apparent may complicate such a call in the first place. In other words, the appeal to an
imagined black community could be viewed as a greater incentive to a group patriotic enough to
fight for a “democracy” that has failed to make good its promise of equality to them. This
pedagogical tactic may indeed be a strategic one that can be read retrospectively as prefiguring
the shift to identity politics and an increased emphasis on individual self-interest that
characterizes later sex education strategies that evolve out of identity-based politics.
In an oral history interview with Richard Goldstone who directed Three Cadets (1944)
the U.S. Air Force venereal disease film and a range of other WWII training and indoctrination
films, Goldstone remarks on the fact that each branch of the armed service had their own
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venereal disease film. In the interview with Goldstone, the issue of a tribal mentality or service
pride is suggested as a possible explanation of this. As interviewer Douglas Bell proposes:
“You know, if you think about it, the idea of having a different VD film for every service makes
a certain amount of sense....you’d be more likely to empathize with characters in your own
service.”9 3 This idea will get taken up, most pointedly in the context of AIDS pedagogy as
evidence increasingly begins to suggest that benefits of pitching to specific demographics.
What will take some time to promote is the idea of learning from one’s peer group as well,
rather than the hierarchical structuration of medical expertise. Goldstone points out something
that remains crucial to sex education methods to this day when he describes the backlash to
these films that also took place during the war. As he puts it: “G.I.s being as perverse as
anybody else, if a kid came up with a venereal disease, for example in the infantry or in the
marines, the older guys would...it was sort of like hazing freshman in college. They would dare
a younger kid, having seen one of these films, to prove his manhood by going out and getting
laid. And there were bad repercussions.”9 4 Later in the interview he says: “Actually....a lot of
these films, even going back to WWI....had the opposite effect, they had a very negative effect
on a lot of kids, because they were challenged to go out and get laid rather than being
warned.”9 5 Goldstone is acknowledging here the very troubling questions surrounding
knowledge, pleasure and danger at the interface of sexuality and the questionable effects of
scare tactics as a productive way to influence behavior that remain central debates in sex
education, particularly for teens.
New Drugs and Old Patterns
As the Second World War progressed, and battle against venereal disease reached a fever pitch,
public debate (and moral panic) continued to rage about its epidemic proportions. In this
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138
climate, the Canadian and American armies and government health departments were frequently
attacked for failing to organize effective VD programs. Plagued by contradictions, particularly
in the early stages of the war, many army programs and policies publically advocated chastity
while privately providing prophylactics. As one American reformer admonished: “The Army
exhibited more concern about conserving manpower than inculcating sexual purity among the
troops.”9 6 Indeed, those in charge of both armies’ venereal disease programs were caught
between reformist advocates of sexual continence and the suppression of prostitution on the one
hand, and the macho posturing of many officers on the other, who felt that a healthy, aggressive
sexual appetite was a fundamental component of the good fighter. For the armed services, it
became clear that venereal disease was a problem of physical vigor, not masculine ethics, the
result of which became a “pragmatic” approach to sex hygiene education which attempted to
reduce the sources of infection as much as possible. The pragmatic approach lacked the fervor
of a purity crusade, but tried to steer some middle course between laissez-faire attitudes and
moral absolutism.
This approach gets taken up in To the People o f the United States, (1944, produced by
Walter Wanger at Universal for the U.S. Public Health Service) which is, once again a
decidedly didactic, propositional piece of propaganda advocating modem medicine, particularly
blood testing for syphilis and the inspirational goodwill of government. One point to be made is
that this film, like Three Counties Against Syphilis and several other USPHS sponsored films
(including Fight Syphilis from 1944) is primarily concerned with syphilis and hardly mentions
gonorrhea. Since gonorrhea was at this time the most frequently reported infectious disease in
North America, fully four times more prevalent than syphilis, this is a striking omission.9 7
Nevertheless, while massive testing for syphilis began in the 1930s, this other venereal disease
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139
generated little popular concern. Allan Brandt offers several explanations for this: firstly,
though this was not indisputable, gonorrhea was generally seen as far less serious. Secondly,
diagnosis of gonorrhea was far more complex and difficult to administer than the much more
precise blood text that had been perfected for syphilis in the 1910s. Lastly, until the early1940s
with the development of sulfonamides, medical science had little to offer in the way of adequate
treatment for the disease.9 8 Surgeon General Thomas Parran’s crusade had thus focused on
what medical science could most satisfactorily treat as he says in an early scene of To the
People : “The purpose of the motion picture is to give you the facts and then you as individuals
and citizens of a democracy must take action.”
From these scenes of direct address (Surgeon General of the Army Norman Kirk also
speaks briefly), we shift into a fictional scenario in which several disappointed aircraft
mechanics (one of whom is played by Robert Mitchum) speculate on why their plane’s pilot has
been grounded. In a doctor’s office, we learn that the pilot has syphilis and is about to be
treated by an affable doctor (played by Jean Hersholt). After receiving his first round of
treatment the pilot leaves the office and Hersholt begins his direct address to the viewer. In true
progressivist terms, the doctor goes through a compendium of facts and statistics about the
costs of the disease as he takes us to several clinics, to draft officers, and we are shown images
of various hospitals signifiying the internment of syphilitic blind, insane, and disabled veterans
as the cost of their maintenance is underscored. The doctor then takes us to a maternity ward in
a hospital, turns to the camera and says: “Now let us measure the spread of syphilis in heart
break,” as he approaches an observation window and we are shown a cluster of infants.
Hersholt looks at them and then back at us and says reassuringly: “Don’t worry, these children
are normal happy babies. They have a good, happy life ahead of them. They’re the lucky ones.
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140
You wouldn’t want to see the other side of the picture.” Interestingly, we aren’t shown the
other side of the picture here in what is a marked contrast from the images presented in the
more typical VD hygiene training films I have been discussing. In contrast to the films made
for recruits, but like those made for civilians, the inspirational message is central to this film
rather than the spectacle of disease and a pedagogy of fear. Hersholt advises us all to get blood
tests, then decides himself to go to get one of his own - to show us how it’s done. He treats the
camera (and, in turn, the spectator) like reluctant companions who are nervous about the
encounter. In fact, as he walks into his doctor’s office, the tracking camera stops, lingers at the
door and recedes. Hersholt then proclaims: “Come on in don’t be scared” to which the camera
responds by slowing tracking into the room in what becomes our perspective shot. When he
approaches his doctor and shakes his hand, he turns back, gesturing to the camera and says:
“I’ve brought some friends along.” I mention this sequence because it’s quite unusual in a film
of this kind. Rather than offering up an expert as distant authoritative pedagogue, this film
offers an “expert” who also functions as a “friend” in a series of addresses to the camera, and in
turn to us which are suggestive of a highly personalized para-social relationship. By this, I
mean a seeming face-to-face relationship between performer and spectator is established,
establishing “the simulacrum of conversational give and take.”9 9 The implications for this
dynamic will be important in sex ed material that begins to deploy formal innovations and
techniques particularly in the 1970s and beyond. For the moment, however, it is noteworthy
that the parasocial relationship would appear to offer a dramatically different mode of address
in which the spectator is invited to imagine him or herself in a face-to-face exchange rather than
passive observation. Rather than a compliant, obedient student, this dynamic would appear to
level the pedagogical field.
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Despite its innocuous and friendly tone, To the People o f the United States would get
embroiled in a Legion of Decency debate which would ultimately prevent its being shown as
part of entertainment programs in ordinary theaters as originally intended. Of course, the
Legion’s objection was to the “deplorable” absence of any direct moral argument in the film
which treats syphilis merely as a disease and not a scourge resulting from promiscuity and sin.
Moreover, the topic of venereal disease was forbidden under the regulations set out in the
Production Code, which meant that the Legion could easily object to its inclusion in an
entertainment billing. In interesting ways that parallel the controversy surrounding Fit to Win
and The End o f the Road, the end of the war precipitated a backlash by those who opposed the
government, particularly the military’s anti-venereal campaign as one which substituted “high
pressure publicity....and offensive frankness....for moral training.”1 0 0
By the end of WWII, the problem of syphilis was beginning to recede, both in public
consciousness and in statistical measures. Part of this was the normal relaxation in the
immediate aftermath of war, the return home and family, the desire for stability, and a
reluctance to face social and sexual problems or to dwell on their existence. Even more
important, however, was the success of the new drug penicillin. Discovered in 1940 and first
used in the treatment of venereal disease in 1943, the drug became widely available by 1944
and completely transformed methods of dealing with the disease. Yet interestingly, this medical
advancement gets mentioned in none of the films I’ve mentioned here, even those made in 1944
and 1945. One reason for this may be that penicillin truly began to transform the meaning of
the disease and its consequences. The apparent ease of a cure, compared to upwards of 8 to 10
months of arsenical treatments meant that the military’s reliance of scare tactics would be
greatly diminished. So in spite of all the attention paid to medical science and its advances, the
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142
“technology” of antibiotics gets omitted from the educational program here. In other words,
medicine and morality continue to be (however unhappy) bedmates.
If history is a lesson, the pedagogical imperative operative in these works should be
considered in the context of the historical present as well -- to issues pertaining to race,
sexuality, gender, class, and beyond. In the wake of penicillin’s emergence as a highly efficient
remedy to treat many venereal diseases (several of which, historically, had dire consequences to
physical and mental health), contemporary sex education may be viewed with respect to these
older discourses. Indeed, one might argue that AIDS education is a history lesson in the
repetition of discourses which have similarly run the gamut of both medicalizing and
moralizing. The war rhetoric characteristic of educational pamphlets, campaigns and videos
produced in the 1980s (both with reference to drugs and AIDS) provides a curious parallel
between these two sex education fronts, as I will show in Chapter 5. Of course, a crucial
difference is the way in which the emphasis of contemporary concerns circumscribing a
“queered” nation shows the degree to which attention has been deflected from specifically (and
assiduously) heterosexual conjugality to a broader range of practices (and discourses).
Nevertheless, the fears and underlying ambivalence toward sexuality persist in spite of
the fact that they may get manifested somewhat differently. Public concern, horror, and fear
about AIDS is really a re-ignition of the older social hygiene movement in a new form. The
once prevalent description of the black population as sexually promiscuous, threatening, and a
reservoir of disease has now been displaced, in the AIDS epidemic in North American at least,
to the gay male population. Similar to ways in which VD was earlier interpreted as “the wages
of sin;” as punishment for sexual promiscuity and misbehavior, AIDS is popularly seen as
caused by gay promiscuity and, even more broadly, as a punishment for unconventional or
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143
unapproved sexual behavior, rather than simply as the result of infection by a microrganism.
What this and the remaining chapters will make clear is that however the history of sexuality is
interpreted, whatever governmental tactics are used to deploy the rules and regulations that
define it, whatever imagery is used to textualize its practices and whatever pedagogical model
is used to deploy information — all of these works continue to show that the very real experience
of sex is hardly a private affair. While youth have been the implied target audience for the
training films I have discussed here, Chapter 3 will examine the proliferation of films about
adolescent and teen sexuality which develop specifically for classroom use in the postwar era as
sex education in the schools gets formalized and increasingly widespread.
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Notes
1. John Grierson, “Education and the New Order "Grierson on Documentary (London, Faber and
Faber, 1966), 261.
2. This passage is from the preface to Donald Buchanan’s report for the National Film Society entitled
Educational and Cultural Films in Canada, published in June 1936. Cited in Charles Acland,
“National Dreams, International Encounters: The Formation of Canadian Film Culture in the 1930s,”
Canadian Journal o f Film Studies Vol. 3:1 (Spring 1994), 10.
3. Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood,” Hollywood Quarterly, Vol 1:2 (January 1946),
167.
4. While exploitation films were closer to the length of B pictures, they departed even from that
product. As Schaefer points out: “B films made by the majors as well as those made by Republic,
Monogram, and even the lowly PRC, may have been cheap and quick to shoot, but they had more in
common with the A films of the majors than with exploitation product. The only films that can be
equated with classical exploitation movies in terms of budgets, shooting schedules, and style were
those ‘quickies’ made by Poverty Row and ‘race films’ made for African American audiences.” See
Chapter 2, “A Hodge-Podge of Cuttings and Splicings”: The Mode of Production and the Style of
Classical Exploitation Films,” in Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! (Durham: Duke University Press,
1999), 50-51.
5. The War Department List o f War Department Films names four such titles including For Your
Information, Strictly Personal (1945, 36 min), Fight Syphilis (1944, 19min), The Magic Bullet (1944,
31 min). Since the latter two titles were distributed to other war departments, one may assume that the
common practice of updating the films for a female audience was the reason for their segregation.
Unfortunately, I have been unable to see these prints and to solve this question definitively, nor can I
but speculate as to why these films were restricted from male viewers other than that they were
assumed to be too graphic and/or lurid and may arouse prurient rather than more ‘legitimate’ interest.
6. Jay Cassel, The Secret Plague: Venereal Disease in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1987), 209.
7. To be sure, there were a handful of entrepreneurs who were committed to making feature films in
Canada, but no centralized industrial center really gained a foothold. For a history of this output see
Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History o f Canadian Cinema, 1895-1930 (Montreal: McGill-
Queen’s University Press, 1978).
8. Gary Evans points out that Canada was one of the first countries to see the practical purpose of film
for such purposes. Though while the Canadian government established an early precedent of
communicating with its citizens through film, he argues, these films generally celebrated landscape
and geography, were characterized by an absence of people, therefore lacked an appeal to human
emotion and failed to define or express and national identity or provoke collectivity in any way. This
mandate would only come about with the formation of the NFB in 1939. See Evans, John Grierson
and the National Film Board (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 18-19
9. More details of the list of films shown to Canadian is found in Appendix H of Jay Cassel, The
Secret Plague, 275-276
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145
10. Suzann Buckley and Janice Dickin McGinnis, “Venereal Disease and Public Health Reform in
Canada,” Canadian Historical Review Vol. 63:3 (1982), 348.
11. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History o f Venereal Disease in the United States Since 1880
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 123
12. Ibidt., 122.
13. Allan Brandt, “The Education of Syphilis as a Practical Public Health Objective,” JAMA 97 (July
11, 1931): 73. Cited in Brandt, 136-137
14. Brandt, “The Education of Syphilis,” 143
15. Ibid., 144
16. Richard Dyer MacCann, “World War II: Armed Forces Documentary,” Nonfiction Film Theory
and Criticism. Ed. Richard Maran Barsam (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1976), 136.
17. Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board, 110.
18. Richard Shale, Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During WW11 (Ann Arbor, MI:
UMI Research Press, 1982).
19. I have thus far been unable to ascertain exactly which American VD training films were shown to
Canadian troops, but several references to the purchase and use of these films occurs in documentation
from the period. See, for example, J. W. Tice et al, “Some Observations on Venereal-Disease Control
in the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Canadian Journal o f Public Heath, Vol. 37:2 (February, 1946), 53.
20. Some critics distinguish between training, incentive and/or indoctrination films, a point which I
will not belabor here. That these films were made precisely as a form of war propaganda is often
elided by those who associate that word with information generated exclusively by the enemy (here
Axis) regimes. Others, notably John Grierson, quite willingly accept their wartime work as precisely a
form of government propaganda. For more on these debates see Richard Barsam, Non-Fiction Film: A
Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1973) and Jack Ellis, The Documentary Idea
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1989).
21. Cited in Robert Eberwein. Sex Ed: Film, Video and the Framework o f Desire. (New Brunswick,
NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999), 70.
22. Ibid., 67
23. Linda Gordon, W om an's B odies, W om an’ s R igh t (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), 85-88.
24. Ibid., 4-5
25. Ibid., 68-79
26. Peter Bogdonovich, John Ford (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 80.
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146
27. Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)Credulous Spectator,”
Viewing Positions: Ways o f Seeing Films ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1994), 121.
28. Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess,” Film Quarterly 44:4 (Summer 1991),
2-13.
29. Blair Fraser, “VD...No. 1 Saboteur,” Maclean’ sMagazine (February 15, 1944), 29.
30. Ruth Roach Pierson, “They’ re Still Women After A ll”: The Second World War and Canadian
Womanhood (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 200
31. Ibid., 201.
32. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’ s Visual Culture (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
33. Lea Jacobs, “Reformers and Spectators: The Film Education Movement in the Thirties,” Camera
Obscura 22 (January 1990), 31.
34. Ibid., 31
35. Henry James Forman, Our Movie-Made Children (New York: MacMillan, 1933). Note that
Jacobs cites the year of publication as 1933 and 1935.
36. Jacobs, “Reformers and Spectators,” 32
37. Ibid., 35
38. While the precise date of their formation is unstated in her article, Teaching Film Custodians was
affiliated with Mark May of Yale University seemingly around 1933. The National Council of
Teachers of English (formed around the same time) was linked to Edgar Dale and his research at Ohio
State University. Both May and Dale contributed monographs to the Payne Fund Studies. See Jacobs,
35.
39. Cited in Jacobs, “Reformers and Spectators,” 36
40. Charles Acland, “Mapping the Serious and the Dangerous: Film and the National Council of
Education, 1920-1939,” Cinemas 6 A (1995), 103-104.
41. Acland, “National Dreams,” 7
42. Ibid., 9
43. Ibid., 8
44. For a more detail discussed of this topic, see Haidee Wasson, ‘“ Some Kind of Racket’: The
Museum of Modern Art’s Film Library, Hollywood and the Problem of Film Art,” Canadian Journal
o f Film Studies 9:1 (2000), 5-29.
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45. Acland, “National Dreams,” 21
46. D.S. McMullan was the director of Visual Education of the Provincial Association of Protestant
Teachers of Quebec and a prominent member of the NFS. See Acland, “National Dreams,” 16.
47. Acland, “National Dreams,” 21
48. Acland, “Patterns of Cultural Authority: The National Film Society of Canada and the
Institutionalization of Film Education, 1938-1941,” Canadian Journal o f Film Studies 10:1 (Spring
2001),14.
49. As is famously known, “documentary value” is a termed coined by John Grierson in a review of
Robert Flaherty’s film Moana for a New York newspaper in 1926. That “documentary” films or
“films of fact” date back to the beginnings of cinema is widely acknowledged. The 1920s saw a
significant rise of interest in the “documentary idea” which, in turn, had a profound impact on the
form, structure and use to which the film medium would be put during the Second World War by both
Allied and Axis powers.
50. Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board, 13-14
51. John Grierson, “Education and Total Effort,” Grierson on Documentary Ed. and compiled by
Forsyth Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1966), 278.
52. Jack Ellis makes a similar argument when he says that in spite of the highly collaborative team
effort of the production process Grierson advocated, and also despite their didactic purpose, those
hundreds of films made under him in Britain and Canada “contain art and bear the stamp of the man,
to one degree or another. Grierson’s influence is evident not only in their subjects and intentions, but
in their forms and styles as well.” See Jack Ellis, John Grierson: A Guide to References and
Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 18.
53. In fact, Grierson is reputed to have coined the term “documentary value” in relation to film in a
review of Robert Flaherty’s film Moana for the New York Sun on February 8, 1926. In a later essay, he
would define documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.” See Richard Barsam, Non-Fiction
Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1973), 77.
54. A sample of recommended texts includes: Rachel Low, The History o f the British Film 1929-
1939: Documentary and Educational Films o f the 1930s (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979);
Gary Evans, John Grierson and the National Film Board: The Politics o f Wartime Propaganda 1939-
1945 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984); David Barker Jones, The National Film Board o f
Canada: The Development o f Its Documentary Achievement. Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford
University, 1977. An extremely useful guide to the wealth of material on Grierson is by Jack Ellis,
John Grierson: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1986).
55. Peter Morris, “Re-thinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson,” Dialogue: Cinema
canadien et quebecois. Eds. Pierre Veronneau, Michael Dorland and Seth Feldman (Montreal:
Mediatexte, 1987): 25.
56. Morris, “Re-thinking Grierson,” 26
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57. Cited in Ibid., 27
58. Ibid., 28
59. Ibid., 29
60. Walter Lippman, Public Opinion (New York: MacMillan Company, 1957), 248.
61. Ibid., 161-162
62. John Grierson, “The Documentary Idea: 1942,” in Grierson on Documentary, 250
63. John Grierson, “Education and Total Effort,” in Grierson on Documentary, 278
64. Grierson, “Education and Total Effort,” 278
65. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman’ s Right: A Social History o f Birth Control in America
(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), 170
66. Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed, 51
67. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 34-35.
68. Grierson, “Education and the New Order,” 268
69. Grierson, “Education and the New Order,” 269
70. Henry Jamison (Jam) Handy begin an industrial/educational film career in WWI when he applied
motion pictures to war training products. In the interwar years he was hired by various companies,
including General Motors to help develop filmstrips for its subsidiaries. During WWII, Jam Handy
Productions reportedly made over 7,000 short films for the armed services and the company continued
production well into the 1960s and 1970s.
71. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 163
72. Cited in Ibid., 163
73. Ibid., 162
74. Ibid., 164
75. Pierson, " T hey’ re S till Women A fter A ll," 200
76. Ibid., 200
77. Leisa Meyer, Creating G.l. Jane: Sexuality and Power in the Women ’ sArm y Corps During World
War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 105-106.
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78. Eberwein, Sex Ed, 46
79. Fraser, “VD...No. 1 Saboteur,” 30
80. Pierson, “They're Still Women After All,” 211
81. Cited in Ibid., 211
82. Annette Kuhn, Cinema, Censorship, Sexuality, 1909-1925 (London: Routledge, 1988): 52.
83. “The Film and Training for War,” Sight and Sound {1940)
84. Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane,” 150
85. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 193-195
86. Cited in Lisa D. Meyer, “Creating G.I. Jane: The Regulation of Sexuality and Sexual Behavior in
the Women’s Army Corps During World War II,” Feminist Studies 18:3 (1992), 585.
87. Cited in Pierson, "They’ re Still Women After All, ” 160
88. Ibid., 160
89. Joel T. Boone, “The Sexual Aspects of Military Personnel,” Journal o f Social Hygiene 27 (March
1941), 119.
90. Allan Berube, Coming Out Under Fire: The History o f Gay Men and Women in World War Two
(New York: The Free Press, 1990).
91. Eberwein, Sex Ed, 74-75
92. For a short article outlining the general characteristics of training films see Newton E. Melzter,
“The War and the Training Film,” American Cinematographer (July 1945), 230. Meltzer notes a
particular trend for the AAF films (produced in Culver City) late in the war to shift to live dialogue,
something made apparent in Three Cadets (1944).
93. Richard Goldstone Oral History, Interviewed by Douglas Bell, 1995, Academy Foundation
Program, Margaret Herrick Library (Volume II), 417
94. Ibid., 417
95. Ibid., 490
96. Cited in D ’Emilio, Intimate Matters, 212
97. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 154
98. Ibid., 154
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150
99. Donal Horton and R. Richard Wohl, “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction,”
Communication Studies: An Introduction, eds. John Comer and Jeremy Hawthorn. (London: Edward
Arnold Press, 1993), 156.
100. Brandt, No Magic Bullet, 165
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Chapter 3: Sex Education in the Classroom: Teen Sexuality and the
Construction of Sexual Citizenship in the Postwar Era
‘Tis the custom of pedagogues to be eternally thundering in their pupils’ ears, as they
were pouring into a funnel, while the business of the pupil is only to repeat what the
others have said: now I would have a tutor to correct this error, and, that at the very
first, he should....put it to the test, permitting his pupil himself to taste things, and of
himself to discern and choose them, sometimes opening the way to him, and sometimes
leaving him to open it for himself; that is, I would not have him alone to invent and
speak, but that he should also hear his pupil speak in turn. Socrates, and since him
Arcesilaus, made first their scholars speak, and then they spoke to them. The authority
of those who teach, is very often an impediment to those who desire to learn. - Cicero
Michel de Montaigne, “Of the Education of Children,”
1579-80'
How many of you have ever stopped to think that in the heart of every child there is a
“chamber of imagery?” the walls of which are ever being decorated; a memory’s
storehouse, the commissary department of thought. You know in the army the
commissary or quartermaster receives, stores up, holds in reserve and gives out on
future requisition of the commanding officer, supplies of food, clothing and
ammunition. How many of you realize that in this commissary department of the heart
there is constantly being stored up good or evil influences; that the Spirit of Evil is ever
active in crowding through eye and ear materials which he can use to the destruction of
the soul.
Anthony Comstock, address before the Conference on
Child Welfare at Clark University, July 19092
In my youth, I accepted it as a byword that the three impossible professions are
teaching, healing and governing, and I have been sufficiently busy with the second.
This does not mean that I do not appreciate the great values of the work which attracts
my co-workers in the pedagogical field.
Sigmund Freud, Forward to Wayward Youth3
Since the early decades of the twentieth century, school curriculum discourses have helped to
define, rank, categorize, distinguish, and standardize appropriate and inappropriate behavior
amongst young people. In this regard, pedagogical practices, including those found in sexuality
education, have played a significant part in the multiple ways in which the minds and bodies of
students are governed and disciplined in school. This contested domain of sex education is
nowhere more apparent than in the discourses and practices that surround sexuality education in
the schools where the subject, from its inception in the early twentieth century, has been
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embroiled in various incompatible definitions of what it means to be a boy, girl, man or woman,
let alone how much so-called “children,” “adolescents” and “teens” should be allowed to know.
Comstock’s conception of the youthful heart as a fragile “chamber of imagery” allied to
democratic self-governance as a “commissary department of thought” cited above certainly
speaks to the perceived vulnerability and malleability of the young at the same time that it
evokes both Plato’s cave and the cinematic experience of the darkened space of reception. The
distinction between childhood, adolescence, and adulthood becomes particularly mired in the
context of gender, sex, and sexuality, both in terms of how boundaries and distinctions should
be drawn around such categories, and what people of various ages and stages should be
induced, required or even allowed to learn. To be sure, Montaigne’s injunction to encourage
the pupil to “taste things” for himself invites perplexing dilemmas with respect to youth in the
fraught domain of sexuality. As a 1914 article in Atlantic Monthly maintains with respect to
sexuality and “taste”: “The fruit of the tree of knowledge, which is now recommended as
nourishing for children, strengthening for youth, and highly restorative for old age, falls ripe
from the stem; but those who have eaten with sobriety find no need to discuss the processes of
digestion.”4
One of the most famous attempts to institute sex education in the public schools took
place in Chicago in 1913-14, a city where many innovations related to pedagogy took place
beginning in the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, most notably involving
John Dewey and Francis Wayland Parker.5 Initiated by Ella Flag Young, a prominent
progressive reformer and superintendent of the Chicago schools, the program consisted of a
series of twenty-two lectures given within the Chicago public school system, attended first by
2,210 parents and then administered to 21,534 students in sex-segregated groups on topics
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ranging from human reproduction to mental hygiene to venereal disease. Ultimately, the
program was a lesson, according to one historian, on how not to implement a sex education
program. The high visibility accorded to the experiment - especially given its campaign of
advertising medical experts as guest lecturers, and the “emergency method” attached to this
approach - with its emphasis on venereal disease, made the subject seem appropriate to many
parents and certain citizens groups. Lessons were conducted in English, Polish, Bohemian and
Russian, and the program was generally well-received by its participants, but the series was
dropped in 1914 after a series of protests by the Catholic Church. The perceived failure of the
Chicago experiment nevertheless led many educators in the social hygiene movement to move
away from the medical-centered, emergency intervention approach with its pathologizing stance
to a new educational model. This new model favored the positive aspects of sexuality that
could get worked into existing courses such as biology and nature study rather than though
“special lectures” which had the effect giving the subject “undue prominence in the childish
mind”6 as well as drawing attention especially from more conservative quarters outside of the
school system.7
One of the ways in which ASHA leaders sought to maintain a profile and to continue
their project of promoting sex education, then, became a shift in emphasis and approach away
from disease and contamination to the protection and safeguarding of the family. Of course,
this had been the subtext of the social hygiene movement from its inception. In spite of the fact
that emphasis on venereal diseases tended to mean that the focus of sexual hygiene had been on
disease prevention and “genital information,” this was nevertheless often imbued with moral
injunctions circulating around prostitution and sexual misbehavior and their devastating impact
on family life. William Snow’s remarks in his report on the White House Conference on Child
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Welfare and Protection in 1930 reflect the general aim o f social hygiene in “the preservation o f
the family and enrichment o f family life for all its members.”8 To this end, Snow argued, sex
education is best presented through its gradual, subtle incorporation into existing curricula,
such as biology and social sciences, psychology, hygiene, physical education, home-making,
literature, and history. This ameliorative tactic was one designed to avoid controversy.
While very little innovation in sex instruction took place in schools over the course of
the 1930s - with the exception of the development of marriage and family living courses
discussed below, the war brought renewed interest in the topic, especially as it came to an end.
For one thing, the ASHA would need to look for ways to remain vital given the historical
tendency for the general public to lose interest in venereal diseases in peacetime. For another,
the invention of Penicillin completely changed the perception of venereal diseases. As one
historian put it, “Penicillin seemed to strike at the social hygiene moment’s very reason for
existence. With the loss, however temporary, of venereal disease as an effective metaphor for
social disintegration, public health authorities in the ASHA and related organizations
questioned what their future role should be. In the absence of a physical health threat, could
they or should they focus directly on sexual and social disorder?”9
One of the techniques that would gain particular momentum in the shift away from the
physical threat of disease would be a psychological tactics predicated on “mental hygiene”as a
strategy for justifying sex education to youth. From this perspective the molding and
manufacture of appropriate behavior - through appropriate knowledge acquisition - became a
central concern. This shift led to increased emphasis away form the pathological toward
protecting and advancing what was considered to be “normal” (i.e., white, middle-class,
monogamic heterosexual) in the relations between the sexes. A way to sugarcoat the pill, as it
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were, was to emphasize the family and begin to carefully scrutinize and survey behavior so as
to prevent disruption of the family ideal. This helps to explain the enormous preoccupation
with juvenile delinquency in the postwar period, the debilitating effects of which are frequently
explained using analogies with sexuality and disease. For example, Abraham Feinberg, a
public welfare advocate and well-known rabbi of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple argued in
1944 that “Juvenile delinquency, not syphilis, is the crucial social disease of our civilization.”1 0
In much the same way that venereal disease has frequently been viewed as a moral scourge
rather than a disease caused by particular germs, certain types of people - often people who are
associated with sexual deviance or misbehavior - become the concern of reformers. The
problem remained, how to institute a broad based educational platform for what was widely
perceived in the generational divide as the growing “youth problem.”
One of the dominant views of education shared by Canadians and Americans alike,
indeed the rationale for compulsory education and public schooling in both countries is the
belief that a genuine democracy cannot exist without the full education of all its citizens. This
position is reflective of a popular view of pedagogy that sees its function as consistent with
democratizing effects on the body politic. To be sure, the notion of “genuine democracy” is
highly contestable terrain, particularly in the case of sexuality which is envisioned very
differently in the minds of the heterogenous communities that constitute the nation here and
elsewhere. The popular equation of knowledge with power that runs through much of the
progressive reform agenda of sexual and social hygiene is certainly predicated on this belief.
Yet to the extent that the school system represents a double threshold between the privacy of the
home and the public sphere, as well as nodal point negotiating and guiding citizens between the
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categories of childhood and adulthood, it is inevitable that sex education would be caught in the
tangle of competing ideologies regarding what constitutes appropriate sexual citizenship.
A significant part of the problem with sex education is connected to parental objections
to curricula that deals with material that deviates from or interrogates the promotion of
monogamic heteronormative sexual practices. Today and throughout the twentieth century, sex
education material consistently advocates abstinence among the young and frames sexuality in a
carefully circumscribed marital, reproductive context. This conceptual framework is often
unforthcoming about areas of particular interest to teens, and typically avoids such issues as
sexual desire, fantasy, and masturbation in favor so-called scientific “facts” and statistics. In
order to avoid controversy, say the authors of Sex and the American Teenager in 1985,
“schools embrace boredom” by directing class efforts toward developing strategies to avoid
conflict and controversy.1 1 In this regard, comprehensive curriculum development, lesson
plans, and learning activities often seem driven less by theories of education than by fear of
attack from both parents and other concerned citizens or groups.
One of the many paradoxical situations this creates lies in the incongruity between the
way the subject is taught in a curricular context which seeks to regulate interest through
carefully managed, scientific language, obfuscated detail, moderated tonality and restraint
versus the myriad ways in which culture in the form of advertising, mainstream cinema and
popular music outside the classroom invites, indeed seduces us to perceive as fascinating,
pleasurable and infinitely complex. The words of William Snow reporting on the White House
Conference on Child Health and Protection seems very similar to the agenda that exists even
today. As he proposes, the “satisfaction of sex curiosity” in youth must ultimately lead to “a
fine and appropriate reticence instead of a false modesty or a vulgar frankness.”1 2 “Appropriate
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reticence” is the general aim of social and sexual hygiene described in 1931 and often today
under the more recent rubric of “sex education” as the preservation and enrichment of family
life. Of course, what “appropriate reticence” may be is often the subject of some dispute, when
it is not elided altogether. One certainty is the effect of the White House Conference, at that
time, the largest conference ever held in the United States on the welfare of children, in
proposing what would come to be known as the “mental hygiene point of view,” the new
pedagogical model to be endorsed on a national level both in Canada and the U.S.. This is a
model, as we shall see, which is predicated on the fundamental plasticity of childhood, on the
ability to guide personality development toward manufacturing the best, most efficient and
hygienic citizens for a society of tomorrow.
Today, the two most common views of adolescence are generally divided along the line
of the raging hormones, or “storm and stress” theory which comes from socio and biologically-
based models, and the youth as subculture theory derived most prominently from the
Birmingham School wing of Cultural Studies. While the biological and the subcultural models
propose different notions of a young person’s knowledge about “adult” matters, both are
predicated on an assumption of youth as a category or stage between a natural and innocent
childhood and a socialized, knowing adulthood. The liminal status of this phase is marked by
discourses which emphasize puberty as a period of physio-biological and psychological
transformation and instability, precipitated by the development of secondary sex characteristics
which trigger a heightened sense of sexuality in the young adult. That adolescence is a sexually
defined stage marking a moment both when sexual experimentation tends to become more
likely, and the ramifications of this experimentation more problematic means that sex education
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for the young adult has historically been (and continues to be) framed as a “problem” in need of
management and control.
In this chapter, I want to outline the historical construction of adolescence as a
quintessentially twentieth-century concept bom out of progressivism’s preoccupation with
govemmentality and public surveillance, the rise of social sciences, and the growing
preoccupation with specialization/expertise, education, statistical measure and
scientific/medical management. In this framework, sex education develops along
progressivism’s ambiguous, dichotomous axes of social reform as simultaneously a project of
social control and humanitarianism; in other words, as attempts to foster self-reliance and
independent citizenship in the young precisely through methods of surveillance and social
control. Alongside the social and sexual hygiene movements mentioned in the previous two
chapters, the “mental hygiene” movement comes to play a significant part in this deployment,
particularly as it begins to focus increasingly upon issues of childhood development from the
1920s onward.
Beginning with an overview of the invention of adolescence, the impact of progressive
pedagogy and the mental hygiene movement here, I will go on to discuss more specifically the
new species of film which begins to proliferate in the post WWII period, the sex education
classroom film. Alongside formal classroom curricula, many different organizations including
Churchill Films, Coronet, Crawley Films, Moreland-Latchford, the National Film Board of
Canada, even book companies like Encyclopedia Britannica and McGraw-Hill have been in the
business of producing educational films (often in conjunction with or as companion pieces to
school text books) on a wide range of subjects particularly from the post WWII period onward.
In fact, corporate sponsorship plays a significant and central role in educational film. The
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reasons for this are primarily economic, given the budgetary constraints imposed upon public
school systems, particularly with respect to audiovisual aids and equipment which, historically,
were far more cumbersome and expensive than the technology available today.
Since the sheer volume of this output could make such an undertaking quite daunting, I
will limit my discussion to a smaller number of representative films, with a few excursions into
those which are exceptional or illustrative for one reason or another. I will also restrict the time
period under discussion here beginning with films produced in the post WWII era and ending in
the 1960s when, as I will argue in Chapter 4, another significant series of formal and thematic
shifts take place in celluloid sex education largely through the impact of cinema verite practices,
student/youth protest, civil rights and the women’s movements as well as the “ feminization” of
sex and sexuality that transpire in this wake. Before doing so, however, I want to return to the
late nineteenth/early twentieth century to the reconceptualization of adolescence that takes place
at this time under the rubric of the social sciences.
G. Stanley Hall and The Invention of Adolescence
In 1904, G. Stanley Hall, a sixty-year-old psychologist and president of Clark University in
Massachusetts published a monumental two-volume work entitled Adolescence, devoted to
understanding the special situation and unique needs of young people who had reached puberty
but were nevertheless too young to marry. While this was not Hall’s first foray into child study
-- his previous work, The Contents o f Children’ s Minds (1883), is one of the earliest scientific
attempts to examine the psychology of the child, Adolescence marked a significant scholarly
achievement and catalyst for further exploration. As Jeffrey Moran argues in Teaching Sex,
this new category of being, “the Adolescent,” signified deep changes:
For decades - even centuries - before, Americans had considered young people to be
more like inchoate, inferior adults than a separate class unto themselves. By the late
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nineteenth century this older view was fading, gradually being eclipsed by a vision of
youth as a unique period of life, with its own dynamic and its own demands. A great
many Americans were growing vaguely aware of this shift, and young people were
becoming increasingly conscious of their separateness as a group from adult culture,
but overt recognition of youth’s new position awaited Hall’s investigations at the turn
of the century. Adolescence is a modem invention.1 3
As modem as this twentieth-century invention appeared to be, Hall and other
popularizers of this concept were profoundly wedded to the morality of the Victorian era.
Indeed as Moran puts it: “To understand the meaning of adolescence in the twentieth century is
to come to terms with the Victorian sexual ideology of the nineteenth century and the social
changes that gave this ideology such cultural force.”1 4 In other words, despite its implication in
the progressive era’s faith in scientific progress and management, the concept of adolescence is
firmly wedded to the effects of powerful social and cultural changes brought about by the
advancements, dislocations, and disruptions of modernity and the subsequent attempts to
regulate, manage, and control sexuality which are at the heart of the Victorian concern with the
civilized self. In other words, medicine and morality continue their beleaguered, uneasy alliance
in the modem construction of adolescence. While the rhetoric of scientia sexualis dominates,
lurking behind this so-called disinterested objectivity is a surveillant gaze establishing via
formalized practices which begin to examine the life and development of children.
In the same way that the “species” of homosexual, as Foucault argues, was a product
of late nineteenth-century cultural discourses, so too is the adolescent is a modem invention
evolving largely from the medicalization of sexuality insofar as adolescence comes to be
defined at the stage in life marked by puberty, the period in life when one becomes capable o f
sexual reproduction. This age-based category of the human population will become the subject
of a range of discourses seeking to regulate and control its potentially enormous “problems”
from such newly invented “helping” professions/disciplines as sociology, psychology,
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psychiatry, sociology, social work, and another, much older method of guidance and
indoctrination -- the field of education. Indeed so integrally linked is the concept of adolescence
to the imperatives of pedagogy that G. Stanley Hall would go on to write another enormous two
volume tome on the subject following the publication of Adolescence entitled Educational
Problems, published in 1911. This later work would have a significant impact on pedagogical
opinion and reflects a transformation in the focus of teaching directly onto the student, by
asserting that it is fundamentally his or her needs and development that are the central concern
in the formation of healthy, socialized young adults.
This child-centered pedagogy has roots dating back to such thinkers as Plato,
Montaigne and especially to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile where he advanced the necessity of
child-centered curriculum as the key to a view of respecting the nature, growth, and
development of children. This position perhaps more famously advocated in the twentieth
century by John Dewey in works such as The Child and the Curriculum (1902) and The School
and Society (1900) as part of a new, progressive pedagogy which would lead many educational
theorists and historians to dub the twentieth century, as “the century of the child” the creation of
which led to a whole new child-study movement that would use the newly-created,
quintessentially modem scientific techniques for understanding the sociobiological category of
adolescence with the utopian view that science, statistics and objectivity could now
quantitatively lead to tremendous progress in the shaping and development of young minds.
In Teaching Sex, Jeffrey Moran outlines three significant material changes beginning in
the Victorian era which led to the invention of adolescence. First, with the rapidly expanding
school system, the introduction and implementation of compulsory education, and greater
numbers of young people attending schools in North America that were increasingly segregated
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by age, a situation arose in which a significant period of young life involved separation from the
adult world through sustained integration within a peer group. Second, the age of puberty
declined over the course of the nineteenth century (probably because of nutritional changes
facilitated by industrialization), which meant that young people were becoming sexually mature
earlier in their lives. The third point Moran offers is that the period of training and education
for the young (beginning with men, though soon after, I would argue, women as well) gradually
grew longer which meant that many young people were waiting to attain an education and job
security before entering into matrimony. This had the effect - worrisome to many reformers -
of delaying marriage (the sole site legitimatized sexual activity) even as young people were
physiologically prepared for matrimony earlier and earlier.1 5 Concern over that precarious
period between sexual development and heterosexual conjugality became a topic which many
progressive reformers hoped the educational system could help to manage.
With the rising influences of urbanization and industrialization, the flood of new
immigrants into North America at the turn of the century, and the tremendous growth and
reliance on the educational system to help manufacture some uniformity among its modem
citizens, curriculum reform came to be viewed as central to the project of social progress.
Obviously, this would include some attention to the considerable concern about adolescence as
a period of forbidden sexuality in the face of so-called “raging hormones.” Hall and others
would argue that this stage of life needed to be carefully regulated. As he put it: “The ideals of
chastity are perhaps the very highest that can be held up to youth during this ever lengthening
probationary period.”1 6 That Hall would characterize the period as “probationary” is a telling
expression of the regulation and control of adolescence that adults began to actively seek,
largely from “experts” in the social, sexual, and mental hygiene movements. Indeed even Hall
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is here parroting the popular ideology of the time and the ideas of his former Harvard professor
William James, whose Victorian perspective is similarly reflected by the words: “No one need
be told how dependent all human social elevation is upon the prevalence of chastity. Hardly
any factor measures more than this the difference between civilization and barbarism.”1 7
Moran takes the logic of such thinking even further when he argues, adolescence is “precisely
that period of chastity between puberty and sexual awakening, and marriage, when the young
man or woman’s sexual impulses could finally be expressed. Without the demand for sexual
repression and sublimation, the modem concept of adolescence made no sense at all.”1 8 This
kind of perspective means that adolescence, as the concept gets created and circulated in
culture, is fundamentally - even definitionally - established as a “problem.”
Coming to the rescue in ways which parallel the sexual and social hygiene movements
and their reliance on medical models of health, the mental hygiene movement peopled with
practitioners from a specifically psychological bent, from the burgeoning fields of psychology,
psychiatry, and the ancillary field of psychiatric social work (all of which were developed and
consolidated as specific disciplines in the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth)
will begin to take on a significant role in the management of adolescent health. Ensconced in
this trend, G. Stanley Hall earned his doctorate from Harvard in psychology in 1878, studying
under William James among others. Hall was, in fact, the first recipient of this new degree field
awarded by that university. From there, he traveled to Germany1 9 to study with three leaders in
their respective disciplines of physics, physiology, and psychology before returning in 1882 to
John Hopkins (where John Dewey was one of his students) to establish what is widely
considered to be the first clinical laboratory in the United States, before eventually moving on to
take up the presidency of Clark University in 1889.2 0 These points are of interest in
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demonstrating the dissemination of ideas around this time and the related trajectories that will
get taken up by different, though related thinkers in the fields of child psychology, psychiatry
and pedagogy particularly.
In a 1967 National Film Board documentary entitled The Invention o f the Adolescent,
many of these ideas are addressed, though without specific mention of Hall and his contribution.
The film begins with a series of images of young people mingling on the streets of Yorkville in
Toronto an area which, at that time, was probably equivalent to San Francisco’s Haight-
Ashbury district. While evoking something of the fly-on-the-wall aesthetics.of cinema verite in
these opening images, The Invention o f Adolescence is nevertheless heavily indebted to voice
over narration, which describes Yorkville as “a new kind of ghetto not based on race or color
but on age.” From an ensuing series of images ranging from the very old to the very young
which appear to have been captured at a mall, the narrator claims:
In our age of anxiety, much of the anxiety centers around children. Their earlier years
are supposed to be years of joy and innocence yet, to many observers, they’re the
uneasy prelude to the convulsions of adolescence... As the child grows, he grows away
from his parents and they, in their anxiety and bewilderment, have come to mistrust
their own instincts and turn to a new army of experts for guidance and reassurance.
The problem of adolescence and the turn to scientific management of it is made explicit in the
film which goes on to offer a historical reading of its evolution, combining both the youth as
subculture view with the youth as “convulsive” hormonal problem so pervasive in our culture.
From this montage sequence of quintessentially 1960s images and apparent
diegetic/ambient sound, classical music is deployed in the service of periodization as a series of
images of sixteenth and seventeenth century paintings are used to convey the nostalgic view
that: “The rearing of children wasn’t always such a complex and troublesome problem.” As the
voice-over tells us: “There was a time, to judge from the paintings of the past, when young
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children grew up more or less naturally into adult life. By the time they reached what we call
adolescent age, they were virtually indistinguishable from their elders.” Notwithstanding the
gross, nostalgic oversimplification of life in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the
problematic and unexplained notion of what growing up “naturally”could possibly mean, the
paintings are used here to highlight that idea as a series of different canvases illustrate what the
voice-over tells us: “Children looked like little adults: solemn, self-reliant, knowing. It’s
difficult for us to guess their ages, often size is the only clue.” Even more difficult is knowing
what to call these young people, says the narrator: “...our words like teenager or adolescent
seem inappropriate.” Finally, we are offered the position that “The artist was not insensitive to
the differences between the adult, the adolescent and the child. He was reflecting life as it was
then. Society didn’t make our distinction between age groups.” The films goes on to jump
back and forth between moving images of present day to paintings and cartoons depicting
children in history, using pictorial representation as point of view in its illumination of the
historical evolution of adolescence.
In the separation of childhood and adolescence, we have come to expect children to be
children, not little adults, the film proposes. From this view, we aim to protect and preserve
what is child-like in children, including their activities, toys and games. This idea is presented
over a series of images in a contemporary classroom where a group of young kids sing a song
about a rabbit, several of whom look directly into the camera, each with a different expression.
What is interesting about this sequence in a film which generally supports a fly-on-the-wall
aesthetic is how knowing some of these children look, not only for their direct, assertive
engagement with the camera, but as they display a degree of perhaps sadness, contemplation, or
at least complexity beyond the simplicity and infantilism of the classroom activities in which
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they are induced to participate. To answer how this separation between the world of the adult
and the world of the child came about, the film returns to history via art history, now from the
eighteenth century, where the modem child begins to appear in family portraits of the period.
Again punctuated by a classical music score, a series of paintings offers visible evidence to the
narrator’s claims: “These are no longer the little adults of earlier centuries talking their places
beside their elders. They look more like children as we now understand them.”
In the reconfiguration of childhood from the eighteenth century, the narrator explains:
“Now people felt that they should shield their children from problems that were beginning to be
classified as purely adult: birth, death, pain and above all, adult sexuality.” Interestingly, this
view of childhood is class bound since clearly all of these paintings are of bourgeois or
aristocratic families. The new protective attitude toward the young didn’t apply to working-
class children who, despite the relocation of work space from craftsman’s shop or peasant’s
cottage to the new modernized, industrial factories that began to spring up throughout the
nineteenth century, were expected to enter into the labor force from an early age. While no
paintings are used to visualize these less idealized realities, etching and cartoons convey the
rigors, demands, and squalor of child labor.
Without explicitly pushing the argument, The Invention o f the Adolescent offers an
important historical context for the different ways in which sexuality gets conceived across
class lines which accords a degree of innocence to middle-class childhood/adolescence that is
rarely attributed to their working-class counterparts. For example, this gets played out in the
twentieth century around the demographic shift of young working-class women to large urban
centers and the moral panics that circulate around their particular susceptibility to exploitation
and prostitution through the labor market. Comparable concern for young middle-class women
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as being “at risk” is much less pronounced. Even delinquency in youth often gets attached to
issues of sexuality, particularly female sexual promiscuity which gets marked as aberrant and
dangerous. Katherine Bement Davis, who wrote the screenplay for The End o f the Road, was a
Commissioner of Corrections for a girl’s reformatory in New York City and Director of the
War Department’s Committee on Protective Work for Girls (CPWC), both organizations whose
primary concern was the rescue, reform and regulation of young women from “delinquent” (i.e.
nonmonogamous and nonprocreative) sexuality in the 1910s. One of the CPWC’s chief roles,
in fact, was precisely to police the “moral zones” erected around army training camps by
arresting or removing wayward women from their general vicinity, thus dramatizing the
censorious logic and double standard at the heart of conceptions of female, working-class
sexuality.
A view of working-class children as being similarly precocious is expressed in a
McGraw-Hill text book from the 1950s entitled Adolescent Development in which the author
states: “What little preadolescent sex play there is - and this is found more among children of
the lower than of the higher socioeconomic groups - ends with the onset of adolescence, and a
new pattern of sexuality is established.”2 1 It is really not until the progressive movement is in
full throttle that, between 1900 and 1920, youth workers, educators, and theorists struggled to
extend protections to children beyond class barriers and to make youth a “universal
experience.” Through the first half of the twentieth century we see a gradual extension of the
concept and experience of youth as a discrete and protected category develop through the work
of Hall, Dewey, and a range of other child specialists. This ‘revolution’ in the treatment and
definition of young people was largely complete by the 1950s and is provocatively illustrated in
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the proliferation of classroom films created in the postwar era designed to guide, manage, and
discipline these bodies.
In the same way that concern over the leisure activities of armed recruits became a
preoccupation of reformers during the two World Wars, the invention of adolescence and the
problematization of its control gets mired in concern over the regulation of leisure and the
problem of what to do with children (and their raging hormones) as they were increasingly
segregated from adult knowledges, responsibilities and structures. As advancements in
mechanization led to drastic reductions in the labor force toward the end of the nineteenth
century, working-class children increasingly got cast out of the labor market and were forced
into destitution and delinquency. The introduction of compulsory education in England in 1878,
for example, is paradoxically both a humanitarian and regulatory attempt to help guide the
problem of youth and leisure in this regard. Education was to become schooling/preparation for
the development of skills that would enable the young person to acquire a responsible place in
our complex society. Citing how advancements in medicine mean that most children today
consistently survive childhood (where three centuries ago only one in six surpassed the age of
six), the narrator of The Invention o f the Adolescent intones:
The society in which we are trying to prepare the young is, we think, much better than
the society of three centuries ago. No other society has spent so much time and money
catering to what it considers to be the needs of youth. But youth is informed,
intellectually alert, sexually mature, and we can well question whether it’s necessary to
try to make them behave like obedient, dependant, sexless, children.
These words are offered as a montage sequence shows an image of a young couple embracing,
various shots of youth in the streets, as well as various images of regimented activities of teens
in a physical education class in a large, institutional gymnasium. While the speculative tone
regarding youthful attitudes and sexuality expressed in this film would no doubt be read
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skeptically by many (and certainly reflects an uncharacteristically liberal position), many ideas
from Hall show up in this film, especially the sociobiological view of adolescence, reformist
views of efficiency, history as social progress and race betterment to which he and others so
ardently attached themselves.
Indeed G. Stanley Hall’s ideas about adolescence are rooted in a form of social
Darwinism which was popular around the turn of the twentieth-century. A colleague’s reputed
introduction of Hall to an audience as “the Darwin of the mind” was an allusion that the
psychologist took to be one of the greatest compliments to his person ever paid.2 2 The basic
thesis of this particular brand of social Darwinism is predicated on a “general psychonomic
law” borrowing ideas from evolutionary sociologist Herbert Spencer and German biologist
Ernst Haekel. The premise of this law is that ontogeny - the development of the individual
organism, replicates the process of phylogeny - the evolution of the race. In other words,
Hall’s is a thesis which assumes that psychical life and individual behavior both develop
through a series of evolutionary stages which mimic the Darwinian path from presavagery to
civilization.2 3 “Adolescence” says Hall is a stage during which “a new birth, for the higher and
more completely human traits are bom.” Dubbed as “neo-atavistic,” adolescence is
characterized as the stage where “the later acquisitions of the race slowly become prepotent.
Development is less gradual and more saltatory, suggestive of some ancient period of storm and
stress when old moorings were broken and a higher level attained.”2 4
This premise, of course, interprets the storm and stress of human growth and
development along an evolutionary trajectory that would place adolescent development (and its
implications for pedagogy) at center stage. As Hall argues in the preface to Adolescence:
If truth is edification, the highest criterion of pure science is its educative value. The
largest possible aspect of all the facts of life and mind is educational, and the only
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complete history is the story of the influences that have advanced or retarded the
development of man toward his completion, always ideal and forever in the future.
Thus psychology and the higher pedagogy are one and inseparable....From this general
view-point I have tried to show how truth about things of the soul, in an unique sense,
is never complete or certain till it has been applied to education, and that the latter field
is itself preeminent and unlike all other fields of application for either scientific or
philosophic conclusions.2 5
Lawrence Cremin has argued that Hall evaluated civilization by the way its children grew and
the way in which cultures developed systems of adjustments/ accommodation to the “natural
growth of individuals.”2 6 As Hall himself said in the inaugural issue of Pedagogical Seminary
which he helped to found at Clark in 1891: “Every educational reform has been the direct result
of closer personal acquaintance with children and youth, and deeper insight into their needs and
life.”2 7 These remarks, written for the same journal in which Anthony Comstock’s comments in
the epitaph of this chapter would be published years later, reflect an opinion what would gain
wide currency at the birth of a new era popularly dubbed “the century of the child.”2 8 When he
assumed his position at Clark, Hall would quickly help to establish that university as a leading
center for advanced research and writing about child development. His preference for a
“pedocentric” over a “scholiocentric” education represented a significant paradigm shift to the
progressive educational model which attempted to fit the school to the child rather than the old
tradition of Western pedagogy which attempted to fit the child to a predetermined, established
and rigid curriculum. Hall’s therapeutic approach to self-development via psychology, indeed
his view of adolescence as a struggle between anarchic/hormonal impulses and the socializing
demands of culture resonates with Freudian influences. In fact, it was G. Stanley Hall himself
who arranged for Freud’s first and only visit to the United States at the twentieth anniversary of
the opening of Clark University in 1909.2 9
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Social Darwinism, John Dewey and the Child Study Movement
Another significant theorist/practitioner whose work would have a profound impact on both
pedagogical reform and the study of youth was John Dewey, who had much in common with G.
Stanley Hall, most notably his interest in child study. Dewey’s prolific writing, long life (1859-
1951), and overall impact would be impossible to assess in a few pages here, though his ideas
must necessarily be connected to the evolving discourses about childhood development and
educational reform that characterize the progressive era. Of any educational theorist, Dewey is
probably the most famous early twentieth- century American thinker whose ideas are frequently
attached to progressive education. From early study in philosophy (particularly Kant and Hegel
at the University of Michigan and later Johns Hopkins), Dewey began to transform his focus
away form metaphysics to a form of applied psychology particularly influenced by William
James’s ideas in Principles o f Psychology (1890) which would have a significant impact on his
intellectual development. From the formation of his famous pedagogical experiments at The
Laboratory School at the University of Chicago (founded with his wife from 1896-1904),
Dewey’s hope for a modem, scientific method of schooling were tried and applied. Indeed,
taking the scientific moniker of “laboratory” reflects that thinker’s commitment to the
development new, innovative, and scientific techniques to improve the child’s method of
learning. One of the dominant themes in progressive education would be the goal of training
children in cooperative and mutually helpful living as a way of democratically transforming the
school and its relation to society.
Much of Dewey’s writing, most notably the multiple published accounts of the
Laboratory School and its methodology, practices and accomplishments including The Schools
o f Tomorrow (1915), coauthored with his daughter Evelyn, reflects an essentially journalistic
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dissection and discussion of various experimental schools. The Schools o f Tomorrow details
the different work undertaken at such places as the Francis Parker School in Chicago, Caroline
Pratt’s Play School in New York, the Kindergarten at Teachers College, Columbia University,
and even various public schools in Chicago, Gary and Indianapolis which experimented with
progressive educational techniques. There is something of the “expose and education” rhetoric
in much of his work, a characteristic so frequently attached to progressive reform discourse. At
the same time, Dewey’s grounding in philosophy is always evident. In the preface to The
Schools o f Tomorrow, for example, he asserts that the project of that text is to “to show what
actually happens when schools start out to put into practice, each in its own way, some of the
theories that have been pointed to as the soundest and best ever since Plato.”3 0 In The School
and Society published in 1900, Dewey published the series of lectures he had given to patrons
and parents of the Laboratory School in which he laid the blame for the current mainstream
pedagogical scene on the failure of educational systems to adequately adapt to the significant
and dramatic changes brought about by industrialism. In defense of his work at the Laboratory
School and of other progressive educational projects, Dewey contends: “The modification going
on in the method and curriculum of education is as much a product of the changed social
situation, and as much as effort to meet the needs of the new society that is forming, as are
changes in modes of industry and commerce.”3 1
By the time Democracy and Education was published in 1916, it was immediately
hailed by many as the most important contribution to theories of pedagogy since Rousseau’s
Emile?2 Walter Lippman described this book in a review in The New Republic as “the mature
wisdom of the finest and most powerful intellect devoted to the future of American
civilization.”3 3 Democracy and Education set out to explore the educational meanings of
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science, evolution, industrialism, and democracy with the goal of bringing democracy and
education into a systematic parity with one another. Here as elsewhere, Dewey’s philosophical
grounding is evident. In fact, like Stanley Hall, Dewey interprets philosophy and education as
integrally linked. In the conclusion to his chapter on “The Philosophy of Education” he states:
Since the only way of bringing about a harmonious readjustment of the opposed
tendencies is through a modification of emotional and intellectual disposition,
philosophy is at once an explicit formulation of the various interests of life and a
propounding of points of view and methods through which a better balance of interests
may be effected. Since education is the process through which the needed
transformation may be accomplished and not remain a mere hypothesis as to what is
desirable, we reach a justification of the statement that philosophy is the theory of
education as a deliberately conducted practice.3 4
Rather than see theory and practice as distinct and often incompatible entities, Dewey’s position
embraced a social Darwinist perspective of community as embryo, an organic view of society
as an evolving organism which emphasized the interrelation and interdependence of all its
elements. As philosophy is the theory, then, education is the practice. Hans Pols situates
Dewey’s perspective within the broader context of the University of Chicago and its thinkers at
this time in his discussion of the period: “Chicago sociologists believed that insights into
organization principles of the social body would provide tools to reintegrate maladjusted groups
and to create a society where everybody could reach their maximal potential. ”3 5
The professionalization of the social sciences characteristic of the work of Dewey and
others which takes place at the University of Chicago during this period owes much to John D.
Rockefeller, Sr. who gave significant endowments to that institution.3 6 As Pols surmises, “In
many ways ‘Chicago’ embodied the hopes and the ideals o f the Rockefeller family and the
philanthropies they endowed. The basic mission of the social sciences was, in their eyes, to find
ways to adjust humankind to modernity.”3 7 In the introduction to a recent anthology assessing
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the impact of Rockefeller funding on the development of the social sciences in Canada and the
U.S., the authors write:
....similar to other modem systems of knowledge, [the social sciences] are grounded in
the development of modem Western thought, economics, and politics. They are
products, in this sense, of the underlying driving force...identified with the dynamics of
capitalism as associated with Protestant ideals. The Protestant ethic contributed to the
rise of capitalism, the dynamics of which produced stratified class-based societies.
Protestantism also provided the charitable impulse to alleviate the suffering that
capitalism helped produce....The evangelical Christianity espoused by John D.
Rockefeller, Sr., his advisor the Reverend Frederick T. Gates, and John D. Rockefeller
Jr., was secularized, formalized, and combined with a modem sense of the potential of
science for solving social problems.3 8
Given a worldview grounded in Christian beliefs on the one hand, and the marketplace on the
other, the organizations, research, and movements that Rockefeller philanthropies supported
tended to support emulated the successful model of the natural sciences in the control of nature.
To this end, social scientists strove to develop strategies for social engineering which would
facilitate the process of social evolution.
These ideas clearly invite discussion of Michel Foucault, particularly his views
regarding human measurement, the examination, the social sciences and “the carceral” in
Discipline and Punish. Grounded in an “examinatory” rather than “inquisitorial” justice,
Foucault sees the social sciences or sciences of man as he calls them to be “one of the great
instruments” for the “multiplicity and close overlapping of the various mechanisms of
incarceration.” This is not to say that the human sciences emerged from the prison. Rather, he
proposes: “...if they have been able to be formed and to produce so many profound changes in
the episteme, it is because they have been conveyed by a specific and new modality o f power: a
certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful.”3 9 As
a scaffolding of relations of power and knowledge, Foucault describes techniques for
“overlapping subjection and objectification” which create new processes of individualization.
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In his words: “The carceral network constituted one of the armatures of this power-knowledge
that has made the human sciences historically possible. Knowable man (soul, individuality,
consciousness, conduct, whatever it is called) is the object-effect of this analytical investment,
of the domination-observation.”4 0 This carceral logic applies nicely to the view of adolescence
as, if not subjected to the vagaries of biological determinism that besiege the young person’s
body, at least “determined” by the institutional discourses that strive to shape his or her
personality.
John Dewey’s view of a child-centered rather than curriculum-centered pedagogy
developed as part of his reflection on the experience of modernity and the extensive social,
cultural and demographic transformations that it generated. The alienation and rapid
transformation of society in modernity, according to Dewey, required new pedagogical tactics
and strategies to evolve and grow in tandem with the new order. The reformist position here is
particularly emphasized by his view that education must be made relevant, indeed central to the
struggle for a better life. Hence democracy and education become powerfully linked to his view
of pedagogy as fundamentally child-centered. The school must become a place where the
“natural” curiosity of children could lead to their “natural” fulfillment through free exploration
and project-based teaching. Instead of remaining an instrument for the preparation of life in
some remote future, education was life, in Dewey’s view, so long as it was structured in
accordance with the developing minds and lives of its pupils.
This progressivist philosophy is very much in evidence in the critique of traditional
education offered by The Invention o f the Adolescent when the narrator of the film describes
the alienation/protection of modem children from crucial aspects of life most notably birth,
illness, and death, which have moved out of the domestic sphere and away from their purview.
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As a cluster of six to seven-year-old students is shown sitting in their desks and staring, with
varying degrees of attentiveness, at their teacher, the voice-over says: “On television, they can
see adult passion, brutality and bloodshed. But the next morning in school they return to a
world in which reality is summed up by the doings of Dick and Jane and their little animal
friends.” That the child’s experience is so often disregarded in the formulation of traditional
curriculum is an issue to which Dewey and many progressive educators will devote
considerable attention. To be sure, this is not suggest that “experience” has not always been an
integral aspect of all pedagogy, but an attempt to consider the child’s experience, the child’s
point of view, as part of the pedagogical process was indeed a new idea.
Dewey makes some provocative remarks regarding the “whole body” view of
pedagogy, moving beyond the mind/body duality at the heart of Platonic thought and integrally
connected to so much rumination throughout the history of Western ideas. His view of this
duality is articulated in the “Theories of Knowledge”chapter of Education and Democracy.
The emotions are conceived to be purely private and personal, having nothing to do
with the work of pure intelligence in apprehending facts and truths, - except perhaps
the single emotion of intellectual curiosity. The intellect is pure light; the emotions are
a disturbing heat. The mind turns outward to truth; the emotions turn inward to
considerations of personal advantage and loss. Thus in education we have a systematic
depreciation of interest....of recourse to extraneous and irrelevant rewards and penalties
in order to induce the person who has a mind (much as his clothes have a pocket) to
apply that mind to the truths to be known. Thus we have the spectacle of professional
educators decrying appeal to interest while they uphold with great dignity the need of
reliance upon examinations, marks, promotions and emotions, prizes and the time-
honored paraphernalia of rewards and punishments.... All of these separations culminate
in one between knowing and doing, theory and practice, between mind as the end and
spirit of action and the body as its organs and means.4 1
Light and heat, mind and body, passivity and activity in ways of knowing are at the heart of
pedagogy’s historical divide more generally and sex education specifically. Dewey’s opposition
to the either/or/.s /m . y which divide those who would support traditional education on the one hand
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against those who promote progressive pedagogy on the other, shows up in his 1938 text
Experience and Education which tries to negotiate the best and worst of both traditions by
settling somewhere between the polar extremes that they (theoretically) represent. In the case of
sex education, these dualisms become mired in the perceived need to satisfy the “heat” of
natural curiosity and developing sexual emotions on the one hand with a desire to guide the
mind away from fulfillment of the body’s desires. In other words, while experience is
celebrated and valued, only a certain kind of experience is accorded the privileged view.
If we establish traditional and progressive pedagogy as polar opposites, we might argue
that traditional education involves a top-down approach, where imposition of knowledge and
ideas works against the bottom-up expression and cultivation of individuality. Whereas
traditional pedagogy involves external modes of discipline and punishment, progressive
pedagogy encourages free activity. As opposed to learning from text books and teachers,
progressive teachers advocate learning through experience, and the acquisition of skills which
make a direct, vital appeal to the child’s day-to-day experience. Experience and Education
argues that both methods must, necessarily, coexist. One of Dewey’s critiques against some of
the more extreme expressions of progressive education is that it is a philosophy borne of
negativity — of defining itself almost exclusively in opposition to traditional education rather
than by a “positive and constructive development of purposes, methods and subject matter.” As
he argues:
It is not too much to say than an educational philosophy which professes to be based on
the idea of freedom may become as dogmatic as ever was the traditional education
which it reacted against. For any theory and set of practices is dogmatic which is not
based on critical examination of its own underlying principles. Let us say that the new
education emphasizes the learner. Very well. A problem is now set. What does
freedom mean and what are the conditions under which it is capable of realization?4 2
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Dewey’s progressive educational ideas about negotiated freedom, indoctrination and guidance
will find fertile ground in critical pedagogy which will get developed by Paulo Friere and others
in the 1960s and beyond, especially in relation to Friere’s work on adult literacy. The logical
extension of these ideas positing education as a practice of freedom will get taken up in more
detail in my discussion of women’s movement films in Chapter 4.
For now, however, I want to apply Dewey’s ideas about progressive pedagogy to a
rather unusual sex education film made for six-year-olds entitled Human Beginnings (1950,
Eddie Albert Productions). Not only is the film unique in attempting to deal with sex education
for such a young age group, where most films begin with puberty, but it also illuminates many
interesting aspects of the attempt to guide young minds via their own unique experience; to
encourage freedom of thought and expression from a point of view which is decidedly child-
centered. Human Beginnings appears to offer a mode of address directed to adult teacher and
six-year-old spectator simultaneously. For example, the film begins with a square-up which is
clearly provided for the benefit of the adult viewer:
Human Beginnings. An educational film designed to promote the emotional well being
of young children through satisfying activities and discussion with understanding adults
at school, home and church. Conversations, drawings and situations portrayed in the
film are based upon real-life experiences of six year old children. The film is one in a
series of Dr. Lester F. Beck of the University of Oregon. It was prepared in
cooperation with the elementary schools of Eugene, Oregon, and photographed with the
children of the Walt Whitman School, New York City.
Clearly establishing the film within the project of social and mental hygiene, the diegetic world
of Human Beginnings begins with a close-up of a young boy surrounded by peers in a
classroom as he plays “Pop Goes the Weezle” amid a general din of activity. A classmate,
Susan, joins the small cluster and announces her forthcoming birthday party and the future
arrival of a new baby in her home.
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All of these images are shot at eye level to the children, who never acknowledge the
presence of the camera and appear to be acting fairly spontaneously as the camera captures
their classroom activities and their dialogue from fairly close range. Human Beginnings has no
voice-over to didactically interpret the activities we are shown. As the teacher summarizes all
of the interesting news reported by students to the class that day, one pupil suggests that they all
draw a picture of Susan’s new baby sister. (A sister is Susan’s professed preference though she
and we have no way of knowing the sex of her future sibling). When another student responds
that it would be impossible to draw a picture of an unborn child, the teacher guides their ideas
into a productive activity by suggesting that they “could draw a picture of how we think a baby
looks before it’s bom.” This is an interesting example of progressive pedagogy in practice: here
we have the students’ interests guide the curriculum to a certain extent, by proposing an activity
to get taken up by the class at large. By democratically accommodating the suggestion of one
of the students, the teacher deploys a technique of guidance which allows a more active form of
participation whereby the students “dictate” or enable the development of what is taught.
Through active participation, here drawing their own individual interpretations of
human beginnings, external, top-down learning would appear to be achieved by a more child-
centered and active form of doing. As the art project is underway, the camera captures a
number of different children engaged in a range of activities centered around their own
interpretation of pregnancy. Several children use paint, one boy molds a plasticine
“mother”and invites a friend to help him model some little babies to go into her “tummy” which
is shaped as a large empty cavity. As several children are shown watching baby mice in an
aquarium, the teachers asks if they would like to draw the rodents instead. One of the boys
refuses with an “I don’t wanna,” to which the teacher replies: “Alright, Lee, you just do
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anything you want to then.” This is a progressive view of classroom guidance to be sure, but
its success is illustrated by the benevolent cooperation of one of Lee’s peers who offers to let
the isolated and seemingly depressed young boy paint on her sheet of paper. The children
produce a range of different interpretations, none of which is privileged as the model of
correctness by the teacher who urges them one-by-one to display their pictures on an easel at
the front of the classroom. One boy shows a baby in his mother’s “pocket” which is followed
by his being corrected by a peer who shows her picture of the baby in a nest close to her
mother’s heart. Another shows her picture of the baby as an egg, which get confirmed as
correct by a few statements by the teacher without ever dismissing the other interpretations or
censoring their discussion.
Another girl shows a mother crying and describes how this was an unhappy mother (we
learn, a neighbor) who felt bad because she was going to have a baby. Although an explanation
for the mother’s tears is never offered, the story gives the young girl some pleasure since she
tells of being able to deliver a home-baked pie to the crying “mother” who said the gift made her
feel “much better” and gave the girl a kiss as a result. Lee places his picture on the easel as he
announces: “Some mothers don’t like their baby.” When one of the students criticizes his
picture (which is an egg shaped, half black abstraction), Lee defends himself by saying that it
has no arms or head because its mother doesn’t like it. The next girl presents an image of
familial bliss when she emphasizes the happiness of “her” mother who is pregnant and who
loves the baby as well as her daddy and herself. She describes a scenario of father being
greeted by mother on his arrival from work and reveals that she, too, gets a kiss when she
comes home from school. The camera then cuts to Lee’s solemn face as he says: “No one
kisses me.” An amusing comment from another boy who talks about his dog’s method of
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greeting is the one to which the teacher chooses to respond in a diverting, light-hearted fashion
here. This scene ends with her summation: “Well...now from our paintings we can tell how
each of us thinks a baby grows. But even more important, the drawings show us how mothers
and fathers and all the rest of us feel about the baby.” Her emphasis on feeling and experience
highlights the progressive direction here, after which, another intertitle is displayed which reads:
“The teacher may want to stop the projector at this point to permit the children watching the
film to discuss what they have seen and to engage in art work of their own before continuing
with the final part.”
While this kind of interruptive directive is more common in educational films made in
the 1960s and 1970s, it provides an interesting break in the film, a break which is again directed
to the adult/teacher and his/her discretion with respect to the film experience and potential
exercises to accompany it. In this regard, the film is hardly intended to be self-contained, but
rather part of the broader classroom experience which suggests a range of activities beyond a
mere passive form of learning by watching. The ways in which the film operates
simultaneously on two levels — addressing adult and child, is punctuated by the case of Lee,
who is clearly a child coping with a range of adjustment problems. On a literal level, the film
never addresses this fact, though it’s impossible for an adult (at least) to ignore. In a way, this
allows the film to function as a potentially different kind of mental hygiene film directed to
adults about both healthy adjustment and potential maladjustment, although there admittedly is
no message offered by the film about how to pursue his individual case. This, we may deduce,
should be left to the experts.
After the intertitle, we resume with another boy from the class, Tommy, who displays
on the easel his picture of his mom’s face peering from the window of a large hospital he has
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drawn. When a classmate asks if hospitals aren’t for sick people, Tommy replies with
confidence that it’s also where mothers go to have babies. He continues with a recollection of
having been told all of this only days before, as a flashback takes us into Tommy’s living room
with his doting parents. Tommy asks his very pregnant mother to explain for him “again” the
story of birth and, with the help of a book that his father fetches, the couple sits on the family
sofa and goes through an accurate — perhaps age appropriate in its vagueness — description of
childbirth which is facilitated by images, shown in close-up, from a book Human Growth
(authored by Lester Beck). The next scene has Tommy wake up to find that his mother has had
a baby girl during the night, and gives a stereotypically comical interpretation of the father’s
nervous excitement and domestic ineptitude as he bums Tommy’s toast, hands him a juice
container instead of his glass, and so on.
Father and son go to the hospital where, for hygienic reasons typical of the time,
Tommy must wait in a special room and cannot see the baby. His sensitive parents, however,
allow him to participate in his new sister’s arrival, by allowing Tommy to finalize the name for
his new sister from their shortlist of two. Even his father cannot yet hold the baby when he
goes to visit his wife in her hospital room. After he leaves to get a glimpse of the baby in the
ward, we are shown several extended close-ups of the infant being breast-fed, another rarity for
a sex education film at this time. When, scenes later, the baby is ostensibly six months old,
Tommy is shown participating in her care and maintenance as he and a friend watch her get
bathed, help apply baby powder and get dressed and then hold her while she feeds from a bottle.
The film then shifts back to the “present tense” as Tommy finishes his story and one of his
peers asks him to tell it over again. The teacher tactfully redirects the dialogue by asking
different students to state their favorite part of his narrative. As she addresses first the class,
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she then turns to the camera and says: “And now boys and girls there are some other boys and
girls just like you watching this film. Shall we let them tell their teachers the part they liked
best about Tommy’s story?” As with the square-up and the intertitle in the middle of the film,
this is another self-reflexive acknowledgment of the film’s construction in a text which
otherwise displays classroom and domestic activities as if the camera were a fly-on-the-wall. In
this regard, it is a curious mixture of fictional film techniques and more direct documentary
strategies invoking the audience/learners of the world beyond the otherwise self-contained,
diegesis of the film text.
Human Beginnings is a useful illustration of progressive pedagogy’s democratic view
of education as child-centered, community-based, project oriented, flexible and validating of the
experiences and needs of young people. The integration of creative activities, nature study,
group investigation are all part of the progressive educational tactics designed to negociate the
child’s point of view and a child centered curriculum at the core of its agenda. Theresa
Richardson refers to this broad-based movement as “the childhood gaze,” borrowing from
Foucault’s study in The Birth o f the Clinic on the origins of medical knowledge and scientific
perspectives in the clinic and mental asylums of France. Richardson coins to the childhood
gaze to refer to “the convergence of medical and scientific perspectives” as it gets lodged,
particularly for her purposes, in the mental hygiene paradigm. As she argues: “The childhood
gaze refers to a method of inquiry based on direct observation, a focus of attention on origins
and beginnings, and a belief system concerned with reforming public policy.”4 3
Part of the effort to consolidate these new ideas within a broad based coalition takes
place in the formation of the Progressive Education Association, created in 1919 by a group of
educators and “interested citizens” for the purpose of “uniting those who were experimenting
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with the new schools and of securing the interest of a wider public for them.”4 4 At the time of
its organization, the Progressive Education Association expressed as its goals the
encouragement of free and natural development of children, an education based on their
interests alongside the study of their physical and mental development to act as guide. The first
honorary President was Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard University, succeeded in
office by Dewey. Two journals were produced through the organization including Progressive
Education (begun 1924) and Frontiers o f Democracy (discontinued in 1943). Shortly
thereafter, the organization changed its name to American Education Fellowship in hopes that
growing criticism of its agenda - beginning in the 1930s - might be dispelled.
One could argue that the flurry of activity and reassessment of cultural practices
resulting from the two World Wars would have a significant impact of the cultural perception
and scapegoating of progressive education in the post WWII era. As one historian remarks:
“War always reveals the real or reputed shortcomings of the schools” by way of taking stock of
the population.4 5 With the widespread application of various aptitude and intelligence tests to
army recruits during both World Wars, as well as the continued existence of remedial defects
including substantial deficiencies in elementary math and science, the influence of progressive
pedagogy’s seemingly less rigorous, disciplined curriculum made it a popular target in many
quarters. In fact, during the 1930s Progressive Educational Association would cement ties with
the National Mental Hygiene Association with prominent hygienists and educational reformers
alike taking up residence in both organizations.4 6 The postwar return to normalcy,
conservatism, and conformity characteristic of the 1950s is a prominent characteristic of the
mental hygiene films produced at this time which, nevertheless, carry many significant traces of
progressive pedagogy’s child guidance strategies. Mental hygiene, in this regard, will become a
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way of guiding young minds into a happy and healthy attitude toward sex and sexuality,
frequently under the auspices of dating etiquette or more broadly, “Family Life Education”
which becomes one of many disciplines infiltrated by progressive education’s attempts to make
education play a more direct, palpable and practical role in the construction of future citizens.
While the PEA was disbanded in 1954, the effects of Dewey and many other progressive
educators who worked in the field of child study would be sustained and pervasive.
Mental Hygiene and the Medicalization of the Mind
The National Council for Mental Hygiene (NCMH) was organized in 1909 in New York City.
Comprised of a small group of reform-minded social workers, physicians, academics,
psychologists and psychiatrists,4 7 the organizations’s agenda was the development of what has
been called “extra-mural psychiatry” or, more broadly, the application of science to help solve
social problems.4 8 Adolf Meyer, a prominent Swiss-born neuropathologist and NCMH
member who developed many of his ideas through extended interchange with both John Dewey
and G. Stanley Hall, helped to propagate the view of mental illness as a form of maladjustment
on the part of the individual with respect to his or her environment. Part of the therapeutic
process that he proposed, consequently, involved a reworking or reestablishment of the
relationship of the individual to the environment through reeducation.4 9 His view of “dynamic
psychiatry” incorporated aspects of Freudian psychoanalysis with a view of psychobiology
which advocated an emphasis on the “whole person” as a product of both social milieu and
one’s particular life history.5 0 This holistic approach to mental illness was grounded in a view
which emphasized the interconnected-ness between mental and physical states, a
psychobiological approach which became a foundational premise behind the mental hygiene
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movement. Clearly, this has significant linkages to Hall’s and well as Dewey’s promotion of an
educational curriculum dedicated to the whole child.
The National Council for Mental Hygiene drew on Meyer’s ideas regarding mental
health and also modeled its platform from the public health movement circulating around social
and sexual hygiene guided by ideals of prevention. For example, one of the first projects
undertaken by the committee was to conduct a series of mental hygiene surveys of several states
to determine the nature and extent of mental health residing within them and also to project
potential costs for treatment and care. From Meyer, mental hygienists came to define mental
health according to adjustment to modem society and extended his approach to mental health as
a means for assessing a wide range of problems from juvenile delinquency to alcoholism,
prostitution, poverty and criminality. As one historian surmises, all of these phenomena were
understood as symptoms of inadequate strategies for adjustment:
Psychiatrists thought they could develop measures to readjust individuals either by
improving their adaptive skills or by providing them with a less demanding
environment. By defining maladjustment in social terms, mental hygiene psychiatrists
medicalized nonconformity and set themselves up as agents of social control. In the
process, they sanctioned new ideals of citizenship. In their views, a well-adjusted
citizen would have the admirable characteristics of “rationality” and “efficiency” - a
modem mind for modem society. As agents of social control, psychiatrists could
narrow the cultural lag and thereby promote social integration.5 1
While early efforts of the Council were somewhat limited and membership was small,
the First World War saw a rise in prominence and interest in the organization in ways that
parallel the acceleration of interest in sexual and social hygiene at the same time. Most notably,
the widespread use o f psychiatric service to deal with shell shock cases only served to confirm
the view of environment and personality as twin factors contributing to mental disorder. The
War was a catalyst for the mental hygiene movement in other ways as well, since it gave
psychiatrists the opportunity to assume a new more prominent professional identity and also
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began to demonstrate the need for psychotherapies beyond the asylum or the hospital. As Sol
Cohen argues, “Many psychiatrists came out of the war service determined to get away from
dealing with the problems of the insane, the mentally deficient, and the alcoholic, which had
been their preoccupation before the war. They preferred to deal with general problems of
personality.”5 2 In short order the mental hygiene movement transformed from a reform effort to
deal with mental defectives, insanity and other forms of severe mental disease into a crusade for
the prevention of social maladjustment.5 3 Part of this crusade involved a turn from hospitals
and asylums to other social agencies, most notably public schools.
This professionalization of psychiatry and psychology was envisioned by members of
the mental hygiene movement as part of their broader role in socialization and the prevention of
mental illness. Very much in keeping with the “zietgeist of efficiency” underlying so much
progressive reform thinking, the “scientific” intervention into development of personality was
clearly indicative of the governmentality underlying so much of their agenda. For example, one
program sponsored by the Commonwealth Fund5 4 as a “Program for the Prevention of
Delinquency” beginning in 1922 is generally interpreted as the catalyst for the whole “child
guidance movement” and was founded on the objective of providing psychiatric services to so-
called “pre-delinquent” children as a strategy for intervention.5 5 By attempting to define
categories of being “at risk” (in contemporary parlance), the child guidance clinic was designed
as a “apparatus of security” to supercede parental authority and judgement insofar as parents’
knowledge of such matters was generally regarded as “pre” or unscientific. This medicalization
of nonconformity gets played out the construction of categories of behavior marked as normal
and healthy or abnormal and hence diseased. By concentrating their efforts on educational and
welfare policies, mental hygienists helped to refine the ways in which such concepts as
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childhood and adolescence, individual and society, success and failure have been defined
through the consolidation of various professional disciplines the practitioners of which
intervened, to an unprecedented degree, into what had previously been private spheres of life.
While there was some effort to educate parents in the ideas of mental hygiene, they
could certainly not be compelled to take parent education courses or to obtain a degree in
mental hygiene, though the Family Life Education movement would ultimately fulfill elements
of this role to college and high school students (as prospective parents) beginning in the late
1930s.5 6 The greatest hope and most of the emphasis behind the mental hygiene movement was
ultimately placed in the education of children and teens. As Theresa Richardson puts it in her
book, The Century o f the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the
United States and Canada, “the mental hygiene movement originated with the premise that
society could be perfected through the socialization of children.”5 7 Describing the particular
“plasticity” of childhood with respect to adaptation and malleability, one prominent member of
the mental hygiene movement characterized childhood as unequivocally “the golden the period
for putting into effect the teachings of mental hygiene. It is the period par excellence for
prophylaxis and therefore the period, above all others, which must be studied if psychiatry is
ever to develop an effective program of prevention.”5 8 With the gradual implementation of
compulsory education beginning throughout the states and provinces of the United States and
Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is small wonder the mental
hygienist would look to the schools as crucial cites for their investigation and influence.
Through the social guidance “team” consisting of child psychiatrists, clinical psychologists,
psychiatric social workers and visiting teachers trained in hygiene principles (who acted largely
in a surveillance capacity to guide teachers in new methodologies for handling children), the
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Commonwealth Fund helped to sponsor extensive investigation and treatment or “adjustment”
of predelinquent and problem children. In fact, the influence on child study and children’s
policy related to mental hygiene would be dominated, in the 1920s and 1930s, by Rockefeller
philanthropy in the case of child study research and by the Commonwealth Fund in child
guidance.
Though founded somewhat later in 1918 in Toronto, the Canadian National Committee
for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH) would operate under similar objectives to its American
counterpart. In fact, the title of Richardson’s book above is indicative of the considerable
overlap between the movements in both countries. Like the National Council for Mental
Hygiene in the U.S., the CNCMH obtained important funding from American philanthropic
organizations, primarily Commonwealth Fund and Rockefeller money. Initially, the CNCMH
gathered together many groups who were concerned about feeble-mindedness and insanity,
often from a hereditarian perspective. In fact, this initial emphasis marked a variation from this
organization’s American counterpart. Under Dr. C. K. Clarke, dean of medicine at the
University of Toronto, the CNCMH initially sought genetic/eugenic controls for various forms
of mental “defectiveness.”5 9 Among their initial activities, they sought to improve the mental
health of children by calling for increased government scrutiny of potential immigrants and a
call to exclude those children and adults who were deemed “defective.”6 0 Not surprisingly, in
many circumstances deficiency/defectiveness was often measured in terms of patterns of
cultural assimilation and resistance.6 1 Hygienists also wanted the feeble-minded to be taught
separately from their healthy counterparts, arguing that such measures would benefit both the
mentally fit and unfit and avoid the “moral menace” that “defectives” would generally impel.
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This was viewed as especially important since many hygienists saw a direct link between
“feeblemindedness” and delinquency.
No doubt some children required some form of special education and attention. With
the implementation of compulsory education came greater numbers of handicapped children
who would historically have stayed home but who now were required to attend school.
Moreover, in the shift from an agrarian to an industrial society, mentally challenged children
who would formerly have found some role in the routines of family farming and domestic labor
were clearly less able to fit into the accelerated pace of standardized curriculum, commerce and
industry. Finally, the last of the major efforts of the CNCMH in these early years was the
attempt to ensure that the feeble-minded would be prevented from reproducing. Their reasoning
for proposing legislation and institutional segregation stemmed from what they claimed were the
results of “scientific investigation” which showed “that the feeble-minded reproduced ‘much
more rapidly than normal persons’ and ‘the offspring of feeble-minded parents’ were ‘always
feeble-minded. ”’ 6 2
The problematic ideology of eugenics is certainly easy to see from today’s perspective,
though my concern here is with ideas and their diffusion less than a moral judgement on the
value of these ideas, which we can assume were propagated - in many quarters - by people
with good intentions. As Fred Matthews has said of the mental hygiene movement more
broadly, “One of the regrettable tendencies of recent revisionist history has been the vulgar
imputation of a conscious self-seeking or promotion of class interests to reformers and other
actors who sought to change their environment - apparently from a utopian view of what
constitutes true sincerity and disinterestedness that finds only contamination in the mixed
motives and unintended consequences of actions in a bourgeois society.”6 3 To be sure, the
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mental hygiene movement was engaged in the pedagogical potential of the various “helping
professions” by using techniques of persuasion, even propaganda to appeal to the fears and
aspirations of the public. What is of interest to me here is the way in which these scientific
ideas can be read as powerful ideological reflections of the ideas and knowledges developing
and circulating in culture at this particular period in time. The diffusion of the mental hygiene
rhetoric gathered powerful and widespread momentum and force through the dissemination of
ideas in academic and mainstream presses, in the classroom, the guidance clinic or other social
service offices, the doctor’s office and, as I will show, the classroom film in the post WWII
period. Two central vehicles for the dissemination of these ideas came from the U.S. based
Journal o f Social Hygiene formed in 1917 and the Canadian Journal o f Mental Hygiene
formed in April 1919, though the reach and interdisciplinarity of many proponents lecturing to
students and laypeople cannot be underestimated. John Dewey, for example, held posts in
psychology, education, and philosophy at the University of Chicago and advocated many ideas
that would be classified under the rubric of mental hygiene.
In an essay tracing the social and cultural influences of the mental hygiene movement in
the context of the United States, Sol Cohen argues:
Few intellectual and social movements of this [the twentieth] century have had so deep
and pervasive an influence on the theory and practice of American education as the
mental hygiene movement. The mental hygiene movement has substantially altered our
ways of thinking about American education....provided the inspiration and driving force
behind one of the most far-reaching yet little understood educational innovations of this
century....the “medicalization” of American education. I mean by this metaphor the
infiltration of psychiatric norms, concepts and categories of discourse - the “mental
hygiene point o f view” - into virtually all aspects o f American education in this century
epitomized in the idea of the school’s responsibility for children’s personality
development.6 4
While Cohen speaks only of the American context here and, unfortunately, much less has been
written about the Canadian one, the force and tenor of his argument applies equally to the ways
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in which the “mental hygiene point of view” came to infiltrate pedagogy in Canada as well. In
fact, some people, for example Clarence M. Hincks, held the position of medical director for
both the Canadian and the U.S. organizations.6 5 Both movements were founded around a
program directed toward the improvement of both mental health in general and treatments for
the mentally ill in particular. And both, through the 1920s and beyond, became increasingly
focused on the mental hygiene of children and youth. From 1918 onward, psychology at the
University of Toronto began to develop in concert with the mental hygiene point of view and
began to establish important links to work being done at the University of Chicago. The
Canadian National Committee first undertook a project in 1919 studying the transition from
school to work under the progressive educational premise that education must more adequately
prepare youth for “life,” a position most famously advocated by Dewey in works such as The
School and Society. With Rockefeller money provided in 1924, the CNCMH began research in
child development using one Toronto school, the Regal Road School, as the “laboratory” for
their assessment of social and behavioral adjustment. Another study, beginning in 1926 with
funding from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial funded the creation of The St. George’s
School for Child Study to assess development of children from six months to six years to make
observations on children in the years before they would generally enter the educational system.
One other project of the CNCMH funded by the Scottish Rite Masons was the Project
on Shy Children beginning in 1937. As described by Hans Pols, this project really
demonstrates “the final transition in the enlargement of interests of mental hygienists from a
concern with mental illness, maladjustment, and pathology to an interest in the normal
adjustment of everyday, normal children.”6 6 Through the deployment of “sociometric tests,”
psychologists investigated the interaction of children as a way to assess and develop measures
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that might foster mental health in all school children, “rather than searching for symptoms of
maladjustment, intervention, and reestablishing normality.”6 7 The issue of shyness as a
symptom of susceptibility to mental disorder is an interesting example of the ways in which
mental hygiene began to recast a specific symptomatology around a certain constellation of
personality traits which were, in other historical periods, hardly deemed problematic. From the
mental hygiene point of view, shyness was interpreted as a strategy for avoiding the challenges
of life:
...one of a number of escapist subterfuges such as repression, daydreaming, and
wishing thinking. The shy child developed faulty habits, which led, first, to lack of
action, reclusiveness, daydreaming, and ultimately, when all the bonds with reality were
broken, to schizophrenia. The daydreaming, shy, and quiet child was a child at risk,
developing contrary to the mental hygiene ideals of action, sociability, and
adjustment.6 8
The attention to shyness as symptom shows up in approaches that become very common in the
mental health movements in both countries especially in the 1950s. Interestingly, the topic is
also the subject of a number of educational classroom films, including most famously Shy Guy
(1947, Coronet) which features a young Dick York of Bewitched fame. This film has had a
revived life as a so-called “ephemeral film” marketed on the CD Roms and video releases from
the Prelinger Archive and also showing up the Fantomas Videos DVD series compilation from
2001 entitled Social Engineering 101.
According to Ken Smith in his recent book, Sex Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-
1970, Shy Guy is “the most successful social guidance film of its time” the progressiveness and
ostensible “realism”o f which helped to establish Coronet “as the premier social guidance film
studio.”6 9 Shy Guy is a fifteen-minute film described by Smith as “the first film for teens that
pushed ‘fitting in,’ rather than regimented rules of etiquette, as the way to social happiness. It
was also the first to show teenagers wresting with personal difficulties and solving problems
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themselves - with occasional guidance from wise adults.”7 0 Dick York plays Phil Norton, an
isolated, shy transfer student in a new high school where he has no friends. Clearly a “geek” by
today’s standards (and I would suspect a “square” by the standards of the late 1940s as well),
Phil spends most of his time outside of school in the basement of his family home, indulging a
hobby of tinkering with radios and phonographs. While on the surface Shy Guy conveys less
regimented rules of etiquette than many other mental hygiene films of the period - for example,
even the titles of other Coronet films, such as Date and Etiquette (1952) and Dating Dos and
Don ’ ts (1949) is suggestive - it is nevertheless guided by the voice-of-god narration which
bookends the film.
Over a series of images of high school students departing from school, the narrator
remarks about how being a “shy guy” is most difficult outside the classroom.
....That’s when you really feel it. The awful loneliness of being new in town. You
don’t know how to make people like you and you find yourself holding a grudge against
them. You’re standing on the outside looking in. You might have something to
contribute to their conversation. But nobody cares whether you do or not. There’s a
barrier, and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down. You imagine they keep
watching the way you look; the way you act. They think you’re different, so you head
for home. What else? But still you can’t forget that you’re alone. An outsider.
From this introduction of the problem, we move to synchronous sound as Phil’s dad comes
down into the basement where Phil tinkers in solitude. In a typically oblique father-son
exchange, the dad uses Phil’s problem with “finding the right parts to fit into his oscillator” as a
metaphor to guide the conversation into a discussion of his social adjustment problems. The
deployment of therapeutic techniques here is quite apparent. As his father advises: “You know
son, maybe school is like your radio. This oscillator will do its work well. But, as you said,
you still have to fit it in so it will work with all the other parts.” Phil gets the message but
expresses his “difference” from the other kids around him. His sensitive father reminds him that
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“everyone is different,” and sits down beside his son to relate his own difficulty with adjusting
to his new job when the family relocated to this new town a few months before. When Phil asks
his father how he coped, he deflects the question, saying that his techniques are not applicable
across the board. He urges Phil to find his own method of adjustment and suggests that he
observe the classmates around him to get a better idea of what skills and techniques they
deploy.
From this begins the next segment of the film, dominated primarily by Phil’s voice-over
(with some synchronous sound) which functions as an interior monologue as he alternately
watches and ostensibly “learns” from the social behavior of the popular kids around him,
expresses his self-doubt, and reprimands himself for not taking part in some of the
conversations around him. It’s worth mentioning that the role models for popularity that Phil
observes are all polite, eager, compliant and extremely well-behaved teenagers’ docile bodies to
be sure. Phil observes these people, making a series of comments (in voice-over) which reflect
the gender stereotypes of the period. For example, his remarks on the popularity of boys relates
to their excellent social skills (especially their politeness to girls), while his comments on
popular girls always includes either direct or implied reference to their popularity among both
boys and girls. This is a small but highly significant point of distinction, since it refers to the
good and bad kinds of popularity. As Are You Popular? (1947) another Coronet mental
hygiene film addresses directly, popularity for girls with boys alone is highly undesirable.. In
other words, those are the girls who “put out” sexually and therefore achieve respect from no
one, including the boys they “put out” to whose popularity, of course, remains unaffected by
their sexual experimentation in an all-too-familiar sexual double standard. Not surprisingly, it
is the working-class girl in this film who is coded as sexually promiscuous.
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Phil quickly leams the ropes and gains some confidence, even attending a “mixer,” one
friday night, though he lacks the confidence to ask a girl to accompany him. At the mixer, Phil
overhears some of the popular boys discussing a radio/technology problem. From Phil’s
nervous voice-over expresses his hesitation to intervene on their conversation (he, of course,
knows the answer to their problem) we switch back to the voice-of-god commentator who ties
up the narrative: “An offer of help. That’s welcome anywhere. It’s not hard to fit yourself into
a conversation. A mention of a similar problem in connection with the record player. They’re
interested in that record player. They’re interested in that shy guy. They know he’s alive now.”
Suddenly Phil is a social success. He invites “the gang” over to his house the next day to see
his radio and phonograph equipment. His dad even brings a round of cokes down to the cellar
to the eager new friends, as the voice-over intones: “Well one shy guy is on his way. Not that
his worries are over. He’ll still have his moments of doubt or hesitation or fear that he might do
something wrong. But he can face these problems now because he knows that he’s not really
different. And while he’s discovered only a few of many ways to overcome shyness, he’s
discovered that it can be done and that’s the main thing isn’t it?”
Turning the commentary back to the viewer invites an impression of dialogue or
parasociality, to be sure. In fact, this guidance discourse as a prominent model for progressive
pedagogy, conforms to a view expressed by William A. White in his discussion of the mental
hygiene movement: “Education has been largely empirical and too much confined to teaching; it
needs to be developed as a scheme for assisting and guiding the developing personality, based
upon a real understanding of the principles involved and the equipment.”7 1 A related argument
gets taken up in an essay on the subject educational films more generally entitled “The Closely
Guided Viewer: Form, Style, and Teaching in the Educational Film” by Barbara Erdman.
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Examining a diverse range (ninety films in total) of teaching films produced in the 1950s and
1970s and collected at the Archives of the Factual Film in Iowa, Erdman takes a formalist
methodological position, akin to David Bordwell’s work on Hollywood cinema, looking at
organizational structure of these films to see what they derive from Hollywood cinematic
strategies as well as from the traditional lesson structure as it has been developed and
consolidated around the “Herbartian five step plan.” First defined and developed in the late
nineteenth century, this technique establishes a traditional lesson as progression of interactions
between teacher, students, and subject matter designed and directed by the teacher, and
occurring within a specific time period, for the purpose of presenting specific new material to
students and evaluating their comprehension and application.7 2 The Herbatian five step lesson
plan gets structured along a consistent trajectory: 1) presenting lesson objectives to students; 2)
assisting students in recall of prior relevant learning; 3) motivating students through
introduction of new material; 4) presenting material and guiding learning by association and
demonstration; and 5) reviewing.
Other aspects of this structure which over time have become standardized techniques in
the structural design of classroom lessons include directing student participation and the
application and evaluation of student learning and/or performance. Along these lines, Erdman
reads teaching films as a related, if abbreviated variation on the Herbartian method as they
begin with a prologue, go on to a presentation of lesson materials — including demonstration or
application of concepts, and then end with a summary or conclusion. Omitting the first two
steps of the traditional lesson plan, teaching films begin with a motivational injunction, a posed
problem such as shyness to be solved or resolved in much the same way as the classical
narrative of problem/conflict and resolution. The appeal of the subject matter thereby gets
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implicated in the viewing experience itself, which creates a self-contained (diegetic) system very
different from the traditional lesson form, which requires continuous interactions between
students, teacher, and lesson material. That the voice of the narrator is the single most unifying
element makes the learning experience in the teaching film fundamentally a viewing experience,
argues Erdman. All “lessons” in the teaching film are visualized, “The pupil of the film lesson
is a closely guided viewer in a concrete, visible world.”7 3 While this essay certainly establishes
some useful links between typical lesson structure and the formal structure of classroom films,
used often today, it’s curious that Erdman will emphasize the importance of “voice-over” on the
one hand, and yet go on to argue the fundamental visuality of the experience on the other.
The significance of voice as the guiding force in classroom films cannot be
underestimated. Moreover, the prominence of adult voice-over in films directed to young
people is hardly an arbitrary matter. That the voice-over so frequently emanates from the
nondiegetic “acousmatic” zone is worth some mention. From Michel Chion, acousmatic
listening is defined as a situation in which one hears sound without seeing its source. In The
Voice in Cinema and Audio-Vision: Sound o f Screen, Chion distinguishes between onscreen,
offscreen and nondiegetic sounds as three zones of a circle which establish, varying degrees of
relation with one another.7 4 In Shy Guy and other guidance films the voice-over which inhabits
the acousmatic zone is indisputably the voice of authority, functioning as a force of disciplinary
power which comments from beyond the diegetic world, beyond the “micro level of bodies,” to
borrow a Foucaultian term. However different the tone of these films may seen from the more
overt didacticism of the Griersonian documentary tradition, the voice-over that they construct is
clearly constructed as the voice who knows. From Foucault’s model of the Panopticon and its
normalizing mechanisms of surveillance, it is easy to read these films as exercising a form of
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disciplinary power which offers itself as productive rather than repressive, functioning at the
level of the body, guided by “technologies of self.” As he says in Discipline and Punish of the
disciplinary power emerging from the advent of modem institutions: “A certain significant
generality moved between the least irregularity and the greatest crime: it was no longer the
offence, the attack on the common interest, it was the departure from the norm, the anomaly; it
was this that haunted the school, the court, the asylum or the prison.”7 5 The mental hygiene
point of view which pervades the classroom film in the postwar period displays the new,
“progressive” way of looking at education less as a power-knowledge institution grounded in
the transmission of empirical knowledge and more as a system committed to the creating of
personality. What Shy Guy and, as we shall see, a host of other sex ed films of the period
reflect is the emergence of “psychological man” and the “triumph of the therapeutic” as
categories and discourse which pervade all aspects of life in twentieth century.
While I don’t entirely disagree with Erdman’s view of a mode of address in educational
films which attempts to offer the spectator a rather concise and controlled interpretation of the
material presented, resistant spectatorship is never considered in Erdman’s essay. Certainly a
film like Shy Guy seems quaint, precious and quite amusing to contemporary viewers. In fact,
the popular recycling/recirculation of this and other mental hygiene/sex hygiene material is
prevalent in a wide range of recent film and video works from Su Friedrich’s coming-of-age
film Hide and Seek to Mystery Science Theater, Harriet The Spy, and MTV’s Beavis and
Butthead. Even The Simpsons has referenced the sex education classroom film in an episode
which has Bart’s teacher, Miss Crubapple, makes snide remarks about the veracity of the
images we don’t see. While indeed the behaviors and practices endorsed by these older films
may seem naive and dated to our jaded eyes, I suspect that the viewers for whom they were
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originally intended were also, to some degree, skeptical and — if closely guided, not necessarily
guided in the preferred direction. The very existence of such a proliferation of films dedicated
to mental health and hygiene suggests a certain anxiety about the regulation and control of
behavior in an era which would become increasingly infamous for its preoccupation with
discourses of conformity and rhetoric of normality.
Along with other titles such as Self-Conscious Guy (1951, Coronet), Mental Health
(1952, Encyclopedia Britannica), Emotional Health (1947, Audio Productions for McGraw-
Hill), Developing Friendships (1950, Coronet), The Outsider (Centron Corp for Young
America Films, 1951) and Facing Reality (1954, Knickerbocker Productions for McGraw-Hill)
a veritable flood of films on this or related topics were produced in the post War period.
National Film Board productions such as Shyness (1953) and Social Guidance Clinic (1955)
reflect similar ideologies. Produced as part of the CBC television series entitled, On the Spot,
Social Guidance Clinic is designed to educate the general public about the importance of
mental hygiene and the role of the guidance clinic in that project. As the film’s voice-over
explains:
Out of every one hundred Canadian school children it is estimated that at some time in
their lives five will be committed to a mental institution, two will go to prison, and at
least five more will be an emotional problem to themselves, their families or their
teachers. In other words, twelve out of every one hundred Canadian school children
need help. On the Spot is here in Toronto this week to learn more about a plan that is
helping to stop this waste in human lives.7 6
Functioning as the preventative antidote to the human “waste” and guided by the progressive
ethos o f efficiency and pragmatism, medical specialization is constructed here and elsewhere as
a necessary guide to the regulation and control, indeed the medicalization of nonconformity in
the interests of building a healthy nation.
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Mental Health is explicit in endorsing the need to rely for guidance on one of a spate of
“helping professions.” The narrator of the films is a medical doctor who also functions within
the diegesis as aid to several of the maladjusted youth depicted. The film is set up by a
prologue, then a presentation of lesson materials — including demonstration or application of
concepts and ends with a summation which follows Erdman’s structure of the classroom film to
the letter. After giving three examples of maladjustment in a young boy and two teens, the
films reviews the “rules” for mental health paraphrased as follows: 1) don’t bottle up your
emotions like love, anger, fear. “Express them naturally”; 2) respect yourself and your own
abilities; and 3) respect others and treat them as friends. After this prosaic recapitulation of the
lesson, the doctor then says:
One of the best rules for good mental health is talking out your troubles and problems
with somebody whose opinion you respect. Your parents, your family doctor, your
school teacher or advisor. Your clergyman may be the right person to talk to on many
things. Whatever it may be, talking is one of the best tonics for good mental health.
As this advice is proffered, a montage sequence shows the various, previously troubled case
studies from the films talking in turn with representative of these various areas of expertise.
Another NFB series, Ages and Stages, produced from 1949 to 1957 and sponsored by
McGraw-Hill Ltd’s educational film division in New York, reflects a similar project of mental
hygiene and progressive pedagogy. Several of the films are adapted from a widely regarded
text book by Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg’s entitled Infant and Child in the Culture o f Today:
The Guidance o f Development in Home and Nursery School published in 1943. Broadly
speaking, the series offers child-rearing expertise to prospective and struggling parents.7 7 From
Arnold Gesell’s Child Study Clinic at Yale, funded by both the Rockefeller and Carnegie
Foundations, the ideas in the film series are heavily indebted to Dewey’s vision of liberty as a
life principle of democracy and the centrality of education in that project. By breaking up the
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stages of development into a series of age-based emotional and cognitive progressions, the
series highlights the extent to which the medicalization of normality is now fully imbricated in
scientific knowledge about growth and development. Indeed in the first film of the series, He
Acts His Age (1949), a child-rearing expert even opens one of Gesell and Ilg’s other books, The
Child from Five to Ten (1946).7 8 Subcontracted out to Crawley Films in Ottawa and partially
sponsored by the Mental Health Division of the National Department of Health, other titles
from The Ages and Stages Series are suggestive: Terrible Twos and Trusting Threes (1950);
Frustrating Fours and Fascinating Fives (1953); From Sociable Sex to Noisy Nine (1954);
From Ten to Twelve and The Teens (1957).7 9
“Fitting In” : The Closely Guided Hygiene of Teens
The Teens is the portrait of a middle-class family, the O’Connors. It is presented exclusively
through voice-over narration with an almost continuous jazzy music which accompanies and
often punctuates the action as it is described exclusively by a male commentator. The family of
five, three of whom are teens, Tim (aged thirteen), Joan and Barry (fifteen year-old twins), and
Mom and Dad, are depicted in their daily routines as the narrator comments on their thoughts,
feelings, sometimes even paraphrasing their dialogue. This day-in-the-life is an elaborately
staged lesson in family guidance which appears to be directed to the young adult and possibly
parents. Tim is described and portrayed as “vague” although very busy thinking about the
world around him just the same. He arrives him from school though the back kitchen door
which plays a central role in the activities displayed in the film. As usual, Tim’s hungry as the
voice-over explains: “He’s at that stage when they suddenly shoot up, just about puberty.”
Stages and phases are the object of study here as Mom and then Joan arrive home and enter the
kitchen.
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Joan is described as mature and conscientious and arrives home in a flutter: “Joan has
had a good day at school. Why? Success with the boys.” At fifteen, her preoccupation is with
social status and fitting in with the gang. She’s going steady with a boy named Peter. As the
voice-over explains: “This places her in an enviable position among her feminine classmates.
Joan doesn’t admit to outsiders that she really isn’t crazy about Peter, but you have to have
dates if you want to be anybody and she feels that the only way to be sure of having dates is to
go steady.” Joan’s excitement is the thrill of being asked out on a date by an older, eighteen-
year-old football star which she has gladly accepted at the risk of “her steady.” The nervous
reaction to this prospect in the glances cast by her Mom are ignored by Joan but made glaringly
obvious to the viewer.
Next to arrive home (following Dad is frequently portrayed be in the living room
reading the newspaper or a book - another cliche in many classroom films) is Barry, Joan’s
twin. Barry is described as “a chip off the old block,” who immediately gets into an argument
with his dad over the purchase of new skiing boots. Minor conflicts and misbehaviors are
described in minute detail by the narrator, who offers a charitable reading of “the teens”: “The
normal teenager is so very occupied with his own life that he’s self-centered, almost has to be if
he’s going to keep up with all the learning he has to do about people and things.”
One of aspects about teens that the film emphasizes is their differences among one
another. Of course, these differences are carefully circumscribed over a limited range
acceptable behaviors and transgressions which are always already contained in the social
scientific rhetoric of normalized stages and phases of development. Tim, for example, is a loner
and likes it that way. He’s far more interested in his chemistry experiments and his private
thoughts that in establishing the active social life to which his siblings are so committed. His
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one intimate friend as another boy who is described by the narrator as he arrives in Tim’s room
after dinner: “David is a year and a half older than Tim but he has been slower in developing
than some of his fourteen-year-old friends. He is not as well-coordinated and as good in sports
as many, and is not at all interested in girls. Happily, he has found that Tim, although younger,
is at about the same stage. Of course, neither of them are conscious of this.” Tim’s parents are
shown to be interested in Tim and David and their “experiments” but commended for not
“hovering.” “Tim’s own interest keeps him going. What teenagers need is scope and freedom.
With them, almost everything is an experiment.”
After dinner with the family, Barry’s life revolves around the gang who arrive in a pack
and immediately retreat to. The voice-over stresses the value of creating these kinds of
interactive spaces for teens to be comfortably among their peers: “A place where you belong,
where you are accepted at your own level is very important. Only in that way you can find out
what your own level really is. They can talk for hours. Sports, cars, people, sports, news,
girls, sports.” The commentary continues:
At this stage, their interest in life is quite different from earlier when the facts of
conception and childbirth were learned. Petting, girls, sex. These are matters in which
their interest is more than passing. Barry’s good relationship with his father and the
way in which his knowledge of sex has been kept up to the level of his interest in the
subject pays off. His attitude is healthy, unworried and confident. Of course, he’s not
above an off-colored joke. But it’s got to be a funny one.
Whatever his off-colored joke may be, we’ll never know, but Barry is certainly popular, well-
socialized and able to solicit a good laugh from his friends. Without going into any detail about
precisely what sexual knowledge the teens have thus far acquired, the film stays in the diegetic
world of the “drama” and demonstration of family life and socialization skills rather than
cutting to the “science” of anatomical charts and sketches. What Barry knows, we’ll never
know, but our voice-of-god narrator certainly suggests that it’s sufficient.
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Joan’s interests and involvements are displayed as “normal,” though simultaneously
different from those of her twin brother. Her sophisticated date arrives at the door and
comfortably converses with her parents briefly before they depart. Joan’s mother is very
nervous and apprehensive, which is registered in her gestures and explained by the narrator who
says: “She has heard that Jim has quite a reputation. And she’s worried that Joan is getting out
of her depth Perhaps they should try to give Joan more guidance. It’s hard to know how
much to interfere. Somehow Mary trusts Joan’s judgement.” Mom’s restraint is offered as the
best strategy here: “Dates with different other boys will help her [Joan] set standards based on
her own experience, rather than the experience of her parents.” Fortunately for all, the date
goes well, though not so well that Joan is prepared to sacrifice her steady boyfriend. We are
not shown the date itself, only the final moments of their evening as they sit (and kiss) in Jim’s
car.
From these episodes and several others which display and describe the normality and
banality of conflicts and their resolution in a family of teens, the film ends with the family, and
a few of Barry’s friends all crowded around the television as the voice-over proffers:
A day crammed with living and learning as they live. They are finding themselves, and
to do this they need freedom to be themselves and yet they still need guidance to help
them become the kind of people they want to be. They need to think for themselves and
yet they need to understand and sense the feelings of others. They are children no
longer, and yet they are not quite adults. But they combine some of the warmest,
gayest, and deepest elements of both. To be fully appreciated, they must be
understood.
This upbeat, tidy understanding of white bourgeois values creates the kind of white washed
vision of North American life that is made all the more obvious in pointed contrast to
Hollywood’s depictions of teens in the period. From films of rebellious youth proliferating in
the period such as The Wild One (1954) with Marlon Brando, Rebel Without a Cause (1955)
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with James Dean, Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Splendor in the Grass (1961), two
diametrically opposed images of family life and teen behavior are apparent. Yet what links
these two traditions, however, is a foregrounding of personality in relation to disorder, most
frequently a disorder that results from the domestic sphere. Jim Stark (James Dean) in Rebel,
for example, is clearly suffering from a range of problems related most glaringly to an
aggressive, domineering mother and a passive emasculated father - from a disorder of the
traditional configuration of gender relations within the family, as it were.
The disruptions and dislocations caused by WWII and their significant impact on the
reconfiguration of North American culture in the post War era has been the subject of a broad
range of studies from a multiplicity of disciplines. From the standpoint of family, sexual
knowledge and behavior, and mental hygiene, a notable counterpoint to the domestic theater
which gets staged in the hygiene films and their strategies of containment would certainly be the
vision of sexuality portrayed by Alfred Kinsey’s famous reports, in 1948 and 1953 respectively,
on the sexual behaviors of American men and women. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female were unusual books, both for their subject matter
and for their enormous, unprecedented popularity in American society. Both remained best
sellers for significant periods of time. In fact, by the time the widely anticipated Human
Female volume came out in 1953, word of its publication pushed off of the front pages of
several major newspapers reports of the verification of the Soviet hydrogen bomb as well as the
surrender of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran.8 0 Without going into detail about the reports and
the controversy surrounding the “scientific” techniques of Kinsey and his associates (i.e. his
reliance on memory of the people he interviewed and the naivete about statistical sampling are
only a few of the criticisms lodged against this work), the reports clearly aroused considerable
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interest. Kinsey and his research team certainly appeared to demonstrate that generations of
American men and women had failed to follow the accepted standards of sexual morality.
Moreover, as Jeffrey Moran puts it: “[they] had failed so spectacularly as to call into question
the moral code’s very validity as a social ideal.”8 1
Kinsey’s background as a zoologist at the University of Indiana before moving into the
domain of marriage education in 1937 is discussed briefly in the introduction to this
dissertation. What is of interest for the discussion here, is precisely Kinsey’s association with
this emerging field of study which began in the late 1920s with “practical” marriage courses,
most famously by sociologist Earnest Groves at the University of North Carolina in 1927.8 2 In
keeping with many progressive reform efforts which sought to make mate selection a science,
from the home economics movement, eugenics and instruction of youth in “eugenical mating,”
as well as sexual hygiene courses, the Marriage Education Movement or Family Life Education
as it is variously called was part of an effort to construct an ideal of “scientific courtship” to
American and Canadian youth. From modest and sporadic beginnings, on a small sample of
American college and high school campuses, a 1949 survey showed, for example, that over 500
U.S. colleges and universities gave courses on marriage relations. A New York Times article
reported in 1958 that over 700 institutions offered accredited courses on the subject.8 3
In her sociohistoric survey of twentieth-century dating and mating habits in America
aptly titled From Front Porch to Back Seat, Beth Bailey offers a summary of the major
characteristics that were developed across the maze of campuses that developed such curricula:
They were “functional” — that is, they rejected “academic” education for a practical
program leaders sometimes compared to vocational education. They stressed the
“personal.” Courses were designed to foster “rapport” between student and instructor
so that instructors could use personal authority to counsel individual students. In a
different but related emphasis, the courses located importance in the individual:
materials were deemed useful only insofar as a student recognized a personal relation to
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(or interest in) what was presented. Finally, quantitative social science research on
“normal” American courtship and marriage served as the prescription and proscription
in these courses.8 4
This could be a definition for progressive pedagogy more generally, though the subject at hand
was more specifically designed to prepare youth for marriage. In keeping with the trend of
progressive pedagogy, these educators (most of whom were from the field of sociology) turned
to science by adopting scientific techniques and translating experience into scientific rhetoric.
That they tended to offer a “prescription” for normalizing courtship and marriage patterns is
undoubtedly embroiled in the mental hygiene point of view.
The Teens is a perfect illustration of this agenda; one which circumscribes explicit
issues related to sex in courtship and mating patterns in favor of a more general sociological
view of family education. This is precisely one of the problems that many sex educationalists
would lodge against the Marriage Education or Family Life Education - that they operated
along a trajectory which emphasized the mental, psychological, social, even economic aspects
of dating and marriage without adequately dealing with the specifics of sex. A huge range of
dating films produced in the late 1940s and 1950s supports this view. From titles such as
Dating Dos and Don ’ ts (1949), Going Steady (1951, revised), Date Etiquette (1952), What
To Do On a Date ( 1951), Choosing Your Marriage Partner (1952) to name just a few titles
(all of which were produced by Coronet), we are given an elaborate theatrical staging - offered
by authorities - which addresses the complex systems of rules regarding courtship patterns
while barely touching upon the issue of sex per se. While barely touching upon the mechanics
of sex, much less how to control the ostensibly powerful “sexual instinct,” these films focus
upon elaborate systems for regulating the places, times, and circumstances in which young
people could express their sexual desires. For example, What To Do On a Date has our
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protagonist, Phil, in a quandary, first about asking a girl out and then, about what to do with
her. Clearly sexual petting does not enter into the picture. The message the film offers is
constant group interaction (from mini golf to “weenie roasts”), a rule which promises success
by making intimacy - and thus sex - logistically impossible.
Date Etiquette addresses the centrality of money in dating by proposing a rigid gender
system in which dates are controlled and initiated by boys, thereby making them hosts. Proper
etiquette is in learning to be considerate of economy: taking the cue about what to order at the
soda shop, for instance. On the basis of what “Danny”seems to want, “Alice” can deduce what
price range her meal must remain within. As Beth Bailey points out, “...in the dating system
money entered directly into the relationship between a man and a women as the symbolic
currency of exchange in even casual dating.” Like prostitution, she argues, “dating made
access to women directly dependent on money.”8 5 To be sure, the rigid conformity that this
etiquette system proposed can easily be read in relation to cultural anxieties about the changing
role of women in culture more broadly the moral panic of some reformers regarding to be the
dramatic rise in divorce rates and the concomitant decline of family values, and the rising rate
of sexual experimentation and promiscuity. Dating Dos and Don ’ ts certainly introduces the
topic of sexual petting more directly by offering three scenarios for how to say “good night,”
repeated by the same players with a voice-over commentary following each “performance.” In
the sole scenario in which “Woody” makes an awkward, somewhat aggressive physical advance
on his date, Ann, he is shunned and dismissed (and, by the narrator, judge harshly for his
inappropriate conduct). The “preferred” goodnight involves a friendly exchange, a brief kiss,
and an invitation to another date, a scenario guided by the principle of deferral.
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What all of these films reflect is less a realistic picture of social behavior in this period
than a view of the struggle for control in courtship as it was played out in an essentially
conservative system. As Beth Bailey has argued, the rigid behavioral codes and definitions that
get established around dating etiquette at this time ultimately shows how Americans were
“attempting to reclaim a past when gender offered a more stable definition and place in the
world.” As she proposes:
Even though the etiquette of masculinity and femininity offered women a path to power
within the dating system, it more importantly expressed fundamental fears about the
amount of power women were gaining in society. The etiquette of gender sought to
draw a line between ‘public’ lives (where barriers between men and women were
breaking down in the worlds of work and education) and ‘private’ relationships.
Although the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ were ultimately inseparable, the etiquette of
gender served as a barrier against new definitions and behaviors. It was a cushion
against change.8 6
In the production of convention, new arbiters of this discourse representing the mental hygiene
point of view sought to bring youth’s experience in courtship and marriage under the
surveillance and authority of educators and experts, and looked to formal institutions of
education to prepare youth for marriage.
In the provincial guidelines set by educators and administrators in the province of
Ontario in the postwar period as marriage and family living curriculum was being developed
and implemented, the approach was very much like the one taken in the U.S.8 7 In other words,
family life curriculum downplayed biological instruction in favor of teaching/guiding about
moral and social aspects of sex. Children were instructed in the morality and conventions of
middle-class society, especially as those conventions related to the strict control and
suppression of sexual expression outside of heterosexual conjugality. Social-Sex Attitudes in
Adolescence, a McGraw-Hill Text film produced by Crawley Films in 1953, chronicles the
social, physical and psychological development of two white middle-class teens through the
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onset of puberty. Correlated with a previously mentioned McGraw-Hill psychology text
entitled Adolescent Development by Elizabeth B. Hurlock, Ph.D., and the collaboration of
physicians, educators and social scientists in both Canada and the US, Social-Sex Attitudes is
reflective of the marriage and family living curriculum and its emphasis on the “science” of
mental hygiene. As I hope to show, this psychological perspective appears to deal in the social
construction of gender by effacing the biological determinism which belies its pedagogical
message.
The Mentality of Marriage and Discourses of Desire
Social-Sex Attitudes begins with a square-up which appears to advocate a social constructionist
view of sexuality.8 8 After the opening credits for the film, which emphasize its correlation with
the Hurlock text by superimposing the credits over an image of the book itself, the film reads:
Teenagers differ greatly in the development of their social sex attitudes. They are
influenced by many factors such as parental guidance, behavior and attitudes of friends,
and the customs of the community in which they live. In this film, we trace the social
sex development of two teenagers - a boy and a girl. Their behavior is probably
normal, but not necessarily typical of all adolescents in society.
Normality and typicality are the essence of the film and are adjectives which, (along with
“natural,”) are repeated ad nauseum here. From this qualification, the film begins on the
wedding day of Bob and Mary (which provides the book end of the film) to the ritualized
differences which constitute their experience of sex and gender beginning in childhood with
Mary’s “natural” expression of desire to have children (interrogating her pregnant mother) and
Bob learning the facts of reproduction from a cat, who is shown with a litter of kittens. While
Mary’s interest and curiosity at this stage (perhaps five or six years of age), is deemed natural,
Bob’s mother must invent scenarios to arouse his interest in the subject of sex and reproduction.
As the film’s narrator, (actor Lome Green) says of Bob’s mother: “She answered all his
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questions. If no questions came, she arranged situations so that he became conscious of sex.”
Interestingly, Bob is being raised in a single parent home by his mother. Though little is said of
the father’s fate, her widowed status would logically be connected to the war and its tragic toll
on the lives of thousands of North American men. Given the acceleration of divorce statistics in
the postwar era, however, it is worth noting that Bob’s mom is not a divorcee, which would
introduce another layer of complexity in a film at pains to promote happy, healthy marriage.
In anticipation of the onset of her menstrual cycle, Mary’s mother is shown instructing
her (with a text book in hand) “...instead of leaving her to pick up odd bits of startling and
inaccurate information from her school mates.” In describing Mary’s familial environment, her
parents are described as a typical happy couple who have their occasional quarrels “but in
general home life was pleasant, natural and secure.” Characterized as going through an odd
“reversal” at the age of eleven where she seems lost in a world of daydreaming and solitude As
the voice-over states: Mary’s mother tried to discuss sex without embarrassment and to give
Mary facts without prejudice or any suggestion of fear or same.” The film then shows a scene
in which Mary and a cluster of her friends sit on a lawn talking about sex and asking one
another questions. Mary, of course, is shown as having a healthy attitude. When a friend ask
her is she’s afraid of having children, Mary replies “not at all because after all, people have
been having babies for thousands of years. Mother says that and nowadays doctors have so
many ways of making it safe...” The synchronous dialogue here is cut off by our narrator who
goes on to comment: “For Mary, the fulfillment of a healthy sex life held no fears. Sex was not
a something sinister to be whispered about but it was a natural function that could contribute to
the ultimate happiness of home and a family.” These interruptive strategies recur throughout
the film, which offers occasional synchronous dialogue but which is dominated by narration
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which interprets and assesses the motives, feelings and thoughts of all of the film’s characters
from a position of supreme authority. A closely guided spectator is the preferred mode once
again.
There are several interesting points in the film which particularly invite alternative or
oppositional readings however. For example, Mary goes through a “stage” of developing a
“sudden strong friendship” with a classmate named Lucille. Not surprisingly, “To Mary’s
mother it seemed unnatural this continual intimacy, this concentration of affection on one not
very unusual girl.” As mother anxiously sets the dinner table and watches the effusive
discussion between the two girls the voice-over comments: “Mother forgets the devotion she had
for her own girlfriend about twenty-five years ago.” A queer reading is an inviting proposition,
however fleeting here, in a scene which never fails to provoke laughter from the undergraduate
film classes to whom I have shown the film.
For Bob, the comparable marker (alongside his development of secondary sex
characteristics) has very different consequences. He develops a role model in the coach of his
football team and is shown in conversation with the coach subtly mimicking his gestures. While
Mary, on the other hand, develops a preoccupation with looks and dress as her interest in boys
gradually develops. No suggestion of “excess” in this stage, or of concern over his admiration
is addressed. While Mary’s desire to get “stirred up about someone” is coded as a “natural
stage” in her progression from antagonism toward boys to falling in love with them, the
potential of any emotionally charged equivalent is carefully downplayed in the discussion of
Bob, whose development is summarized by the narrator as a montage sequence shows him
working at his desk, at football practice, talking to his coach and running past a cluster of
adoring girls. Over these images the narrator intones:
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Bob was growing up too. He knew about the reproductive organs and nocturnal
emissions. He also knew about masturbation. But he’d read that the problem was
more mental than physical. He knew that the healthiest life for him was to have plenty
of exercise and fresh air...His interests were mainly masculine and his success at sports
made him sure of himself. He could take girls in his stride, just as he did games. Until
one day, when Bob was sixteen, it became apparent that his interest was getting to be
more than just casual....
While no comparable mention of knowledge or interest in masturbation is accorded to Mary, the
emphasis on the mental hygiene point of view is glaringly obvious here. Bob’s more-than-
casual interest is visualized by a cartoon that his mother finds while cleaning his room of Bob
and “Betty” in a nude embrace. Characterizing the problem of sex as “more mental than
physical,” is clearly a strategy of containment which enables the framework of discussion to
remain fixed on the “scientific”discourse of psychological development. Less a problem of
“biology” or hygiene (and wet dreams could certainly be framed as such from the point of view
of, say, single mothers and their laundry duties), sex for Bob is a problem of social-sex,
negotiating the balances and etiquette required by the differences between the sexes; of
developing “masculine interests”; cultivating success at sports, and casually taking girls in
one’s stride (as with games).
While the film foregrounds the cultural logic of adolescent sexuality (framed from the
perspective of white - assiduously - heterosexual middle-classness), the medical model of
biological difference on which these behaviors is predicated presumes a strong biological and
hormonal set of determinants. Boys masturbate; girls groom - all in accordance with the
dictates of the pituitary gland. This biological difference allows Bob a healthy interest in sex
which is denied to Mary. For example, while both at first date a number of different people,
Mary fairly quickly begins to settle into a pattern of going steady while Bob takes out a
different girl every week. Mary’s dates are depicted as romantic more than sexual, while Bob is
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portrayed as having “wild times” and taking out girls of whom his mother disapproves. A jazzy
musical score always accompanies Bob’s dates until his first date with Mary. As an
improvisational musical styles frequently associated with sex, the music here adds a layer of
connotation to Bob’s sexual experimentation which, while never depicted explicitly, is
nonetheless very much in evidence. The only time this jazzy score is played in a scene with
Mary is when her current steady Jack pushes her to “go to far” in his car one night, after which
she promptly dumps him.
By the time Bob is introduced to Mary at a party, the narrator explains, “the desperate
need to learn all about sex was over.” One could deduce that the need to learn was at least
satisfied to some degree. For Bob, petting was no longer “just a form of entertainment.” The
double standard of sexual morality is very much in evidence here. Bob and Mary become more
and more serious, as the voice-over explains:
Because of similar family and educational background, they had much the same way of
looking at things. They began to know that this time it was for keeps. They were so
sure that their love was deep and spiritual that at times a marriage ceremony seemed to
them to be just a formality. Love seemed to be all that really mattered. But each of
them knew deep down that they wanted their marriage vows to have real meaning.
Real meaning, means chastity, of course, and this is what this model couple exercises as the
film shows them resisting temptation and then jumps ahead in time to where it began, on their
wedding day. Following a recapitulation of the lessons learned in the film as a montage
sequence repeats step-by-step the stages of development which ultimately bought Bob and Mary
together, the film ends with the speculative remarks of our voice-of-god narration who turns the
mode of address more directly to the viewer as he surmises: “Now they’re on their own. Do
you believe their parents have done the best they could to help Mary and Bob make all of these
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adjustments? Are Mary and Bob typical of our teenagers? Have they a sound background for
marriage? What do you think?”
This incitement to discourse tries to imply what the film does not: that there are a range
of possible interpretations about the normality and typicality of Bob and Mary. Nevertheless, it
deploys the pedagogical technique of appearing, at least, to invite a multiplicity of readings.
While this vision of middle-class life is certainly a “hygienic” one in which even the problems
presented seem to be perfect problems with easy, concrete solutions, I am not proposing the
makers of these films were in any way naive. Mental hygiene films are fundamentally a profit-
making approach to social engineering, one that was determined not so much to depict the world
as it really was than to create an image - in the interests of preventative medicine - of how it
really should be. In this regard, melodrama’s nostalgic mode - displayed in earlier sexual
hygiene films of the First and Second World War era - is explicitly linked to this film’s
moralizing discourse. One important difference from those films and these ones, however, is
the shift from the reliance on graphic spectacle and a pedagogy of fear and illness, to a reliance
more on guiding voices and a pedagogy of health. The picture of health and hygiene is nowhere
so apparent as in the last category of films that I will discuss in this chapter, the menstruation
film.
Hygienic Bodies and Fertile Minds: The Mentality of Menstruation
From the early production of the classroom sex education films, educators in both Canada and
the United States, have relied on films to teach adolescent women about menstruation. In 1947,
the Kimberly-Clark Corporation hired the Walt Disney Company to make the first of these
educational films, The Story o f Menstruation, a film which remained in active circulation for
over twenty-five years. With versions made in several languages and shown around the world,
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Kimberly-Clark estimates that The Story o f Menstruation was viewed by more than 100 million
young women.8 9 In fact, so successful - and in a sense, timeless - was this film considered to
be (at least by the sponsor), that it was not until the early 1980s that the corporation saw fit to
update the original film. In an unpublished dissertation from 1989 entitled The Corporation in
the Classroom: The Struggles over Meanings o f Menstrual Education in Sponsored Films,
Margot Kennard points out that sponsoring corporations enjoyed little competition from
noncommercial producers of menstrual films. Indeed, among the number of companies created
in the postwar period to enter the business of sex education, none made films dealing
exclusively with menstrual education which, when handled explicitly, was always framed within
the broader context of female urogenital education and coming of age. Too messy a business to
touch? A topic that inevitably must be faced but preferably with “discretion” meaning in
private? Whatever the reason, at the time of conducting her study in the mid-to-late 1980s,
Kennard found that only one noncommercially sponsored film, Dear Diary (1982) was used
with any regularity in some public school systems.
Problematically tied to the definition of sponsorship is the question of what role the
sponsor might play in the deployment (or concealment) of information. In Kennard’s view, the
significant and often central role such films play in the history of menstrual education practices
begs the question of what and whose meanings are privileged in these texts. Kennard’s project
is to use a cultural studies framework to address issues concerning the construction and
circulation of meanings within various menstrual education films. Combined with ethnographic
research which consists of interviews with various directors, producers, and corporate personnel
involved in the production of these films, her goal is to unearth contradictory moments in these
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texts: sites where corporate authority is contested (however briefly) in the struggle for meanings
operative within the films themselves.
While her study is an important one, a criticism that I have of Kennard’s project is her
failure to distinguish among different degrees of investment that corporate sponsorship may
obtain. Since all of the companies involved in classroom film production were profit making
enterprises, her assumptions about corporate sponsorship via the feminine hygiene industry
more particularly gets elided in her analysis. Moreover, her discussion of a corporate agenda
behind the “upbeat message” which dominates these menstruation films fails to take into
account that this upbeat message was the dominant theme in most sex education films made in
the period from the late 1940s and into much of the 1960s. At this time, hygiene discourse
pervades virtually all sex education, including menstruation education. So while my discussion
is certainly allied with Kennard’s agenda, I’m less interested in examining “subversive” fissures
or gaps within the ideological construction of the films’ meanings which is her project, than in
framing these texts within the models of hygiene discourse, including the pedagogical strategies
and documentary tactics they deploy.
To be sure, a corporate discourse on menstrual education wants its corporate image and
consumer products to be associated with primarily “positive” images of menstruation which
results in a “sugar coating” or white washing of the process whereby menstrual “problems”
(pains, irregularities, fears and phobias) are barely touched upon in films designed to promote
an upbeat viewing experience. Even the titles of these films is suggestive: Molly Grows Up
(1953); I t ’ s Wonderjul Being a Girl (1960); Naturally...A Girl (1973) and Growing Up on
Broadway (1984) were all produced by Personal Products, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson.
Another consistent trope within these films related to a corporate political agenda more broadly
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would seem to be the tension between the sponsor’s need to privilege “accurate”
medical/scientific knowledge with the need to win approval from schools which, as previously
mentioned, have often been pressured on many sides to regard the explicit processes of
fertilization as too controversial for the elementary classroom.
In The Story o f Menstruation, the elision of this tension between accuracy and
approval is demonstrated by the euphemistic and inexplicit link proffered by the narrator’s
explanation of menses in relation to reproduction. Although it is only one of several physical
changes experienced by adolescent girls, menstruation is generally given greater cultural
significance than budding breasts or the appearance of body hair. In spite of this, it is hygiene,
not sexuality, which remains the focus of the instruction that these films proffer. In her analysis
of the history of menstrual discourse as a culturally constructed script, Brumberg argues that
instead of seeing menarche as a marker of an important internal change for girls - specifically
in her new capacity for reproduction, the tendency has been instead to stress the importance of
outside appearances, “keeping clean, avoiding soiled clothes, and purchasing the ‘right
equipment’”:
The script that we follow in late-twentieth-century America involves mothers, doctors,
and the producers of new technologies, all of whom have collaborated over the past
hundred years to produce a distinctly American menstrual experience that stresses
personal hygiene over information about adult womanhood for female sexuality. In the
1990s, the sanitary products industry is a more-than-$2 billion-a-year business, built on
scientific and popular beliefs about personal cleanliness as well as changes in
contemporary women’s lives: earlier menarche, fewer pregnancies, and later menopause
- all of which foster more periods and more sales. The way we menstruate in America
today not only affects the economy, it also contributes to the way in which adolescent
girls make the body into an intense project requiring careful scrutiny and constant
personal control.9 0
Along these lines, The Story o f Menstruation offers a transhistorical narrative about
the “natural” and “normal” cycle of life for females which ultimately and essentially suggests
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that reproduction in the context of heterosexual conjugality is the inevitable and desirable
consequence of maturity, part of nature’s “eternal plan.” This animated begins with credits to
Walt Disney and Kotex as some white flowers float across the screen and into the bedroom of a
baby girl as the female voice-over intones:
Why is nature always called mother nature? Perhaps it’s because like any mother she
quietly manages so much of our living without our ever realizing there’s a women at
work. Why right from the beginning we breathe and sleep and wake up with no more
conscious planning than we use in sprouting teeth. Mother nature controls many of our
routine bodily processes though automatic control centers called glands. The story of
menstruation really begins with one particular gland....the pituitary gland.
The invocation of nature, indeed of “ Mother Nature” from the beginning of the film narrativizes
menstruation within a model which reflects an ideological position of femininity as one of
passive/objecthood rather than of active subjectivity. Far from being a subject in her own right,
this biological model maintains that “ As a girl grows up from blocks to dolls to books, that
means her body is obeying the orders issued by the pituitary gland.” From a series of animated
sketches giving general views of the pituitary gland, the reproductive organs, the film goes on to
emphasize the social aspects of menstruation, such as the importance of body cleanliness, good
posture, regular exercise and a healthy, balanced diet, all of which are displayed through the
behavior/performance of a female figure who resembles a cross between Snow White and
Cinderella.
In a review of The Story o f Menstruation from 1947 in Educational Screen (a trade
publication for educational professionals and film librarians) the use of animation here is lauded
as “a happy solution to most o f the problems posed by the subject matter.” The unidentified
author of the review states :
With this medium of expression, ‘glass-figure’ technique could be employed to show
the internal organs. A half-real and half-diagramatic rendering of these was developed
in order to avoid any unpleasantness. Thus the technical clarity of straight diagrams
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was maintained, and the ghastly effect of a realistic rendering was avoided. No nude
figures were shown. Medical language was simplified, and unnecessary terms
eliminated without the loss of essential accuracy. A gynecologist of the highest
reputation checked the story in detail at every stage of its development: words, pictorial
representation, animations, and implications.9 1
This review reflects an attitude toward menstruation which frames this corporeal “event” within
the rhetoric of naturalized, essentialized experience which is legitimated by the invocation of
medical science. Interestingly, although a mother is shown in the film as she tends to her baby
in a brief image, no mother is shown imparting information here. In anatomical sketches which
explain the mechanics of the cycle itself, only internal organs are discussed. Perhaps this is to
avoid naming and describing among other things, the clitoris which, of course, would implicate
a discourse of desire that these films stringently refrain from evoking. In fact, the clitoris is
virtually absent from all sex ed films directed to youth until the early 1960s, when for example
in Girl to Women (1961, Churchill Films) it is described succinctly “a small, highly sensitive
organ” with no further detail.
While The Story o f Menstruation is at pains to frame menstruation as inevitable,
natural, and hormonally ‘hard-wired’ into the female organism, the films displays the degree to
which the meaning of menarche derived from the particular culture that surrounds the body of
the sexually maturing girl. The dated quality of this story of menstruation throws into relief the
extent to which revisionist discourses on adolescent sexuality, social sexual, and mental hygiene
can be implicated in the ways in which biology and nature are socially constructed. Although
product placement is not significant in The Story o f Menstruation, the pamphlet created to
accompany the film, entitled Very Personally Yours, is certainly a more obvious advertisement
for Kotex products. Nevertheless, it’s hardly a stretch to argue that most North American girls
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of all classes in the twentieth century have grown up equating menarche and menstruation with
a hygiene product.
While female adolescence is framed in the context of rituals of hygiene, appearance and
control, male adolescence is afforded far greater (albeit still limited) latitude with respect to
sexual expression and desire. In films direct to male adolescents and teens, they learn about
“wet dreams” (as the onset of puberty for boys), “erections” (as the preface to heterosexual
intercourse) and “ejaculation” (as the act of inseminating). Even in a film as early as 1953
entitled As Boys Grow (Medical Art Productions), masturbation is taught to the boys by their
gym coach as a perfectly “normal and natural” activity in which to engage. This, to be sure, is
a far more liberal approach to masturbation than Victorian prohibitions against the practice
which lingered well into the early twentieth-century. Despite these differences at the level of
content, one of the most pronounced similarities among these films is a pedagogical technique
still very much in evidence in a considerable body of contemporary sex education material
today, the pedagogical presumption or framework of which is based on what Paulo Freire
describes as the “banking system” of education. According to this model, students are
conceived as passive recipients of knowledge which is deposited in them with little or no
attempt to predict the ways in which they may indeed resist or subvert such direct attempts at
indoctrination.
This hierarchical pedagogical model has much in common with the explicit didacticism
of the Griersonian documentary tradition, one on which The Teens, Shy Guy, the various dating
films mentioned here, Social-Sex Attitudes in Adolescence, and The Story o f Menstruation are
clearly based. In the medicalization of sexuality that comes to dominate the ways in which
youth are invited to imagine themselves and their sexuality, little latitude is offered for
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223
behaviors which deviate from the proscribed norm. Considerably more latitude is offered
through the Sixties, as I will show in Chapter 4. For example, when teenage pregnancy begins
to get framed as an “epidemic” in the 1970s, several films will start to address this difficult
topic as well as contraception more broadly. These are subjects that never come up in the sex
education films of the post war era, since fear of premarital pregnancy tended to be avoided in a
curriculum that emphasized a positive, upbeat message. Of course, where it does come up it is
always framed around “premature” marriage, since the rehabilitation of reproductive sexuality
could never allow for any discussion of abortion.
Over the course of the 1960s, several changes take place that begin to show up in sex
education films directed to teens. A far greater emphasis on youth as a subculture, with teens
depicted in a world often devoid of parental representation will be one of the significant changes
to occur. Moreover, some variation in representation of race and class begins to show, with
occasional, though still marginalized treatment of homosexuality. The topicality of various
sexually transmitted diseases from VD to herpes to AIDS will similarly change the pedagogical
focus of sex education over time. As venereal disease statistics begin to point to very high rates
of infection for teens in the 1960s and 1970s, a series of VD scare films will also get produced
for classroom use. In other words, the model of benign, containable problems that characterize
the mental hygiene point of view in the postwar era, wither away during the 1960s, as the
counterculture movement more broadly, the civil rights, gay rights, women’s health and feminist
movements more specifically all begin to challenge the status quo, defying conformity and
expressing individual rights and freedoms. These sociocultural transformations will show up in
changing film and pedagogical practices, including the gradual demise of marriage and family
living curricula as a vehicle for sex education both on screen and off.
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Notes
1. Montaigne, O f The Education o f Children and Other Selected Essays (Chicago: Henry Regemy
Company, nd), 71.
2. Anthony Comstock, “The Work of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice, and its
Bearings on the Morals of the Young,” Pedagogical Seminary 16 (Sept 1909), 404.
3. August Aichhom, Wayward Youth, Forward by Sigmund Freud (New York: Viking Press, 1925,
reprinted 1963), v.
4. Agnes Repplier, “The Repeal of Reticence," The Atlantic Monthly (March 1914), 297.
5. The affiliation between these two progressive educators is widely known. Useful summation of
their work and ideas can be found in James Bowen, A History o f Western Education Volume 3
(London: Methuen, 1981).
6. Cited in Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping o f Adolescence in the 2ffh Century (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 58.
7. For more on the Chicago experiment see Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex, 50-55.
8. William F. Snow, “Social Hygiene and the White House Conference on Child Welfare and
Protection,” Journal o f Social Hygiene 27:1 (Jan 1931), 43.
9. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex, 124
10. Cited in Mary Louise Adams, The Trouble With Normal: Postwar Youth and the Making o f
Heterosexuality (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), 54.
11. Cited in John D ’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in
America (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 342.
12. William F. Snow, “Social Hygiene and the White House Conference on Child Health and
Protection,” 45.
13. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex, 1
14. Ibid., 2
15. Ibid., 15
16. Cited in Moran, Teaching Sex, 15
17. William James, The Principles o f Psychology Volume I (New York: Dover Publications,
1890/1950), 22-23.
18. Ibid., 15
19. Theresa Richardson points out that German universities reached the peak of their influence and
productivity by around 1870 and had become a mecca for American and Canadian scholars seeking to
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225
do advanced work before such programs were available in North America. See The Century o f the
Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada (New York:
State University of New York, 1989), 19-20.
20. Although William James previously established a “psycho-physics” laboratory at Harvard, Hall’s
is considered to be the first true clinical one. See Theresa R. Richardson for more detail on this point.
The Century o f the Child, 24.
21. Elizabeth Hurlock, Adolescent Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955), 359.
22. G. Stanley Hall, Life and Confessions o f a Psychologist (New York: D. Appleton Co., 1923), 360.
Cited in Lawrence Cremin, The Transformation o f the School (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1968), 101.
23. For an extended discussion of this view see G. Stanley Hall, “Evolution and the Feelings and
Instincts Characteristic of Normal Adolescence,” Chapter 10 in Adolescence, Volume II (New York:
Appleton, 1915), 40-94.
24. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Volume I, xiii
25. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Volume I, ix
26. Cremin, The Transformation o f the School (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 102.
27. G. Stanley Hall, Pedagogical Seminary 1 (1891), 123. Cited in Cremin, 102.
28. Ellen Keys, Century of the Child (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1909); Peter B. Neubauer,
“The Century of the Child,” Psychiatry in American Life ed. Charles Rolo (Freeport, N. Y .: Book for
Libraries Press, 1971), 133-141; and Theresa Richardson, The Century o f the Child: The Mental
Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada.
29. T.J. Jackson Lears, No Place o f Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation o f American
Culture 1880-1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 250.
30. John Dewey and Evelyn Dewey, Schools o f To-Morrow (New York: Dutton, 1915, revised 1962),
xxwii.
31. John Dewey, The School and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1900, revised 1915),
8
32. Thomas Perceival Beyer, The Dial, LXI (1916), 103. Cited in Cremin, 120.
33. Walter Lippman, The New Republic VII (July 1, 1916), 231.
34. John Dewey, D em o cra cy a n d E ducation (New York, MacMillan Company, 1916), 387.
35. Hans Pols, “The World as Laboratory: Strategies of Field Research Developed by Mental Hygiene
Psychologists in Toronto, 1920-1940,” The Development o f the Social Sciences in the United States
and Canada: The Role o f Philanthropy, eds. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher (Stamford, Conn.:
Ablex Publishing, 1999), 118
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226
36. For a detailed analysis and discussion of Rockefeller donations and their effect on the
development of the social sciences at various institutions including the University of Chicago, see
Edward T. Silva, “Critical and Conventional Images of the Rockefeller Philanthropies in the
Sociological Literature,” The Development o f the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada:
The Role o f Philanthropy, eds. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher (Stamford, Connecticut: Ablex
Publishing, 1999), 23-36.
37. Pols, “The World as Laboratory,” 118
38. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher, “Introduction: The Social Sciences and Their
Philanthropic Mentors,” The Development o f the Social Sciences in the United States and Canada:
The Role o f Philanthropy, eds. Theresa Richardson and Donald Fisher. (Stamford, Connecticut:
Ablex Publishing, 1999), 4.
39. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth o f the Prison, (New York: Vintage, 1979),
305.
40. Ibid., 305
41. John Dewey, Democracy and Education, 391
42. John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York, Collier Books, 1938), 22.
43. Theresa Richardson, The Century o f the Child, 3.
44. Harry G. Good and James D. Teller, A History o f Western Education, Third Edition (London:
MacMillan Company, 1969), 514.
45. Harry G. Good and James D. Teller,^ History o f Western Education, 515
46. Sol Cohen points out that prominent hygienists began to publish in Progressive Education as
early as 1926. By 1950, the NCMH was compelled to join forces with the National Mental Health
Foundation and the Psychiatric Foundation to form the National Association for Mental Health. As
Cohen puts it: “The NSMH passed quietly from the scene. But the mental hygiene movement no
longer needed the NCMH.” The mental hygiene point of view was thus and ubiquitous and
“complete.” See “The Mental Hygiene Movement,” 137.
47. For more on this history see Sol Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement, The Development of
Personality and the School: The Medicalization of American Education,” History o f Educational
Quarterly 23:2 (Summer 1983): 123-149.
48. Hans Pols, “The World as Laboratory,” 120
49. Adolf Meyer, The Com m on Sense P sych iatry o f A d o lf M e y e r (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948)
50. While considerable attention have been devoted to Freud’s impact and the impact of
psychoanalysis of North American culture and life, until recently, comparatively little has been written
about its impact on education. To be sure, psychoanalysis has filtered into education in oblique ways
and often in a watered-down form from the beginning of the century, especially through mental
hygiene discourse. Nevertheless, that psychoanalytic terminology has tended to be avoided by
educational theorists hardly means that its impact is not significant. Adolf Meyer, W.A. White, J.J.
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Putnum and Smith Ely Jelifee were all prominent mental hygienists and psychiatric progressives who
were heavily influenced by Freudian ideas, even if, as Sol Cohen remarks, they were notorious for
“sloughing off its darker side, and taking from Freud what suited their own more optimistic,
environmentalist, reformist sentiments.” For more on this see Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene
Movement,” 34. More extensive discussion of the links between pedagogy and psychoanalysis will be
developed in Chapter 4.
51. Pols, “The World as Laboratory,” 120
52. Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement,” 128
53. It’s worth pointing out that a significant number of patients housed in asylums as they were
developed in the U.S. and Canada over the course of the nineteenth century were alcoholics and/or
suffering the debilitating effects of advanced syphilis.
54. The Commonwealth Fund was established by the wife of Stephen Harkeness in 1918. Harkeness
was an early partner in Standard Oil with John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
55. Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement,” 128-129
56. Ibid., 129
57. Theresa Richardson, The Century o f the Child, 2
58. William A. White, “Childhood: The Golden Period for Mental Hygiene,” Mental Hygiene 4:2
(April 1920), 259.
59. The hereditarian approach to mental hygiene certainly exists among many American Mental
Hygiene Association members. See, for example, William A. White, “Childhood: The Golden Period
for Mental Hygiene,” 260-261.
60. Theresa Richardson argues that child immigration superceded the problem of unsupervised or
delinquent children as a concern for Canadian hygienists and others. With the population of Canada
jumping from approximately five million in 1891 to nine million in 1921, and with 73,000 children
sent to Canada between 1869 and 1919 from the U.K. under the auspices of charitable organizations, a
major concern of “nation building” became the immigration of “quality” citizens. See The Century o f
the Child: The Mental Hygiene Movement and Social Policy in the United States and Canada, 13-14.
61. Neil Sutherland, Children in English-Canadian Society: Framing the Twentieth Century
Consensus (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2000), 73.
62. Sutherland, 75
63. Fred Matthews, “In Defense of Common Sense: Mental Hygiene as Ideology and Mentality in
Twentieth-Century America,” Prospects 4 (1974), 460.
64. Cohen, “The Mental Hygiene Movement,” 124
65. Pols, “The World as Laboratory,” 122
66. Ibid., 137
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67. Ibid., 137
68. Ibid., 137
69. Smith devotes a short chapter to the history of Coronet, begun in 1938 by an entrepreneur named
David Smart. As the story goes, Smart either traveled to Germany in the mid-1930s or read about
someone else’s travels and was struck by their use of film as a mass “educational” tool. Setting up a
million dollar studio modeled on the Warner Bros studio in Hollywood, in a wealthy suburb of
Chicago, the studio eventually became the largest privately owned motion picture production facility
east of Hollywood. Though very little film production took place there during the war, by the end of
the 1940s in a postwar boom, and in accordance with a bold pronouncement by Smart, Coronet
released a new film every 4.2 working days. Ken Smith, Mental Hygiene: Classroom Films, 1945-
1970 (New York: Blast Books, 1999), 89-98, 203.
70. Kevin Smith, Mental Hygiene, 203
71. William A. White, “Childhood: The Golden Period of Mental Hygiene,” 262.
72. Barbara Erdman, “The Closely Guided Viewer: Form, Style, and Teaching in the Educational
Film,” The Ideology o f Images in Educational Media: Hidden Curriculums in the Classroom. Eds.
Elizabeth Ellesworth and Mariamne H. Whatley (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 32.
73. Ibid., 42
74. Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); The
Voice in the Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
75. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 299.
76. Cited in Brian Low, NFB Kids: Portrayals o f Children by the National Film Board o f Canada,
1939-1989 (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2002), 144.
77. Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg, Infant and Child in the Culture o f Today: The Guidance o f
Development in Home and Nursery School (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1943).
78. Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg, The Childfrom Five to Ten: From the Former Clinic o f Child
Development School o f Medicine at Yale University (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1946).
79. The huge success of the series, which won a number of international awards and was shown
widely in the U.S. and Canada, led McGraw-Hill to hire Crawley Films to do several more in the
series as well as other films in support of various text books published by the company. In total,
McGraw-Hill in New York commissioned 44 films and the Chicago-based International Film Bureau
commissioned 25 to be made by the company over a period of fifteen years immediately following
WWII. Crawley Films, co-founded by F.R. (Budge) Crawley and his wife Judy just before the War, is
probably a Canadian equivalent to Coronet Films insofar as no other company in Canada produced
this volume of guidance, sex education and industrial films (as well as more traditional
documentaries). For more on this and on Judy Crawley’s part in the series, see Barbara Wade Rose,
Budge: What Happened to Canada's King o f Film (Toronto: ECW Press, 1998).
80. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex, 135
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81. Ibid., 135
82. For a brief history of the Marriage Education Movement see Beth Bailey, From Front Porch to
Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1988), 119-140.
83. Ibid., 125
84. Ibid., 127
85. Ibid., 22
86. Ibid., 117
87. For a history of the Canadian movement which uses Toronto as its case study, see Mary Louis
Adams, The Trouble With Normal, 107-135.
88. Five films were produced in conjunction with Hurlock’s text book. Beyond Social Sex Attitudes,
the films I will be discussing, are Age o f Turmoil (1952), The Meaning o f Adolescence (1953),
Meeting the Needs o f Adolescence (1953), Physical Aspects o f Puberty (1953) and Social
Acceptability (1948). Although it is beyond the scope of the argument I have set for myself here,
research into the relation between print and visual “texts” such as these would be a fascinating project
to pursue. Another McGraw-Hill text, Your Marriage and Family Living by Paul Landis, is correlated
with three Crawley produced films: Is This Love?, How Much Affection? and When Should I Marry?
(all from 1957). Another avenue not pursued here is the updating of films on particular topics. For
example, Churchill films has produced four editions of the films Girl to Women and Boy to Man
beginning in the 1960s with a new “edition” produced more recently in the early 1990s. Beyond
merely changing fashions to make the films less dated to contemporary viewers, it would be useful to
see how information has changed over time; how social conventions get depicted differently, whether
anatomical charts change, etc.
89. Margot Kennard, “Producing Sponsored Films on Menstruation: The Struggle Over Meaning,”
The Ideology o f Images in Educational Media: Hidden Curriculums in the Classroom (New York:
Teachers College Press, 1990), 67. This essay is an extract from Kennard’s doctoral dissertation on
the topic. See Kennard, The Corporation in the Classroom: The Struggles Over Meanings o f
Menstrual Education in Sponsored Films, 1947-1983. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University
of Wisconsin - Madison.
90. Joan Jacobs Brumberg, The Body Project: An Intimate History o f American Girls (New York:
Vintage Books, 1997), 30.
91. No author, “New Biology Film Helps Girls,” Educational Screen 26:4 (April 1947), 215.
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Chapter 4: Challenging the Domestication of Sexual Consciousness:
Rebellious Youth, Misbehaving Women and Critical Pedagogy
The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.
Pierre Eliot Trudeau, 19671
Now that women, the only real experts on female sexuality, are beginning to talk
together and share notes, they are discovering their experiences are remarkably similar
and that they are not freaks. In the process of exposing the myths and lies, women are
discovering that it is not they who have individual sex problems: it is society that has
one great big political problem.
Alix Shulman, 19712
I think what happened in the sixties and early seventies is something to be preserved.
One of the things that I think should be preserved...is the fact that there has been
political innovation, political creation, and political experimentation outside the great
political parties, and outside the normal or ordinary program. It’s a fact that people’s
everyday lives have changed from the sixties to now, and certainly within my own life.
And surely this is not due to political parties but is the result of many movements.
Michael Foucault, 19823
Until the 1960s, the points of tension in sexual liberalism had proven manageable.
Contraception had not led to promiscuity; white youth did not seem to be abusing their
freedom; the public display of sexuality mostly remained within reasonable bounds; the
domesticity of postwar American affirmed the importance of marriage; deviants
received punishment. But the 1960s was a decade of tremendous political and social
upheaval. In a variety of ways, standards of appropriate behavior and middle-class
cultural values came under attack. As one might expect, sexuality would not remain
immune to this process.
John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, 19884
The development of Marriage and Family Life Education, as I argue in Chapter 3, was part of a
postwar strategy for advocating mental and social health as it came to be scrutinized by the
rising powers of various helping professions from the 1920s onward, most notably psychiatry,
psychology and social work. I suggest that this period favored discussion of the mind — the
mental/emotional and social hygiene of sex education rather than a strict biological, urogenital
perspective. The mentality of this work, moreover, is continually framed within the contours of
the family as the crucial site for coming-of-age as well as the ultimate destination to which
youth should aspire for the reproduction of society at large. The privileged status accorded to
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231
the family during this period is no doubt powerfully implicated in the postwar return to
normalcy and in the ways in which procreation took on almost mythic proportions during the
Cold War era. The tenor of this “pronatalist” perspective is epitomized by the words of Louisa
Randall Church who proposed in 1946:
...when the first atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima, new concepts of civilized living, based
on the obligations of world citizenship.... were bom. Out of the smoke and smoldering
ruins arose a great cry for leadership equipped to guide the stricken people of the world
along the hazardous course toward peace. On that day parenthood took on added
responsibilities of deep and profound significance.... Surely in all history, the parents of
the world were never so challenged!...Upon the shoulders of parents, everywhere, rests
the tremendous responsibility of sending forth into the next generation men and women
imbued with a high resolve to work together for everlasting peace...The new philosophy
of child guidance makes of parenthood not a dull, monotonous routine job, but an
absorbing, creative profession - a career second to none.5
Church expresses here a view that was very popular during the era; one which views
domesticity less as a retreat from the public sphere and more as an expression of responsible
citizenship. In the chaos and devastation of World War II, childrearing came to be viewed as
one possible way of exerting influence, of making a difference, and of helping to shape a new
future.
The “baby boom” actually began in both Canada and the United States during WWII
rather than following it, as is popularly believed. For example in Canada, an unprecedented
record 255,317 births were recorded in 1941 (following a gradual decline over most of the
century, particularly during the Depression) in a fertility surge described as “‘now-or-never’
births fathered by men leaving for the army.”6 From a birth rate low of 20.3 per one thousand
in 1936, the national average slowly began to grow to a peak of 28.3 by 1959, after which
fertility across the country began to decline significantly.7 Similarly from 1940 to 1945,
birthrates in the United States climbed from 19.4 to 24.5 per one thousand, reflecting a
dramatic reversal of declining fertility rates during most of the century (again, excepting the
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Depression).8 The marriage age dropped and marriage rate increased dramatically around this
time, inspired in part by the prospect of men departing for overseas combat as well as the
possibility of draft deferments for married men. This demographic explosion in North
American families represented a temporary disruption of long-term trends which had really
begun in the mid-nineteenth century, and lasted only until the “baby boom” children came of
age.9 While baby boom parents grew up during the Depression and the war, beginning their
families during years of prosperity, their children grew up amid the relative affluence of the
Cold War and the rigid codes of conformity that it encouraged. Reaching adulthood during the
1960s and 1970s and rejecting the Cold War’s politics and assumptions, this demographic led
to the creation of a counterculture and a new women’s liberation movement and played a
significant role in the civil rights movement of the period. Thus the generation that gave birth
to the biggest boom in birthrate during the century produced the generation which ultimately
“brought the twentieth century birthrate to an all-time low and the divorce rate to an
unprecedented high.”1 0
While many observers often point to the 1950s as the last flourescence of time-honored
family life and values before the sixties generation made a major break from the past, Elaine
Tyler May argues that such a view is shortsighted. In her book, Homeward Bound: American
Families in the Cold War Era, May argues:
In many ways, the youths of the sixties resembled their grandparents, who came of age
in the first decades of the twentieth century. Like many of their baby-boom
grandchildren, the grandparents had challenged the sexual norms o f their day, pushed
the divorce rate up and the birthrate down, and created a unique youth culture,
complete with music, dancing, movies, and other forms of urban amusements. They
also behaved in similar ways politically, developing a powerful feminist movement,
strong grass-roots activism on behalf of social justice, and a proliferation of radical
movements to challenge the status quo. It is the generation in between - with its strong
domestic ideology, pervasive consensus politics, and peculiar demographic behavior -
that stands out as different.”
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May’s position is bolstered in many ways by a consideration of sex education films. For
example, the 1910s saw the development of films dealing with such controversial topics as birth
control and abortion which would not reappear on screens until well into the 1960s. Moreover,
these topics were often engaged by women - Lois Weber being an excellent case in point -
whose entrepreneurial status in the early industry would decline sharply thereafter. When birth
control and abortion reemerge as film subjects, it is once again largely women - especially
those committed to the women’s self-health movement - who would most prominently tackle
these controversial issues.
In this chapter, I want to examine the transformations in sex education that begin to
take place from the 1960s onward. One of the key factors affecting this transformation, I will
argue, is the influence of the women’s movement and the films which were independently
produced under its banner particularly during the 1970s. By reexamining a body of work that
has been the subject of considerable analysis over the years, perhaps most famously beginning
with Julia Lesage’s frequently anthologized, often-quoted essay entitled “The Political
Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film,”121 hope to offer these feminist documentaries as
an example of a shift in pedagogical strategies away from the closely guided spectator of so
much of the expository sex education material from the 1940s and 1950s to strategies engaging
a complex range of film practices which propose a critical pedagogy. This approach, as I will
show, challenges and interrogates the systems of knowledge through which we had previously
come to imagine ourselves and our sexuality. Counter to the mental hygiene agenda with its
psychologizing and ranking of behavior proffered through an ostensibly objective, clinical gaze
(a pedagogy of the mind, as it were), these feminist films are in many ways more overtly
subjective and didactic in their opposition to the medical establishment and the “science” of
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female sexuality, offering a new pedagogy of the body in their shift away from the scientific
gaze. These films propose a corporeal pedagogy which interrogates the social constructedness
of both biological/sexual and social norms through a politics of enfleshment. Via film’s
political potential to function as an urgent public act, many of these films are clearly committed
less to artistry or formal innovation than to a pedagogical imperative, aiming to “enter the
16mm film circuit of educational films especially through libraries, schools, churches, unions
and YWCAs to bring feminist analysis to many women it might otherwise never reach.”1 3 Thus
the political aesthetics of feminist documentary film, are politically, aesthetically and
generically linked to the movement from which they sprang. Importantly, the “deep structure”
that Lesage reads in these films -- including Self Health, Healthcaring, Rape, and Taking Our
Bodies Back — is the consciousness-raising group as a modified use of/shift in the aesthetics
and tactics of cinema verite. I will take up the issue of the consciousness-raising group and its
centrality to a model of critical pedagogy in greater detail later in this chapter. Before doing so,
I want to examine some of the teen sex ed material of the 1960s and 1970s which is illustrative
of so many of the significant formal and thematic shifts taking place in sex education at this
time.
The Decline of Marriage and Family Living and the Mental Hygiene Point of View
In 1964, both Newsweek and Time magazines devoted cover stories to the sexual and moral
revolutions that were taking place on American college campuses.1 4 In the Newsweek article,
for example, the writer poses the basis for the morals debate in the context of sexual practices:
“Undoubtedly, the key to the new morality is the widespread belief that a boy and girl who have
established what the campus calls a ‘meaningful relationship’ have the moral right to sleep
together.”1 5 Certainly these transformations were part of a more widespread “revolution” which
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235
appeared to be taking place in the public visibility of sexual matters. For example, a series of
U.S. Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and 1960s (including several famous cases
involving feature films) had removed some of the legal strictures on the dissemination of
sexually explicitly material. Formerly taboo topics such as masturbation, homosexuality,
contraception and abortion also entered into public discussion to an unprecedented degree. In
sex ed films, for example, the clitoris gradually begins to appear on anatomical charts of the
female body as the 1961 film Girl to Woman (Churchill Films) illustrates. Even female
masturbation is mentioned in some films, for example Then One Year (1972, Churchill Films)
which deals with the ups and downs of coming-of-age for both sexes.
The example of contraception is particularly indicative of the transformations
beginning to take place. As late as 1960 in the U.S., thirty states continued to have statutes
prohibiting or restricting the sale and advertisement of contraceptives. In 1965 a landmark U.S.
Supreme Court decision ruled Connecticut’s law unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated
a married couple’s right to privacy. This, in turn, led to the immediate legalization of
contraceptive sale in all fifty states. Despite the huge success of and interest in the pill, which
began to be marketed to the American public in 1960, the right to privacy in matters of birth
control was not fully extended to the unmarried population until 1972, when the Supreme Court
overthrew a Massachusetts law prohibiting the sale of contraceptives to unmarried people.1 6 In
Canada, it was only in 1969 that the Canadian Criminal Code was amended so that the
provision of contra-ceptives ceased to be illegal. This amendment was of an 1892 (Subsection
179c) Criminal Code mandate not unlike the Comstock Law of 1873 which made it an
indictable offence to “offer to sell, advertise, publish an advertisement of or have for sale or
disposal any medicine, drug or article intended or represented as a means of preventing
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conception or causing abortion.”1 7 It was in his 1967 proposal of an omnibus bill to overhaul
these antiquated statutes Canada’s young Justice Minister and future Prime Minister, Pierre
Trudeau, made one of his most famous statements cited in the epigraph of this chapter.
In a book about birth control in Canada whose title, The Bedroom and the State,
echoes Trudeau’s famous remark, Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren argue that,
although these legal reforms seemed daring at the time, many Canadians were probably
unaware of the illegality of contraception during the 1950s and 1960s. Moreover, they contend
that there is reason to wonder whether these legal reforms actually made much difference since
Canada’s birth rate had been falling for most of the twentieth century - even in advance of a
birth control movement. As they and others have argued, the amendments of 1969 stand as
classic examples of changes in the law languishing behind changes in sexual behavior.1 8 The
unstable and turbulent atmosphere of the 1960s, particularly vis a vis their challenge to
traditional codes of morality, prompted many adults to call for the schools in both nations to
formulate a response. This, in turn, led to a revelation that sex education by the early 1960s
was virtually moribund. As Jeffrey Moran puts it:
In particular ASHA, the traditional leader in sex education (now called the American
Social Health Association), had been muffling its support for sex education under the
vague heading of family life education, which might or might not include education
about the sexual side of life. By 1962 ASHA’s commitment to “local preference” on
curriculum content had come so close to outright silence about sex and venereal disease
that public health officials at a series of gatherings on the West Coast felt compelled to
push Edgar C. Cumings, ASHA’s regional director, to declare whether the organization
was, finally, in favor of sex and venereal disease education. Cumings protested that
ASHA still supported teaching these subjects, but the point had been made. ASHA and
similar institutions by the early 1960s seemed to have abandoned sex education.1 9
The American Social Health Association’s “retreat” from sex education in the 1950s is
integrally connected to the powerful influences of the mental hygiene point of view and the way
in which this permeated family life education models. Moreover, the invention and widespread
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use of penicillin, as mentioned, made the VD outreach/educational project seem less urgent than
it had during the Second World War, especially since there was a marked decline in incidence of
both syphilis and gonorrhea during the 1950s leading many educators to believe they could
either ignore or downplay the sexual component of FLE.2 0 In an article written for Marriage
and Family Living, the official journal for marriage educators and social scientists, Robert and
Frances Harper argue that while the ameliorative tactic of downplaying sexuality in FLE had
been a useful strategy in getting the curriculum into many school boards, by 1957 they suggest
that this tactic has led to the disappearance of sex ed in favor of courses on “effective living,”
“personal adjustment,” “good citizenship” and “hygiene.” As the title of the piece suggests,
“Are Educators Afraid of Sex?” Harper and Harper express concerns of such an erasure:
Family life education has become a relatively common commodity in schools and
colleges. But where, pray tell, are the clear and forthright voices on problems of sex?
The only lucid, steady, and cogent sounds we have heard on the matter have not, for the
most part, issued from family life educators. They have come from Kinsey and a few
medical and psychological clinicians, who have more often been attacked as misguided
“outsiders” than they have been supported by family life educators.2 1
Of course, as this curriculum became widespread, so too were elements of the sexual
revolution slowly beginning to coalesce, not only via the legal challenges and in the publication
of the Kinsey reports in 1948 and 1953 but also in the publication and widespread popularity of
Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine beginning in 1953 (with Marilyn Monroe as its inaugural
centerfold); in the significant challenges posed to Hollywood’s antiquated Production Code that
culminated in its abandonment in 1968 to be replaced by a ratings system administered by the
Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) which began a classification system based on
age appropriateness rather than content restrictions.2 2 The sensation caused by the publication
of Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place in 1956, as well as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (published
in the U.S. in 1956), alongside the American release of an unexpurgated edition of D.H.
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Lawrence’s Lady Chatterly ’ s Lover (also in 1956) were all part of the general climate which
reflected increasing public discussion of sexuality. Men who subscribed to the “playboy”
mentality found a welcome ally in Helen Gurley Brown, the woman who transformed
Cosmopolitan into a top-selling magazine and who initially won notoriety for her book Sex and
the Single Girl, first published in 1962 and thereafter a hugely successful best seller.2 3
Published just one year before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique which
documented the discontent of middle-class housewives and proposed a new “life plan for
women” which could include both motherhood and career, Sex and the Single Girl, by contrast,
argued that marriage was unnecessary. Promoting the joys of singles lifestyle, particularly for
young, urban working “girls,” Brown argued, “you may marry or you may not” stating: “In
today’s world that is no longer the big question for women. Those who glom onto men so that
they can collapse with relief, spend the rest of their days shining up their status symbol and
figure they never have to reach, stretch, learn, grow, face dragons or make a living again are the
ones to be pitied.”2 4 In some ways, Brown’s book was much more radical than Friedan’s -
much to the chagrin of many feminists. Yet as Barbara Ehrenreich, et al point out, Brown’s
book came out at a time when Ladies Home Journal “still found most of its young readers
looking ahead, not only to marriage but to the details of their future kitchen decor.” Moreover,
they argue, “Sex and the Single Girl was a best-seller at a time when ‘feminism’ did not even
exist in the American political vocabulary, and when most middle-class women could imagine
few options other than marriage and full-time motherhood.”2 5 In terms of sexual morality,
Brown’s position was also a radical departure from prevailing attitudes. Reacting to articles in
such popular magazines as Reader’ s Digest and Ladies Home Journal which advised women
either to say no to sex or get married, Brown provocatively proclaimed: “I don’t know about
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girls in Pleasantville and Philadelphia, where these magazines are published, but I do know that
in Los Angeles, where I live, there is something else a girl can say and frequently does when a
man ‘insists.’ And that is ‘yes.’....Nice girls do have affairs, and they do not necessarily die of
them!”2 6
Outside of popular culture and in the context of sex education more explicitly, two
figures will come to play a significant role around this time. Lester Kirkendall, who moved
from a position as elementary school principal in his hometown of Oberlin, Kansas in 1927 to a
professorship in Family Life Education at Oregon State University from 1949 to 1968, would
figure prominently in the transformation of sex education over this period. In particular,
Kirkendall came to dissent from the prevailing sex ed position focused on the prohibition of
premarital and extramarital intercourse and FLE’s rigid demands in this area. Although during
the 1950s he subscribed to FLE’s views by taking a psychological perspective on the sexual
exchange and condemning premarital and extramarital sex, by 1960, Kirkendall’s framework
began to move beyond this view. In an essay published in 1960 in Marriage and Family
Living, Kirkendall proposed the possibility that “ways may be found to use sex in premarital
relationships in a positive, meaningful way.”2 7 “Intercourse,” says Kirkendall, “neither
strengthens nor weakens the relationship. The attitudes of the couple toward each other and
their observance or rejection of good human relationship principles are the crucial factors.”2 8
While still privileging marital over nonmarital sexuality, Kirkendall challenges the common
assumption that guilt and regret are prevailing emotional reactions to premarital intercourse by
advocating a value system which emphasizes integrity and mutual respect in interpersonal
relations. Kirkendall writes:
Whenever thought and choice regarding behavior and conduct are possible, those acts
are morally good which create trust, and confidence, and a capacity among people to
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work together cooperatively. Such acts build integrity in relationships and an enhanced
sense of self-respect in the individual. Those acts are morally bad which build barriers
and separate people through creating suspicion, mistrust and misunderstanding. Such
acts destroy the individual’s sense of self-respect.
This means that acts in themselves are neither moral nor immoral - good and
bad. In thinking and choosing we focus attention on the quality of the relationships
between persons rather than on the goodness of specified behavior or acts in terms of
mores, taboos, commandments or abstract logic.2 9
This position of moral relativism and mutual respect will be one explored in the
mandate of SIECUS, the Sex (later Sexuality) Information and Educational Council of the
United States which was launched by Dr. Mary Steichen Calderone in 1963. Along with
Kirkendall, charter members of SIECUS would come from an elite group of educators including
Wallace C. Fulton, a past president of the National Council on Family Relations; William
Genne, director of the Family Life Department at the National Council of Churches, and Clark
Vincent, chief of the Professional Training Division of the National Institute for Mental Health.
According to Jeffrey Moran, SIECUS was a bold name for an organization whose New York
office consisted solely of Calderone, a secretary and a typewriter, but its elite membership as
well as a start-up grant from the Commonwealth Fund “underscored the respectability of the
enterprise.”3 0 In their initial charter, the SIECUS mandate is described:
To establish man’s healthy sexuality as a health entity: to identify the special
characteristics that distinguish it from, yet relate it to, human reproduction; to dignify it
by openness of approach, study and scientific research designed to lead towards its
understanding and its freedom from exploitation; to give leadership to professionals and
to society, to the end that human beings may be aided towards responsible use of the
sexual faculty and towards assimilation of sex into their individual life patterns as a
creative and re-creative force.3 1
In Calderone’s view, we must move beyond our reticence in discussing sex and sexuality to
“block our habit of considering sex as a ‘problem’ to be ‘controlled.’” Rather, she maintained in
1963, “Emphasis must be on sex as a vital life force to be utilized.”3 2
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Mary Calderone was sixty years old when she founded SIECUS and stepped in to
become, as some called her, the “‘grandmother’ of the orphaned subject of sex ed.”3 3 As
medical director of Planned Parenthood of America since 1953, Calderone had had extensive
exposure to postwar transformations in American sexual life.3 4 Her work for Planned
Parenthood, largely through the tremendous volume of mail she siphoned every year, convinced
her of the profound and widespread ignorance about sexuality throughout America. According
to Moran, her attendance at a 1961 marriage and family conference sponsored by the National
Council of the Churches of Christ where she met with Kirkendall and a core of other
researchers and educators convinced Calderone that the time was right for a “breakthrough
effort” in the area of sex education.3 5 While SIECUS represented a more forthright and
nonjudgmental approach to sex and sexuality and reflected a liberal attitude toward sex and
adolescence characteristic of the 1960s, the organization shared with the ASHA and the earlier
generation of family life educators the goal of conserving the American nuclear family.
Alongside increasing numbers of social scientists and educators concerned with youth in the
1960s, SIECUS leaders and its supporters maintained that “the only way to preserve the family
and aid in personal development was to discard their predecessors’ timidity about sex and their
moralistic prescriptions.”3 6 To this end, SIECUS and its dispersed officers and directors pooled
their expertise as sociologists, educators, psychologists, clergymen, medical practitioners and
laypeople to create a quarterly newsletter devoted to a review of films, books and articles about
sex education in addition to tirelessly offering their expertise to various communities across the
United States, including school boards who wanted to create or update their sex education
curriculum.
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While SIECUS and its mandate represents a more liberal view of sexuality in many
ways, the popularity of SIECUS and of sex education in general in the 1960s was still cloaked
in the vestigial moralism of promoting sexual freedom within the confines of the marital
relationship. In Jeffrey Moran’s view, SIECUS would have accomplished very little had it not
been for the concomitant rise of nationwide panic about the sexual revolution: “Concern over
sexual changes provided the real energy for a proliferation of sex education programs; SIECUS
and related organizations tried to stimulate and channel this energy, but by and large they
merely followed popular demand for some kind of public response to the sexual revolution.”3 7
In a widely read article on the sexual revolution entitled “Sex Invades the Schoolhouse”
published in 1968 in the Saturday Evening Post, John Kobler argues that the sexual revolution
had given sex education its main impetus. As he puts it:
National statistics tell part of the story. Venereal diseases among teenagers: over
80,000 cases reported in 1966, an increase of almost 70 percent since 1956 - and
unreported cases doubtless dwarf that figure. Unwed teen-age mothers: about 90,000 a
year, an increase of 100 percent in two decades. One out of every three brides under 20
goes to the alter pregnant. Estimates of the number of illegal abortions performed on
adolescents run into hundred of thousands.3 8
Kobler goes on to cite the findings of a poll of 1 l*-graders at a New York City school which
cited the majority as thinking that there was nothing wrong with premarital intercourse.
Kobler’s inflammatory rhetoric resumes, “Newspaper reports of dropouts and runaways, of
drug-taking, sexual precocity and general delinquency intensify the worries of parents.” These
“evils,” in Kobler’s view, are merely the “grosser symptoms” of a widespread social upheaval
and decay: “Communication between generations has stalled (‘Don’t trust anyone over thirty’),
and moral values once accepted by children because Mom and Dad said so have given way to a
morality of the relative (‘What’s right or wrong? It all depends on the particular situation, on
the individual’).”3 9
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What Kobler is expressing disdain for here in his critique of moral relativism is
precisely the shift away from conformity so characteristic of postwar ideology to an identity-
based politics of relativism and individuality that would become so pervasive in this period,
especially in the various movements battling for civil rights, the revolt of youth and
consolidation of politicized youth subcultures, and the struggle for gender equality. This
generational divide shows up in several of the sex education films of the 1960s which are
notable for their relative absence of parental representation in contrast to the tightly knit nuclear
family of the FLE-inspired sex education films of the 1950s. In The Game (NFB, 1966), a film
mentioned at some length in the Kobler article, we are given a portrait of teen dating practices
which is markedly different from the closely guided spectator addressed in films such as Dating
Dos and Don ’ ts, Going Steady and Date Etiquette mentioned in Chapter 3. The Game is set
up as a more or less linear narrative filled with art cinema conventions such as jump cuts,
elliptical editing techniques, narrative fissures, stylish black and white cinematography and
oblique camera angles. The film focuses on a central protagonist, Peter, who bears an uncanny
resemblance in dress and manner to Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, a film to which The
Game’ s visual style is heavily indebted. On the macho provocations of six of his friends,
conveying typical aspects of peer pressure, Peter asks out a girl named Nicky, who is variously
described by the gang as a “challenge” and a “virgin.” The film begins with Peter displaying
his marksmanship as he hits a target with his BB gun and is admired for his skill by his friends.
As they “hang out” on this urban rooftop situated in downtown Montreal, two girls in bikinis
walk by and become the object of catcalls by all of the boys except Peter, who defends his
reticence by claiming that he’s too cool for such direct propositions. On a challenge by the
group, one of the boys approaches the two sunbathers and promptly returns saying: “Those two
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are worse than Nicky. They said we were kids!” Nicky, then, becomes the coveted “object”
posed to Peter as a possible next challenge to which he replies: “She’s a virgin. I’m fed up
doing favors.” His friends cluster around him and are depicted from a series of low angle close-
ups as they call him a “chicken” and challenge him to ask her out.
While Peter appears unmoved by their pressure, he is shown in the next scene (which
finds him artfully hidden from view, then emerging from a bath tub with sunglasses on) as he
reaches out to dial her number. Peter and Nicky eventually date, and are shown in a series of
clipped episodes as they wander through Montreal; try to get into a go-go club (but are refused
entrance for being underage); shut down an elevator in a busy office building to make out, and
end up in Nicky’s bedroom. Compared to the highly regimented dating practices depicted in
1950s films, The Game has a kind of unconstrained “realism” about it, showing power
struggles, mixed emotions, moodiness, insecurity, silences, confusion, and a kind of spontaneity
to conversation rather than the stilted scripting and even more stilted performances of so many
1950s films. During a beach party along the St. Lawrence River, Peter and Nicky leave the
gang (which includes a very hip garage band playing rock and roll in the sand) to go off in a
car. A series of pans along tree tops especially evokes the car scenes from Breathless as the
two end up on a remote country road and the band’s music (aptly, they are playing “Little By
Little”) fades into silence.
A series of images of the car from close up to remote and oblique long shots ending
back at the river suggests a passage o f time which connotes that the two have had intercourse in
the off-screen space. As the car reappears in the mise en scene, the two return to the empty
beach looking confused, perhaps regretful, and certainly withdrawn from one another. The
emotional effect of this scene is underscored by long take cinematography and silence. The two
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slowly walk toward the river at some distance from one another, a shot which plays out in “real
time” and is punctuated by the chiaroscuro effect of the black and white image. From a series
of discontinuous images which show their faces in close up, Nicky remarks to Peter: “You’re
quiet.” An abrupt juxtaposition follows this scene to one in which Peter and his friends play
basketball in a school gymnasium. It as a noisy, jarring counterpoint to the silence and stillness
of the previous scene, emphasized by sound, movement and handheld camera. When asked
about his “game” with Nicky, Peter reacts aggressively against one of his friends and breaks his
glasses. From here, a series of episodes shows Peter very deliberately avoiding Nicky, even
exiting their high school from a back entrance when he sees her waiting outside for him after
class. He plays hooky and is confronted by his mother in the film’s only scene which shows
parental figures. An elaborately staged sequence which frames Peter against a backdrop of
modem architecture and urban space ends with a final argument between Nicky and Peter in
which the only part of the dialogue we hear are her words as she says to him accusingly:
“That’s what my friends said you would do.”
After another rooftop exchange with his buddies who tease and provoke him for
information about his exploits with Nicky, Peter leaves the crowd in a state of frustration and
perhaps anger. His emotional state is punctuated by a series of images which show him
wandering aimlessly through the city streets, stopping to watch a construction worker drill into
concrete along a roadside in an image which is punctuated by the synchronous sound of the
blaring machine. The film ends abruptly and ambiguously just as Peter enters a phone booth
and calls Nicky. This open-endedness was certainly not lost on educators and was viewed as a
strength of the film. Nevertheless, as the authors of Sex Education on Film state: “The film
does not moralize openly, but it hints, in scenes dealing with the boy’s feelings of anxiety, that
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the wisdom of premarital sexual involvement is suspect.” The ending, they maintain, “leaves
the audience to hypothesize about the fate of the affair.”4 0 Instead of the didactic structure of
voice-over narration as the authorizing gaze and interpreter of events, films such as The Game
create a structure in which students/viewers are invited to draw their own conclusions from a
series of “loaded” facts. In other words, rather than lecturing students to delay intercourse until
marriage, a more popular tactic in the 1960s and 1970s would be to construct and present a
litany of “problems” that result from premarital sexual practices such as venereal disease and
cautionary tales about teen pregnancy and social censure. This type of film practice is allied to
the tradition of “trigger” filmmaking as a pedagogical strategy which is predicated on the ability
of films to elicit emotional responses and allies with the position of educational psychologists
and technologists who have attempted to correlate various types of learning with particular
media.
In an essay entitled “Open-Ended Films, Dead-End Discussions: An Ideological
Analysis of Trigger Films,” Mimi Omer challenges the position held by many educational
theorists who subscribe to the view that “trigger films” can be an appropriate means of
“knowledge transfer” as opposed to “skill attainment.” For these researchers, learning is
generally divided into three separate domains, according to Omer, the psychomotor, the
cognitive, and the attitudinal or affective domain. It is affective leaning that theorists hope is
translatable into filmic technique.4 1 As one historian of the trigger films argues:
Often the objectives of affective learning are achieved through personal interaction with
one’s self and/or others. Many times such an instructional objective.. .will be to expand
the learners’ awareness by helping them to attain competency in recognizing and
successfully coping with situations they are likely to encounter relative to their own
feelings and with sensitivity to the feelings and viewpoints of others. The attainment of
such a goal may be accomplished by a variety of methods such as on-site observations,
discussions, role playing, and so forth; but, whatever the method, information must be
introduced as the stimulus for the learners. This information might: provide specific
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perceptions, generate a particular mental state, dictate an emotional set, present a
socially charged atmosphere, or offer a distinctive mood to any individual learner...A
trigger film is just such an external stimulus resource, designed to set-the-stage to
generate and elicit responses to the situation and information.4 2
While advocates of trigger films assume certain behaviorist mechanisms of cause-effect will
help to “trigger” and “stimulate” discussion among viewers/students, one of the many criticisms
lodged against this view is that its proponents assume that classrooms are unproblematic sites
for the discussion of controversial subjects. In addition to this, Omer points out that students
tend to be regarded as an undifferentiated mass and as individuals simultaneously which only
leads to confusions over elisions made between and among students based on ethnicity, gender,
race, sexuality, class and so on. Moreover, while the stimulation of discussion is the goal of
such films, students are framed as lacking competency and in need of expanded awareness
whereas teachers and other educational professionals remain positioned “as people who have
dealt conclusively and successfully with their own implication and involvement in controversial
topics under discussion.” In other words, “Teachers and other educators involved in affective
learning are assumed to practice the ‘correct responses’ and ‘proper behaviors’ the films are
encouraged to trigger.”4 3
While trigger films are by definition designed and calculated to evoke viewer response,
Omer points out how they are carefully constructed to elicit a particular type of audience
response/involvement related both to the text/context problematic as well as to the issue of
hidden curriculum.4 4 In other words, while trigger films quite literally require a form of active
participation by audiences in order to “finish” the text, the terms and direction of that
“finishing” are severely constrained. The meaning produced in the encounter of text and subject
cannot be assumed either on the basis of its discursive strategies or its textual characteristics.
While a film like The Game certainly invites a greater potential for ambiguity than, say, the
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“open” invitation to discussion of Bob and Mary in the end of Social-Sex Attitudes in
Adolescence, the terms/constraints of the debate - teen sexuality as problem is still the
underlying (and old) message dressed up in art house devices here. The act itself, sex itself is
only suggested for obvious reasons. But this allows for the assumption that whatever pleasures
were derived from the act are not worth the consequences. Would their regret be so great had
the film chosen to address certain precautions taken by the teens such as contraception, for
example? This is not an option for a film designed to “trigger” a specific view of premarital sex
as contrary to the safe, “normal” and appropriate view of heterosexual conjugality.
Nevertheless, the newer form would become a popular technique in many sex ed films of the
period as they begin to move away from the didactic expository construction of adult voice-of-
god narration to filmic strategies which appear to promote ambiguity and moral relativism and
a vision of youth culture as considerably more independent and autonomous than the one
presented in earlier films.
Another film by George Kacsender, director of The Game, makes this argument of a
hidden curriculum at the core of a seemingly ambiguous representation even more pointed.4 5
Phoebe: The Story o f a Premarital Pregnancy (1964, NFB) chronicles a day in the life of
Phoebe as she sleeps late, is reprimanded by her mother for doing so, hitchhikes to a lake with
her boyfriend and contemplates her predicament. Like The Game, Phoebe borrows heavily
from art cinema conventions with an episodic narrative interspersed with various flashbacks
and fantasy scenarios which show, for example, the supportive reaction of her parents to the
news of her pregnancy; her father’s angry and acrimonious reaction to it; her boyfriend Paul
responding with delight in one fantasy and running away from her in another. She envisions
two very different discussions with a school counselor who advises her on the one hand to enjoy
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the pregnancy and return to school when the baby is delivered, and on the other, admonishes her
for her poor judgement, banishing her from school “for the sake of the other girls,” and advising
that she will only be able to resume her education at a different school where no one will know
of her sordid past. These imaginings cover a broad spectrum of possibilities with no outcome
ultimately provided. After their day at the beach during which Pheobe argues and then
reconciles with Paul, she returns home having revealed nothing of her predicament, though we
as viewers are shown a great deal, not least of which is the flashback to an abandoned house
that they revisit on this day which is the same place where Phoebe and Paul have had sex
(though this is never shown). The implication is that one sexual encounter — one dangerous
transgression — has led to her pregnancy, a melodramatic convention recognizable in the
longstanding tradition of “fallen women” films from early cinema to perhaps its apex in the
1930s.
Phoebe: The Story o f a Premarital Pregnancy even brings up the issue of abortion as
one of Phoebe’s flashbacks shows her asking a friend about her experience with the procedure.
This, however, is offered and summarily dismissed as an option for the young woman (it was
still illegal in Canada in 1964). The film ends with Phoebe calling Paul on the phone at the end
of the day, telling him she’s pregnant, immediately hanging up, and bursting into tears. A long
take on her tortured face partially veiled by a sheer curtain sets the film up as a provocative
trigger to discussion. Indeed, Phoebe was hugely successful, second only to Universe (1960) a
classroom film about astronomy, as the NFB’s most widely sold film in both Canada and
abroad.4 6 The perception of the film’s quality and effectiveness is illustrated in the comments of
one critic who writes: “The realistic presentation of her [Phoebe’s] situation makes it
unnecessary to preach the virtues of sexual caution to teens. Schools and community groups in
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Canada and abroad found Phoebe an excellent vehicle to deal with the dawning of the sexual
revolution.”4 7 In other words, the film’s ostensible ambiguity is hardly unambiguous. That it
would achieve such widespread acclaim and use says a great deal about both the similarities
and differences in sex education at the dawn of the sexual “revolution.” In other words, while
veiled in a strategy which differs markedly from the closely guided spectator of 1950s films, the
ultimate destination is more or less the same. A pedagogy of fear remains at the heart of this
message, although dressed up in rhetorical strategies which would appear to complicate the
message, extending beyond mere preaching to suggest a more ambiguous range of meaning.
To be sure, that teen pregnancy and intercourse are even topics for discussion in the
classroom film is a sign of “progress”or expansion in topics directed to teens inasmuch as such
topics engage the fact of teenage sexual activity, however qualified or compromised that
engagement may be. This shift toward ostensible “moral neutrality” vis a vis pedagogical
strategies which appear to offer young people a forum for expressing their own ideas and
opinions (and therefore to make their own moral decisions) would not develop without critics.
SIECUS, for example, would frequently have to defend itself against accusations from
colleagues in the National Council on Family Relations for improperly “pulling sex out of
context.”4 8 While the vast majority of the white middle-class educators still generally adhered
to the avoidance of premarital sex, including Mary Calderone and Lester Kirkendall who would
be so roundly attacked by these conservative groups, many came to embrace a “sexual ethos”
which separated pleasure from reproduction and reflected the changing function o f the family
beyond its older, strictly economic model. The development of the pill and the various legal
decisions affecting married and unmarried couples’ right to contraception are evidence of the
changing view of sex and sexuality to one expressed in romantic terms, as an important,
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intimate form of marital communication or as “one of the bonds of personal fulfillment for
which marriage existed.” As Jeffrey Moran surmises, “To traditionalists, this approach
reduced marriage to a contractual experiment in self-actualization, and degraded both the
spouses and the institution. But these new marital and sexual ideals became important in the
new sex education.”4 9
As sex educators defended the need to balance the public commercialization of sex with
more tempered classroom tactics, we see a continuation of a long line of defense of sex
education as a responsibility of the state. From the birth of the progressive era came efforts to
bring sexuality under public control including state licensing for marriage certificates
(instigated in part as a strategy for venereal disease control), increased policing/regulation of
prostitution and sexual delinquency, as well as the move to secularized divorce mandates in
both Canada and the U.S. Compared to these more coercive legal tactics (or, in Althusserian
terms, Repressive State Apparatuses) sex education in the classroom would appear to be a
“soft,” indirect or perhaps unconscious expression of state power (or an Ideological State
Apparatus). Even when family life educators avoided explicitly sexual topics they nevertheless
expanded the principle of public intervention. As Moran argues: “Through family life
education, many educators, psychologists, and family sociologists staked a claim for the public
schools to wield authority over a still wider range of personal behaviors - dating, leisure
activities, mental adjustment, consumption, marriage and childrearing, to name only a few.5 0
To be sure, the state had developed and maintained apparatuses which had staged considerable
business in the bedrooms of the state. Where inducement to discussion staged in these more
ambiguous films is designed to “trigger” discussion beyond the films themselves in a less direct
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or coercive manner, many of the VD films produced in this period rely on older didactic
devices, particularly the staging or dramatizing of confession.
Venereal Disease as a Topic for Teens
Ironically, despite all of Calderone’s efforts to position sex education through a
positive, progressive pedagogical approach to the whole person, SIECUS would benefit most
from the concerned reactions on the part of adults to the sexual revolution and the changing
codes of conduct that it represented. Calderone would maintain a high profile in the public
debate about sex education, appearing in such films and televison broadcasts as Sex in Today’ s
World, a 1966 film produced by Irving Gitlen for NBC-TV and distributed by Focus
Education, as well as Man Alive (original broadcast, November 19, 1967), a CBC program.
Sex in Today’ s World was distributed in two versions, a fifty-two minute version (the original
broadcast) and a twenty-eight minute version for classroom use. By citing statistics on the
rising incidence of teenage pregnancy, high rates of divorce for young couples and the
escalating rates of venereal disease among teens throughout the 1960s, Calderone and others
reapplied the old (unproven) adage that sex education could work as “preventative medicine.”
Where very few films on the topic of venereal disease were made in the 1950s, a veritable flood
of material began to reappear in the 1960s and 1970s in response to statistics indicating its high
rate among teens and young adults and the fears (one could say moral panic) that this generated
among parents and concerned citizens. A small sample of such titles include Dance, Little
Children (1961, Calvin Productions for Kansas State Board of Health), This Monster VD
(1964 Moreland-Latchford), VD See Your Doctor (1966, Moreland-Latchford), VD - Name
your Contacts (1968, Moreland-Latchford), VD. - Every 30 Seconds (1971, Alfred Higgins
Productions), VD Questions (1972, Herbert Bernard), How to Keep From Catching VD (1973,
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Jarvis Couillard Associates, and The Hidden Epidemic (1973, Encyclopedia Britannica Films).
Churchill Films, a Los Angeles-based educational film production company would reissue their
VD title three times over a twenty year period beginning with A Quarter-Million Teenagers
(1964), A H alf Million Teenagers (1969) and ending with A Million Teenagers in 1985, the
very titles of which suggest an alarming, often inflated rise in rates of infection, especially
among the young.
Many of these films resemble earlier VD films through their use of expository
narration, anatomical diagrams, microscopy, photographic evidence of symptoms and dramatic
“case study” characterization. For example, A Quarter-Million Teenagers relies exclusively on
voice-of-god narration until the final minutes of the film. It begins with a series of images of a
football game with views of the cheering crowd. As a series of images of different crowd
scenes are displayed, the voice-over asks: “How many people in this picture would you guess?
Six, eight thousand? How many in this whole stadium?” Our narrator then provides the
answer: one hundred thousand fans are in the stadium, a number equivalent, we are told, to the
number of people “in our country” who had contracted syphilis in the past year. The number of
people who had contracted gonorrhea is even greater, ten times this number which is visualized
by the animated replication of ten stadium images. Of this number, one quarter are teens the
male voice tells us as the film’s title is displayed. A Quarter-Million Teenagers then goes on to
propose that we stop being “so secretive” about VD as an image of a door opens up into a dark,
empty space. General discussion o f bacteria, then specific discussion o f syphilis and gonorrhea
are punctuated with images of toilet seats, murky ponds, hands being washed and reaching for
doorknobs as the narrator explains and clarifies myths surrounding routes of transmission.
This is illustrated with two separate diagrams peopled with a range of bodies which get
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superimposed across one another. Transmission of disease is visualized by white asterisk-like
scribblings which cover the genital area of certain bodies to suggest their contamination. One
of the interesting things about the diagrams used here is that they are nonspecific or vague in
terms of racial marking. The background of the sketches is predominantly blue and the figures
are rendered with black outlines in a series of poses which suggest little more than youthfulness
and gender difference.
Indeed no character becomes a case study or guide through this film, which goes on to
follow the progress of both diseases in male and female bodies through anatomical sketches and
a few photographic images of chancres on fingers and the face as well as swollen joints and
body rashes. Like the VD films made for civilian use in the WWII era, these images do not
include photographs of diseased genitalia. Even when medical treatment gets staged, as in a
blood test, we are only given images from over-the-shoulder of faceless young male and female
teens or close-ups of certain body parts. After the details of VD are presented, the voice-over
intones: “This chain of infection among teenagers raises some troubling questions. We have
tried to answer only one: how an individual can break the chain by understanding the diseases
and their cure.” Alongside the appearance of a series of sketched male and female bodies, a
series of different, youthful voices pose the following questions:
But, well, what about the rest of the chain?
How can people keep from getting these diseases?
If getting cured is so simple, why should there be so much VD? Why doesn’t everybody
go for treatment?
Why is the VD rate so much higher in teenagers than adults? Has it always been that
way?
We’re getting rid of some diseases such as polio, why can’t we do it with venereal
diseases?
If all teenagers knew there was so much VD, do you suppose it would change their
attitudes toward, well, towards sexual behavior?
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The image track is gradually peopled with a cluster of sketched bodies which appear to
represent the bodies of each person posing a question. The male narration returns to say: “We
leave these questions to you.” While not exactly setting up the film itself as an ambiguous
object of contemplation, A Quarter-Million Teenagers nevertheless attempts to conclude in an
open-ended fashion. Made in cooperation with Los Angeles City Schools and the Los Angeles
County Health Department, this film would obtain widespread distribution, the “shelf life” of
which would only be refueled by the production and update of subsequent editions.
The racial integration depicted in many of these films is certainly noteworthy,
particularly as a contrast to the prevailing white middle-classness of 1950s sex ed material.
Even the photographs of diseased bodies in A Quarter-Million Teens shows a racial mix. In
VD. - Every 30 Seconds, which stages a range of encounters between doctors and teen patients,
racial integration is also foregrounded. From a young blond couple frolicking on a southern
California beach, to a racially mixed basketball game, to a race and gender mixed touch
football game on the beach, the opening montage sequence aims at inclusivity. The voice-over
accompanying it similarly aims at both sexes as it alternates between a young male and female
voice. First the boy speaks: “You’ve seen kids like us before. We’re healthy and having fun.
And there are a lot of kids like us.” The girl’s voice continues: ‘W e all have hang-ups but
nothing serious enough to destroy our mental or our physical health.” As the vision of youth
playing sports on the beach is displayed, the girl’s voice warns: “But the chances for life and
happiness can be destroyed” and the boy surmises: “By some diseases that are spreading
rapidly. Every thirty seconds someone contracts one of these crippling diseases.” This
introduction immediately sets up the drama or conflict of the film and leads immediately into a
doctor’s office first signaled by a close-up of a young white man’s back rash as his (also white)
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doctor warns him that “this” is something that could affect him for the rest of his life. Another
doctor-patient encounter shows an afflicted young black woman being addressed by her white
male doctor. The film goes into a series of charts and statistics that frames VD among other
communicable diseases, and includes a direct address by Dr. Walter Smartt, Chief of the
Venereal Disease Division, LA County Department of Health about the seriousness of the
disease and the need to consult a doctor. Smartt will appear several times in this film and in
several other made in the LA area through the period including acting as a supervisor on VD
Questions and participating in How to Keep From Catching VD, VD - Ancient History to
Present [check this tape] and The Hidden Epidemic.
Stating that the VD rate is highest among the 15-24 year-old age group, an adult male
voice-over accompanies a series of images showing young people — singles and couples, black
and white (though never mixed couples), as they walk around college campuses and city streets.
This film covers the specific aspects of syphilis and gonorrhea, showing anatomical sketches of
their impact on the body, microscopic images, and actuality footage of those sufferers who are
partially paralyzed, blind and victims of neurosyphilitic symptoms. By establishing the
fundamental importance of medical expertise in treating the disease, the film offers both the
public health clinic and the private physician as the two main, reliable routes to diagnosis and
treatment. So far as this film is concerned, these experts are men, though the emphasis on
racial “equality” is facilitated by the prominent place accorded to a black physician, Dr. Vernal
G. Cave, Director of the Bureau of V.D. Control for the New York City Department of Health
who is cross cut with Dr. Smartt in several scenes, warning about how VD can be contracted
again and that people can have several venereal diseases simultaneously. In another scene,
another black doctor talks to a patient as the voice-over comments on how to obtain information
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about prevention (though the film conveniently mentions nothing specific in this regard).
Another point emphasized in VD. - Every 30 Seconds is the issue of confidentiality. The voice
over tells us: “In most states, the doctor doesn’t have to notify the parents of teenagers. This
makes it a lot easier for a young person to get medical help.” Another consistent inducement to
the diseased person is to name his or her contacts: “Wherever you go, tell the doctor where you
got VD. This is important so that the other person get prompt treatment. It’s the only decent
thing to do because you know that untreated VD can cause a lot of misery. Also, this helps
stop the spread of disease.” The urgency of the need to combat VD is underscored by the
recurring image of a stop watch shot in extreme close-up with the accentuated sound of seconds
ticking by, a sound repeated throughout the film even when the stop watch image is not visible.
The “epidemic” of venereal disease described by Smartt in this film is a theme
addressed in most of the films mentioned above. While VD had experienced significant rates of
decline over the later course of WWII and during its immediate aftermath, by the end of the
1950s and early 1960s, VD rates had begun to climb once again. In the decade from 1965 to
1975, the number of cases of reported gonorrhea tripled to almost 1 million people per year in
the United States. Described by the federally operated Centers for Disease Control as the most
common and most costly communicable disease into the 1980s, most estimates claim the
number of gonorrhea cases to be near the 2.5 million mark.5 1 Though its incidence declines
throughout the 1980s, Canada had a particularly high rate of gonorrhea as well, with 216.6
infections per 100,000 population, the highest demographic o f which was among young people
(especially men) in the 20-24 year-old age group. In both countries, the effectiveness of
penicillin alongside a shift of public health priorities and hence financial allocations meant that
federal appropriations for VD were substantively reduced during the 1950s.5 2 Another problem
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was the widely held perception shard by many public health officials, physicians and laypeople
alike which attributed the increase in VD to what was described as the three “p’s”:
“permissiveness, promiscuity and the Pill.”5 3 Many have pointed out that while there was
undoubtedly a fundamental shift taking place in sexual mores in this period, changing patterns
of sexual relations predate the 1960s and the resurgence of VD at this time. Moreover, changes
in sexual practices alone cannot adequately account for the sudden and dramatic increase in
venereal rates. As Alan Brandt argues, the irony is that while birth control is frequently cited as
a principal cause of the new epidemic, it may actually provide a means of combating the
problem:
It is overly simplistic, for instance, to cite the Pill as a “cause” of this rise in rates of
infection. Studies have shown that women who rely on the Pill for contraception are at
no greater risk to contract venereal disease than those who use any form of birth control
and, indeed, those who use no form of birth control at all. In fact, some recent studies
have demonstrated that the Pill may actually act to prevent the development of pelvic
inflammatory disease. Barrier forms of contraception - especially condoms and
diaphragms - are also known to decrease the possibility of some infections. Some
contraceptive foams and spermicides apparently have bacteriocidal properties,
particularly for gonococcus. The relationship between contraceptive technique to the
prevention of venereal disease has too often been overlooked in clinical practice.5 4
While the Pill had been available to North American women from 1960 onward, it
wasn’t until 1965 that it became widely available in the U.S. as contraceptive legislation was
struck down by the Supreme Court. Another important aspect of the new permissiveness or the
revolution in sexual morals taking place was unquestionably the upsurge of the gay rights
movement and the increased sexual visibility and activity within gay subcultures. Interestingly,
this wends its way into several of the VD films made for youth at this time. For example, in the
beginning of This Monster VD (which compares VD to a “prehistoric” dinosaur invading the
modem world), after setting up the microscopic visuality of VD, the film makes clear that these
diseases can be transmitted not just from “the opposite sex but also from homosexual
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practices.” The accompanying images here are curious: several young people exit a building as
two young male teens stop at the entranceway to talk. Just when the prospect of homosexuality
gets mentioned, a young woman comes out of the building and wedges between the two boys.
Scenes later, these two boys are on a double date and one of them, John, will turn out to have
contracted gonorrhea from his girlfriend Linda, with whom he has been going steady for six
months. The specter of homosexuality is thus relegated to the margins of the film which goes
on to concentrate on John and later Linda’s plight as they encounter the medical expertise which
will instruct and cure them of their disease. Interestingly, the bulk of the film is taken up by
the exchanges between doctor and patient, most particularly the dramatization/inducement of
confession surrounding the naming of contacts.
Both John and Linda are at first loathe to admit that the source of the disease could be
sexually transmitted. When Linda goes to a public health clinic which has tracked her through
John, we learn that she has had sexual relations outside of her “steady” relationship with John.
She becomes, as it were, the infecting source via her “promiscuous” behavior, a position
reiterated by the medical doctor who speaks to the viewer in direct address toward the end of the
film to proclaim that “ignorance, apathy and relaxation of moral standards” are the allies of
venereal disease in his warning of the dangers of promiscuous behavior as its cause. That
Linda has ostensibly slept with only two people: John and this “other” man is enough to
condemn her in the eyes of medical science here which is an interesting sign of the fact that
despite significant shift in sexual mores during this period, attitudes associating venereal disease
with sin persist, even in the staging of so called “objective” medical practitioners. To be sure,
the tracing of contacts was a key aspect of efforts to control venereal disease and one which
was particularly thwarted by the ongoing stigma attached to contracting them. Another film
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from the period which strives more persuasively to downplay the moralizing aspect of venereal
disease is VD - Name Your Contacts which, like This Monster VD, is largely focused on the
dramatization of confession in relation to naming sexual contacts. Moreover, Name Your
Contacts also has an early example of a gay male seeking treatment.
Made in 1968, VD - Name Your Contacts begins with a young man, Mr. Roberts,
leafing through the pages of a phone book and then immediately stages his conversation with a
doctor who is treating him for venereal disease. After an extended conversation in which the
doctor’s persuasive powers finally win out, Roberts reveals the name of his contact, Betty, who
is then shown in a bitter exchange with a female public health nurse as she insists the
information is wrong, tries to find out its source, and takes offense at the insinuation that she
has had multiple partners with the claim: “What do you think I am, a prostitute?!” to which the
patient but prodding nurse replies “No, Betty, I don’t think you are. But even if you were that’s
your affair. I’m only concerned about your health and theirs.” Following this exchange staged
as a series of shot/reverse shots and during which Betty refuses to name names, a voice-over
suddenly begins commentary in a film which has, up to this point, staged only synchronous
sound dialogue. The voice tells us that Betty ultimately gave one name to the public health
nurse, though she knew there were others. “She won’t admit the possibility that she could infect
the men rather than be infected by them. Her pride is dangerous in the fight against VD.” We
then cut back to Mr. Roberts who is then shown visiting his girlfriend (not Betty) to whom he
confesses that he has gonorrhea, advising her to get tested. When he reveals that she too will
have to “name her contacts,” the girlfriend reacts with indignance about her privacy and then
expresses fear over her name being mentioned to Roberts’ doctor, though he says he has
protected her: “I only gave them the name of the other girl.” The voice-over intones: “The
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other girl....who has carried the disease from one man to another. Her duty now is to link the
other man to the forces at city hall in constant combat with VD.”
By switching immediately to another scenario with another man, Philip Andrews, the
voice-over suggests that this is Betty’s other contact. As dramatic drum roll and very low
octave piano keys are struck, the voice-over sets up this scenario:
Philip Andrews, age thirty-six, just ending an out-of-town business trip. Philip is
married and has three children, but his trips way from home often take him to distant
towns and distant situations....Laura Perkins, age twenty-three, secretary. She has had
one previous sexual relationship with Philip. Last night she told him of her engagement
and that she couldn’t see him again. But one drink led to another.
As first Philip and then Laura exit a motel room and silently, sheepishly get into a car together,
the error of their ways is dramatized by sound and image. Interestingly, while the voice-over is
set up as offering a position of knowledge beyond what the individuals acting in the films could
possess, it is nevertheless set up as a judgmental voice commenting on the transgressions of the
characters in the diegesis. It is really the doctors and public health officials who are presented
as the privileged, or at least “objective” arbiters of sound scientific advice administered without
judgement. Philip is summoned to the public health department where his doctor (a black
physician) talks about the necessity of contact tracing, which for Philip must include the testing
of his wife for gonorrhea. Philip reluctantly gives the doctor the name of his wife’s physician,
after being warned of the dangerous consequences to her potential fertility and health that could
result from his silence. While the compromise upon which they settle is to have Philip suggest
that his wife call her for an annual physical, the consequences o f her infection are left
unexamined in this drama. Similarly, Laura must face telling her fiance and laments this
realization to her physician/public health official (a black woman) who similarly offers only
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support for the positive outcome of being honest and getting cured, despite the potentially
inflammatory consequences of such revelations.
The next scenes of the film show a montage of an urban downtown area where a cluster
of young people are gathered outside a theater which is advertising a Jane Fonda film with the
headline “Shameless Sex.”5 5 Suggesting the interpenetration of popular culture and sexual
practices, a group of four young people (two couples, one black, one white) jump in a car and
drive off as the montage interlude (replete with pop music) ends and we are presented with
rather inflammatory information about VD statistics among teens, even adolescents (though no
specific numbers are given). A young black couple is shown embracing and the female is
shown later in the public health office with the same nurse who met with Betty. It is revealed
that she was “contact traced” into the office, has had multiple partners, and is sixteen years of
age. Next a young man (named George) enters into the clinic and nervously awaits his
appointment with the doctor. George is returning for another round of treatment and is
subjected to a series of questions by his physician who has tried to track down his ostensible
contact. Suddenly his doctor stops the direction of the inquiry by saying to George:
Let’s be honest with each other. The girl doesn’t exist...It wasn’t a woman, was it
George? Look, I’m not here to judge or to criticize. My only concern is for your health.
You’ve been infected with VD. I only want to help you get rid of it, and help those
with whom you’ve had sexual contact. Now it doesn’t matter to me whether it was
male or female. My only interest is health. Do you believe me?
When George replies somewhat halfheartedly, “I guess so,” the doctor says: “I want you to. I
want you to have complete confidence in what I’m doing.” This dialogue is staged in a series o f
tight close-ups cut as shot/reverse shots which (in their proximity to the face) resemble the
staging of daytime soap operas. The confession ends with George claiming that he has had ten
or twelve recent sexual encounters (well in excess of any of the heterosexual patients portrayed
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in the film) and can remember the names of “most” of them to which the doctor merely replies
“Good” as he beings to fill out forms. The sacred trust of doctor-patient confidentiality is really
the subject of the film as it repeatedly dramatizes a range of different scenarios in which
objective, disinterested scientific management of disease is the work of modem medicine.
Interestingly, this film in fact offers very little in the way of scientific information about VD, as
it ends with a montage of the various patients we have encountered and voice-over commentary
on the difficulty we as viewers may have in similar situations with the final injunction that it is
our “duty” to name sexual contacts: “Remember, a misguided and false sense of protection can
only ruin someone else’s life.”
While these venereal disease films of the 1960s and 1970s depart from the predominant
“health focus” of 1950s films for teens, the “disease focus” is not exactly the same as the
barrage of diseased body images so prevalent in many earlier VD films. While aspects of the
stigma of disease continues, a prominent feature of these films is less the symptoms and
revelation of disease than the naming, confessing of partners. In other words, the body (and its
symptoms) speaks to the patient and his/her body (though again the symptomatology of the
female body is obscure and difficult to read, often rendering her ignorant of its processes) who
in turn must dutifully succumb to the “millenial yoke of confession,” to invoke Michael
Foucault. The “clinical codification of the inducement to speak” which he outlines in The
History o f Sexuality is precisely what is enacted in these films as they stage an elaborate
network o f sexual causality which requires procedures o f confession and scientific discursivity
in order to regulate and control the spread of disease. In the confession, as Foucault argues,
“truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of an individual
secret”:
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The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject
of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does
not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner which is not simply
the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and
appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile;
a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to
surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone,
independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the
person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of
his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation.5 6
The inducement to speak here is positioned less as a duty to nationhood (as in the films
produced during the two World Wars) than as a civic and civil responsibility. Nevertheless, the
agency of domination is clearly positioned in the one who listens and says nothing. As Foucault
puts it, the power is “not in the one who knows and answers, but in the one who questions and
is not supposed to know.”5 7
One of the consistent themes in these films which marks their departure from the 1950s
paradigm is the degree to which parental authority is marginalized in the face of medical
expertise. In fact, the exchange between the sixteen-year-old and her public health official
dramatizes this difference when the nurse tells her that her parent need never know about her
contracting gonorrhea, much to the girl’s relief. It is no surprise, then, that many of these films
and the curricular project more generally would come under attack by various conservative
organizations for the challenges this position posed to parental authority. By the late 1960s,
thousands of conservatives in both Canada and the U.S. became mobilized through various
citizens’ groups opposed to sex education as it had been evolving in the classroom. The names
(and acronyms) of these organizations are indeed suggestive: MOMS (Mothers Organized for
Moral Stability), MOROREDE (Movement to Restore Decency), POSSE (Parents Opposed to
Sex and Sensitivity Education), all of which began, from various positions, to attack the project
of sex education curriculum as it evolved over the decade. Jeffrey Moran argues that the sex
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education controversies of the late 1960s are actually crucial events in the development of the
religious right:
Like the crusades against obscenity earlier in the decade, the controversy over sex
education demonstrated to the political right the usefulness of social issues in
mobilizing not only fundamentalists and culturally conservative Catholics but also
previously apolitical evangelicals who connected sex education with...the ‘wider culture
of modernity,’ with its assaults on traditional sexual morality, gender roles and
religious sentiment.5 8
While it would take some time for various religious right groups to partake in the business of
sex education on film and video from a “Christian” perspective (a point I will develop in
Chapter 5), it is important to point out that the shifts taking place in sex education films at this
time are much like the argument about film genres more generally: they are both conservative
and innovative, liberal and reactionary simultaneously in their repetition (with variation) of the
messages (and lessons) to be derived about sex. This ambiguity is nowhere more apparent than
in the birth control movement and some of the films that were produced under that rubric, as I
will now show.
From Birth Control to Planned Parenthood and Back
In a groundbreaking book on the history of birth control, Linda Gordon argues that
perhaps the single most important factor in the material basis of women’s emancipation in the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been the promise of contraception. As she
sees it, birth control is not only a major factor in the development of women’s sexuality, but the
ability to control reproduction could promise the “elimination of women’s only significant
biological disadvantage.”5 9 From this view, her social history of birth control in Woman’ s
Body, Woman’ s Right argues that this practice is “as much a symptom as a cause of larger
social changes in the relations between the sexes.” Published in 1976 as the feminist second
wave was well under way, Gordon argues that such a history has largely been missing from
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literature which, when dealing with sexuality and birth control, has tended either to trace birth
control history from the perspective of medical technologies and/or medical history or to profile
prominent personalities in the birth control cause. As she views it:
The lack of adequate history about sexual behavior and attitudes is a result of the
inattention to women in history, because sex itself cannot be comprehended except as a
facet of the relations between two sexes. (This is because sex has been primarily,
though not exclusively, defined in terms of relations between men and women.) The
relations between the sexes cannot, in turn, be analyzed correctly except from an
understanding of the subordination of women and their resistance and accommodation
to it.6 0
O f course since the publication of this text, a veritable industry surrounding sexuality and
sexual history has developed. What is so significant about this work is that it nevertheless
holds up as such an important documentation of a social practice that has existed virtually from
the beginning of civilization.
Certainly Foucault’s History o f Sexuality comes to mind here (though Gordon’s book
predates its English translation), most notably for the ways in which her argument offers an
analysis of power relations both from top-down and bottom-up perspectives. Gordon’s main
difference from Foucault is that she attends very specifically to issues of gender in her historical
analysis of the ways in which the folklore of birth control so prevalent in ancient societies
devolved into the restrictive sexual standards of the modem world which ultimately forced it
underground. The re-emergence of birth control as a respectable practice in the last
(nineteenth) century, in her view, was part of a gradual process of changing sexual standards
“largely produced by women’s stmggle for freedom.”6 1 From a Foucaultian perspective, the
putting into discourse of issues of birth control and contraception is largely attributable the
politics of sex and gender as mechanisms of power. As Woman’ s Body, Woman’ s Right
posits, from the mid-nineteenth century, when feminists attacked unwanted pregnancies in the
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name of “voluntary motherhood” and the protection of female chastity, there is considerable
continuity to the twentieth century when contraception gets blamed for the breakdown of
traditional standards of morality:
The suppression of birth control in class society was partly a means of enforcing male
supremacy but partly, too, a self-protection for women, a means of enforcing men’s
responsibility for their sexual behavior. Indeed, all cultural aspects of womanhood
were created and re-created jointly, though not usually amicably, by men and their
female subjects, resisting and accommodating to their subjection. Even while unable to
overthrow their rulers, women could and did change the terms of their labor and limit
the privileges of their masters. In no areas of life have women ever accepted
unchallenged the terms of service offered by men. Sexuality and reproduction were no
exception. The major institutions of sex and reproduction, such as the family and codes
of morality, were established as much by women’s struggle to protect themselves as by
men’s struggle to protect their property.6 2
One of the interesting arguments that Gordon develops in this project relates to the
theme of professionalism that I have discussed throughout this study. In her division of the
birth control movement during the modem industrial era into stages, Gordon argues that while
the first two stages — voluntary motherhood at the very beginning of the progressive era and the
creation of the “birth control” movement in the 1910s were largely feminist-based, grassroots
organizations, the third stage of birth control history is markedly different. As she proposes,
from the 1920s onward, the movement “evolved away from the radicalism of its second stage
into a liberal reform movement.”6 3 This stage produced a new slogan, “planned parenthood,”
which was peopled largely by professionals who took over the birth control groups less by
driving out radicals than by attaching themselves to a cause that many radicals had abandoned.
Many of these professionals were, of course, doctors who were now willing to embrace a cause
that they had hitherto avoided. From the 1930s onward, when the practice of family limitation
initially became a subject of fairly widespread public debate, until the marketing of the pill in
the early 1960s, the majority of doctors tended to view the desire of married couples to have
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fewer children as a “problem” rather than an opportunity to provide medical service. The
American Medical Association, for example, would not endorse the use of contraceptives until
1937 and even then somewhat tentatively.6 4 The national association of African-American
physicians, the National Medical Association, would begin to endorse contraception that same
year with the stipulation that it be regulated and supervised by physicians.
In Canada, as mentioned, dissemination of birth control information was technically
illegal until 1969. While these practices were officially condemned under the Criminal Code,
clearly many segments of the population continued to exercise their right to control their
fertility. The loosening of sexual mores during the 1920s is a suggestive case in point, since
Canada and the United States both saw declines in birth rate in a decade in which sexual
experimentation and activity was ostensibly on the rise. It was not until the 1930s that some
provision of birth control methods and information was recognized by the courts as potentially
serving some public good - this during the Depression when economic conditions and
alarmingly high death rates from illegal abortions brought the problems attending fertility
control to public view. At the same time that contraception was made technically legal in 1969,
abortion, under specific conditions, was also permitted. That these abortions could only be
performed under the recommendation of medical practitioners as “therapeutic,” was designed to
safeguard ostensible “abuses” of the procedure and would, of course, problematically leave
control of women’s bodies in the hands of medical professionals. To be sure, Canadian laws
regarding these issues were much slower to emerge and generally more restrictive than those of
many European countries and the United States. As with other western industrialized countries,
the major shifts that have taken place in birth control legislation have tended to reflect
tendencies toward bureaucratization, commercialization, medicalization, masculinization and
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professionalization. Canada had no equivalent high profile feminist advocate of birth control on
the scale of Margaret Sanger or Marie Stopes. As McLaren and McLaren argue: “The desire
to protect women from the power of men and to promote their emancipation was rarely
articulated, prior to the 1960’s, as a political program in Canada in defense of birth control or
abortion.”6 5
The reticence of medical practitioners to fully endorse contraception is illustrated in the
technology of contraception itself which bears witness to virtually no innovations from the mid
nineteenth century until the mid twentieth. For example, by 1865 rubber condoms, vaginal
diaphragms, spermacidal douches, and the “infertile period” had all been described in popular
manuals available to the public. Interestingly, however, the condom was not historically viewed
as a contraceptive so much as a prophylactic to prevent venereal disease which partially
explains why the benefits of its contraceptive value are never mentioned in, for example, WWII
training films. While various forms of sheaths have a long history of being used to cover the
penis for a variety of purposes, the condom as we know it was first publicized specifically as an
anti-venereal disease precaution by the Italian anatomist Fallopius, a sixteenth century authority
on syphilis (and the man who “discovered” “Fallopian tubes”).6 6 As many historians have
pointed out, the most reliable forms of contraception in the nineteenth century - condoms,
douches and pessaries - were so attached in the minds of medical practitioners to the libertine,
the prostitute and the midwife that they were viewed as outside of the realm of respectable
medicine and, by the majority o f doctors, never recommended to patients as birth control
devices.
The fertility period in the female cycle was only recently understood with accuracy.
For those practicing coitus interruptus with a view to safe and unsafe stages in a woman’s
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cycle, many were misinformed. It was not until Drs. Ogino and Knaus correctly determined the
ovulation cycle in the late 1920s that the period 14-16 days following menstruation went from
being understood as the most “safe” to least in terms of potential conception.6 7 Because of
Roman Catholic opprobrium, moreover, this discovery was not made widely available until the
1930s.6 8 Medical attitudes and public information about contraception must be viewed within
this context since practitioners were primarily conditioned by the social values which they
shared with other citizens. As one historian puts it, one could hardly have expected the
physicians to challenge the status quo en masse:
They were chosen by a process that reflected ability to internalize the values of a
professional culture which depended on public confidence and support. Their function
was to comfort and to explain, and sometimes to cure - not to question the basic
structure or justice of the social system. Contraceptives were not therapeutic means in
a therapeutic sense, since they were usually sought by healthy women for social, as
opposed to medical, reasons.6 9
In a period in which medical advances were enabling great improvements in the management of
difficult pregnancies and the repair of birth injuries, medical doctors were much more
committed (and confident) about their value as facilitators of birth and the improvement of their
“art.” Until the middle of the twentieth century, birth control was a banal, or worse,
“disreputable” topic of specialization for the first class physician. What will lead to the
“professionalization” of the birth control movement will be the issue of eugenics and population
control as “humanitarian” reformist goals through which contraception could get re-framed.
These eugenic and humanitarian goals are made evident by a Disney Productions film produced
for the Population Council in 1967 entitled Family Planning (directed by Les Clark).
The eugenic agenda is supported not only by the text itself, but by the fact that the
Population Council was founded in 1952 by Frederick Osborn, a leading eugenicist who later
set up the Population Association of America. With funding from the Milbank Memorial Fund
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as well as (slightly later) the Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council’s demographic
and medical advisory boards would consist of ten men, six of whom had powerful ties to
eugenics.7 0 Family Planning demonstrates the ways in which, beginning in the 1950s, a
transition from postwar disfavor of eugenics moves into the rubric of population control thereby
effecting a problematic and complex linkage between birth control and population control. The
film begins with credits over an animated red curtain which is quickly shown to be the curtain
for a theatrical stage onto which Donald Duck marches to set up an easel and paint to comic
effect. Donald Duck performs a series of slapstick gestures as the male voice-over (playing
straight man) tries to begin the lesson and is temporarily delayed by Donald’s pratfalls. Donald
eventually starts to paint on the canvas which will become the “animation” for the lesson. The
image he first draws is of “One of the world’s most unusual inhabitants: Man.” The voice-over
continues: “Throughout the world, of course, there are all sorts of men. They look different in
different places and have different ways of life. But basically, all men are the same, so to make
things easier let’s put them together into one and let this one stand for all. He’s a common man,
just like you or me.” This information is conveyed as the animated images (from Donald’s
brush) take over the entire screen and we are shown a range of different races and ethnicities
spaced in a chat-like circle. Racial, cultural and ethnic differences are signified by both skin
color and costume, as well as a musical medley which effects a melange of different cultural
sounds.
The “family o f man” rhetoric dominates the rest o f the film as this one mem stands in
for all and the voice-over outlines the superiority of man and his ability to reason over all else
on the planet. A chronicle of man’s progress over famine and disease leads to the central
themes of the film, literalized as a scale balancing stick men representing those being bom
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against those dying moves from an equilibrium to a sharp imbalance weighing heavily on the
birth side. O f course, by man’s side is “woman” who enters the story rather belatedly. The
upward rise in the family man is being hampered by an increase in population that amounts to
“astonishing numbers,” we are told as the common couple gets duplicated on the screen.
Donald consistently provides humor as he rushes to “create” the images for the film which use
this couple as the case study for analysis. One of the striking things about this “family of man”
picture is that the couple is clearly marked as other. They are costumed as such and live in
rather primitive, agrarian conditions. The man, who eventually speaks, has something of a
Yiddish accent. The woman/wife, who wears a sari and has dark black hair tied back in a bun,
could easily pass for East Indian. She is shy and disempowered or at least not emancipated
enough to speak to strangers, and is shown whispering questions to her husband to pose to the
narrator rather than asking for herself. Since the film is in English, it’s hard to decipher exactly
who its intended audience actually is: American immigrants who come from agrarian cultures?
Middle-class white viewers who could watch and learn about overpopulation as caused by
“others”? This “benign” family of man theme (the phrase is repeated many times during the
film) is considerably more sinister when one considers these issues. Indeed as Robert Eberwein
says of the film: “[It] plays both ends against the middle: on the one hand it appears to celebrate
the family of man and human diversity; on the other it clearly presents the greatest threat to the
family of man as proceeding from people who aren’t white Americans.”7 1
Family Planning gives very little specific information about contraceptives per se.
Instead, the film emphasizes the benefits of modem, scientific developments in countering the
effects of having too many children, illustrated by a hypothetical scenario in which our couple is
shown with an ideal family of three children and then an alternative sequence of too many
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(seven or eight), leaving no extra money for modem conveniences (represented by a radio).7 2
Beyond this, argues the narrator, the family’s ox can no longer be fed, the mother is “tired and
cross and her health will suffer,” and the children will be “sickly and unhappy, with little hope
for the future.” When they grow up, we are cautioned, with all of the land divided up and
parceled out to the sons, none of them will be able to adequately sustain and provide for
themselves and their families. Presenting as typical a picture of entailment which harkens back
to eighteenth century inheritance laws (and Jane Austin novels) clearly not practiced in North
American culture in the twentieth century, the impression is that the culture presented is
decidedly antiquated and not American. “Today things have changed,” the voice-over intones:
“modem science has given us a key that makes possible a new kind of personal freedom: family
planning.” With this, Donald Duck dons a medical white jacket and holds up a large, gold key.
As our “common man” poses a series of questions about what planned parenthood is and how
one can learn more about birth control, the voice-over provides all of the answers, showing the
wife in various scenarios asking a doctor, a health service worker and also attending a family
planning clinic, representatives of which are all depicted as visible minorities. The film ends
with the injunction to practice family planning for the betterment of oneself, one’s family and as
a greater “responsibility toward the family of man.” As a final image of Donald pointing out to
the spectator is staged, the voice-over includes us as viewers in his command.
By situating birth control within the realm of population control, Family Planning
conforms to the widespread view o f many human ecologists and conservatives at this time —
including a generation of politicians, businessmen and other professionals who began to view
the topic as central to the maintenance of world order on a global level, as well as to the costs
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and consequences of social welfare on state and provincial levels. As McLaren and McLaren
argue:
In the post-war West there was...the pleasant surprise of a baby boom; but Western
analysts discovered in the developing world in the 1950's what they fearfully labeled a
“population explosion.” In books with titles like Exploding Humanity and Our
Crowded Planet, Canadians were warned by such luminaries as Bertrand Russell,
Julian Huxley, Adlai Stevenson, and Arnold Toynbee that the uncontrolled fertility of
the Third World posed a greater threat to world stability than the risk of nuclear war.7 3
With concerns ranging from the global to the ethnocentric, then, many subscribed to the view
that family planning was central to the social, political, ecological and economic need for
population control. That significant funding for these efforts came from the philanthropies of
wealthy American capitalists is therefore hardly a surprise. Even in Canada, one of the key
figures in the implementation of birth control clinics was a manufacturer/businessman named
A. R. Kaufman, who owned the Kaufman Rubber Company in Kitchener, Ontario. Widely
hailed as the “father” of the Canadian birth control movement for clinics he helped to establish
during the depression era in Toronto, Windsor and Hamilton, Kaufman was far from radical in
his views and indeed clearly displayed an interest in birth control for its eugenic potential.7 4 As
McLaren and McLaren point out: “...it was not Kaufman’s intent to provide birth control
information to whomever wanted it. He believed that the birth rate of the middle classes was, if
anything, too low.”7 5 So while he initially modeled the Ontario clinics on those established by
Marie Stopes and Margaret Sanger in the U.K. and U.S., he did so with a markedly different
agenda.
Moreover, while the early significant work by Stopes, Sanger, and other radical
feminists beginning in the 1910s would continue under various guises in the consolidation and
respectability accorded to the birth control movements, the professionalization of the movement
meant that these radical beginnings would go underground until the women’s liberation
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movement of the late 1960s and 1970s when feminist birth control propaganda and services
would begin to evolve in both Canada and the United States. The pre-dominance of
conservative forces and eugenic interests in the birth control movement as it evolved from the
1930s onward is nowhere more apparent than in the name change from American Birth Control
League to “Planned Parenthood” which took place in 1942 (a change vehemently opposed by
Sanger). Linda Gordon summarizes these circumstances succinctly:
The radical associations of the name “birth control” seemed inescapable to many in the
movement in the 1920s and 1930s. Opponents still called Sanger a free lover, a
revolutionary, an unwed mother. Some supporters tried to coin new names for the
movement: “Children’s Charter,” “Better Families,” “Child Spacing,” “Family
Planning” were a few. Many of these suggestions had a meaning similar to that which
was finally victorious; they lacked only the catchy alliteration of “Planned Parenthood.”
All the names proposed took the focus away from women and placed it on families or
children. All were designed to have as little sexual connotation as possible.7 6
In the eyes of many, “planned parenthood” invited a more positive connotation than “birth
control” insofar as eugenicists viewed the latter term as muddying the waters of their distinction
between positive and negative eugenics. In their parlance, “positive” eugenics meant
encouraging more reproduction among the “fit” middle classes, while negative eugenics was
that class’s “excessive” use of birth control. The term “planned parenthood” was viewed as
positive in the sense that posed no aggrieved or combative parties seeking justice (the perceived
connotation of birth control and its feminist, female-empowering underpinnings).7 7
The efficient, professionalism attached to Planned Parenthood is illustrated in Sex in
Today’ s World (1966) mentioned previously. As a documentary attempting to investigate the
so-called “sexual revolution” of the 1960s, Sex in Today’ s World presents a wide array of
scenarios from Playboy Clubs frequented by the older generation, to rock clubs favored by the
young. The camera shows sex education classes in Flint, Michigan and interviews various
professors and students on the campus of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Experts”
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in the field such as Dr. Mary Calderone and psychologist Dr. Morton Schillinger (executive
director of the Lincoln Institute for Psychotherapy), function as both talking heads and as voice
over to various scenes, though the film is structured predominantly around one anonymous male
narrator. One sequence sets up the Planned Parenthood Association as an African-American
receptionist answers a telephone identifying the office space as one of their clinics. The voice
over, which is interspersed with synchronous dialogue, tells us that this is one of over three
hundred such organizations across the country to help with “sexual problems” and that
additionally, there are thousands of clinics set up in hospitals around the nation as well. The
“case study” who we follow through the clinic is a white woman visiting specifically for birth
control. The public health worker/nurse (also black) who interviews the woman asks her why
she wants to avoid having any more children. The woman, in her mid-to-late thirties, responds
that the economic restrictions of her family’s middle-class status and the desire of her husband
and herself to enable the family to afford a higher education for their two children as key
factors. She then adds that she would like eventually to return to work. From here, the women
is shown in a doctor’s office as he presents her (by means of a flip chart and diagrams) with the
range of potential contraceptive options from which she may choose. The voice-over then
interjects: “...since 1965, dissemination of contraception has been legal in all fifty states. In this
decade, the two most significant developments are the IUD — the intrauterine device - and the
pill.” While his explanation of the other contraceptive devices is muted by the voice-over, the
doctor is shown explaining at length the benefits of the pill. The sequence ends with the woman
at the Planned Parenthood dispensary, being issued a five month supply of the oral
contraceptive.
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Several aspects of this sequence are noteworthy. For one thing, the image of Planned
Parenthood as precisely helping white women who have already reproduced is a placating image
and one that is less predicated on population control than intelligent family planning. The
woman’s desire to “return to work” certainly suggests an image of female empowerment
reflected in the doubling - from fifteen to thirty percent - of women entering the labor force
from 1940 to I960.7 8 Moreover, we see no evidence of young, single women or teens at the
clinic seeking birth control advice. While the “support staff’ is presented with racial variation,
the doctor dispensing knowledge is an older white male not, for example, a young female doctor
or public health nurse who may put too much of a woman-centered spin on the medical
management of sexuality depicted here. Such an image helps to preserve the idea that “planned
parenthood” is safely adjudicated within the confines of marital conjugality and governed by the
reliable management of modem medicine.
Another interesting film on this topic which demonstrates some distance from the
population control agenda is Methods o f Family Planning, a Moreland-Latchford film from
1972. The film is made in conjunction with a variety of organizations including the heads of the
Family Planning Federation of Canada, the Toronto Department of Public Health, the National
Director of the Catholic Communications Center and Canada’s Department of National Health
and Welfare. Beginning with a classroom session of couples attending a birth control class, the
age and racial variation presented in the film is quite striking: there are young white and black
teens, asian and indian couples all being instructed by a man at a chalk board at the front o f the
room. The films goes through a variety of methods of birth control as the voice-over explains
the rhythm method, the pill and the synthetic hormones of which it is comprised, the diaphragm,
IUD, including those devices “available for use without medical prescription” alongside medical
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diagrams which visualize their function. The condom is singled out as the only effective
contraceptive in protecting against VD and each method is explained in conjunction with a
different couple who receives specific information with various health professionals. A
relatively older couple is shown getting information about vasectomies and tubal ligations,
procedures which became increasingly widespread from the 1970s onward. The film concludes
with the claim that “Family Planning is a matter of free choice” and can best be learned about
through a doctor, a qualified nurse or a family planning service with the final injunction:
“Pregnancy by choice or by chance. It’s up to you.”
What is interesting about the film beyond the mixed race representation here is that
several of the couples presented appear to be teenagers and unmarried (if wedding rings are
anything to go by). Several clearly look like hippies in the stereotypical sense and so, the
viewer may assume, are actually not exactly engaging in the use of contraceptives from the
perspective of its official moniker of “family planning” per se. That it was made in consultation
with the Catholic Church is another interesting point. While the United Church of Canada had
formally endorsed the “morality” of birth control as early as 1936, the Catholic Church in both
Canada and the U.S. would, of course, be much more loathe to accept the practice. By the
1970s, however, Canada’s census data shows that cultural and religious fertility differentials
had virtually disappeared from the statistical variation, throwing into sharp relief the
differentials based on income and education. This is a curious transformation, especially given
Quebec’s largely Catholic population. Interestingly, as McLaren and McLaren point out, the
transformation of the French-Canadian family was perhaps the most dramatic evidence of that
province’s “Quiet Revolution.” While, as mentioned, Canada’s fertility rate peaked at 28.3
births per 1,000 in 1959, it thereafter began to head in another unexpected direction. The most
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dramatic drop in fertility occurred in Quebec where the birth rate was cut in half within the
1960s alone. While in the 1940s the average Quebec woman had on average about four
children, by the 1970s the number had dropped to about two.7 9 The decline in birth rate also
indicates that years before the widespread use of the pill, fertility rates in both countries were on
the decline. While this data is suggestive of some degree of fertility control among Catholics,
the consultation of the Catholic Church in Family Planning could also account for why
abortion does not come up as a solution to unwanted pregnancy.
The Pill and Its Legacy
Although a great many Catholics would remain opposed to birth control, one
particularly important aspect of the media attention leveled on the pill during the 1960s was its
endorsement by a prominent Catholic obstetrician-gynecologist, Dr. John Rock.. As a professor
at Harvard’s Medical School and a Catholic who attended daily mass, Rock was a valuable
addition to the team participating in the development of the first oral contraceptives. Given his
professional and religious “stature,” Rock stood a better chance of convincing Catholics of the
merits of contraception than did other non-Catholic birth control advocates. In Rock’s view,
the pill should be acceptable to Catholics and non-Catholics alike because it simply modified
the time sequences of the body’s natural functions, making it, in Rock’s view, “an adjunct to
nature.”8 0 Margaret Sanger, who was also instrumental in facilitating the pill’s development,8 1
was converted to the benefit of having Rock participate in the effort as she wrote in a 1960
letter: “Being a good R.C. and as handsome as a god, he can get away with anything.”8 2
Another aspect of Rock’s status was that his career had been largely centered on problems of
infertility, hence his professional renown was in helping couples to conceive. As with many in
the post WWII period, Rock was converted to the project of population control, gradually
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becoming convinced that smaller families, made possible through contraception, were “a
necessary response to the threat of overpopulation.”8 3 It was Rock’s experimental work in the
1950s with attempts to induce pregnancy in previously infertile women which led Dr. Gregory
Pincus and his team at the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology to invite him to join
forces in their effort to develop an ovulation inhibitor.
While a detailed history of this collaboration is beyond the scope of this project, one of
the most significant results of the development of the pill for my purposes was the controversy
which developed over the health risks that its early high dose version induced. Much has been
written about clinical trials conducted on Puerto Rican women on whom the pill was tested in
the mid 1950s, and the multitude of side effects associated with Enovid (its brand name), most
seriously the risk of stroke and blood clots in certain women.8 4 Given the laws against birth
control in the U.S. at this time, Puerto Rico offered a number of other advantages over
American locales. That women from an impoverished housing project in a suburb of San Juan
were the objects of this first major clinical trial beginning in 1956 was certainly the product of a
range of biases, not least of which had to do with the racist issues of population control. The
use of human subjects for clinical trials during this period was not uncommon, nor without
obvious class and race biases, as the previously cited Tuskegee, Alabama experiments on
tertiary syphilis conducted by the U.S. Public Health Service from the 1930s to the 1970s has
made glaringly obvious. The co-called “Father of gynecology” and inventor of the speculum,
Dr. James Marion Sims conducted his research and experiments on unanesthetized slave women
in his backyard clinic in Montgomery, Alabama between 1845 and 1849.8 5
From a climate of optimism that had characterized progressivism’s faith in science and
medical advancement, especially motivated by technological inventions such as penicillin in the
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1940s and the development of a vaccine for polio in the 1950s, came a gradual loss of
confidence and cynicism in relation to scientific advancement. Beginning with the thalidomide
tragedy in 1961 which caused thousands of birth defects in Europe, the public began to question
the collusion of doctors and the pharmaceutical industry. The faith in science was further
questioned by the publication of The Doctor’ s Case Against the Pill (1969) by Barbara
Seamen, which would help to bring to public attention concern over the safety of the pill and
also to help galvanize the women’s health movement which was evolving in various locales
during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Indeed, while Seaman was writing her book in New
York, the women who would soon form the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective were
holding their weekly meetings and assembling information based on shared experiences as a
consciousness-raising and self-help approach to women’s health in reaction to a shared
perception of the medical profession that they saw as “condescending, paternalistic, judgmental
and noninformative.”8 6
In her social history of the pill, Elizabeth Siegel Watkins argues that Barbara Seaman’s
critique of the pill and of the medical-pharmaceutical complex more generally lent support to
the nascent movements of feminism and consumerism. As she argues in On the Pill.
The consumer movement, which originated in the United States with efforts to regulate
the manufacture of food and drugs in the late nineteenth century, entered a new phase in
the 1960s with the publication of books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962),
Jessica Mitford’s The American Way o f Death (1963), and Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at
Any Speed (1965). Whereas Carson took on the chemical industry, Mitford the funeral
industry, and Nadar the automobile industry, Seaman challenged the pharmaceutical
industry and the closely allied medical profession. She demanded that the pill
manufacturers and physicians share all available information about the health risks of
oral contraceptives with patients, so that women themselves could make informed
decisions about birth control. This demand for full disclosure represented an extension
of the relatively new concept of informed consent in medicine beyond the operating
room to include all doctor-patient interactions.8 7
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The hearings held by Senator Gaylord Nelson’s Subcommittee which took place beginning in
January 1970 marked the entry of the federal government into the medical and public
controversy over the safety of the pill. These hearings not only helped to demonstrate the
sexism at the heart of medical research and juridical inquiry, but also led to the FDA mandate
to include inserts for patients describing the known health risks of oral contraceptives in every
package of birth control pills. While Seaman’s book alone was not the cause of this
governmental intervention, it certainly illustrated the need for women to speak out and be heard
as they sought to gain control over their lives and their bodies. In this sense, criticism of the pill
became a catalyst for considerable mobilization around women’s health issues and for a shift in
doctor-patient relations which resulted from that critique. In an effort to gain control over
reproductive and sexual self-health, many women came to view issues pertaining directly to the
body as central to the concerns of women’s liberation.
In a 1999 National Film Board documentary entitled The Pill (directed by Ema Buffie
and Elise Swerhone) much of this history gets framed through the use of archival footage and
photos of key players in its invention including Margaret Sanger, Gregory Pincus and Katherine
McCormick, advertising images and talking-head interviews with Puerto Rican women who
participated in the clinical trials, other early users, doctors, public health historians, medical
ethicists, as well as high-profile feminist activists such as Gloria Steinam and Barbara Seaman.
Narrated by feminist writer-activist Anne-Marie McDonald, The Pill offers a historical
overview of the drug’s scientific development, dissemination and controversy, as well as
discussion of the enormous hope offered by its invention to solve the age-old problem of
separating sexuality from reproduction. Narrativized from a chronological perspective, The
Pill engages a range of issues, using present-day interviews and archival footage of, for
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example the women who attended the Nelson Senate hearings and whose vocal disruption and
interrogation of the ethics of those hearings would help to mobilize thousands of the many
million women taking the pill by 1970. One of the many objections raised by the women
attending the hearings was that there were no women invited to testify either as patients or as
scientists/experts about the pill. Even Seaman, who had been extensively interviewed by
Nelson in advance of the hearings and recommended many of the witnesses that the committee
would ultimately call in to testify, was not asked to testify at the hearings ostensibly because
“she wasn’t a primary source.”8 8 According to one account, Nelson didn’t want to ask women
who had suffered side effects or Seaman to testify because he “didn’t like that way of doing
things” and “wanted to keep things on a high level.”8 9 But as Elizabeth Watkins points out,
earlier hearings on the fatal side effects of the antibiotic Chloromycetin included the testimony
of three fathers whose children had died as a result of the drug, so Nelson’s opposition to using
laywitnesses would seem specious. As one of the young women interviewed at the time would
say of the Senate hearings: “We’re tired of men controlling our lives and our bodies.”
Part of the enormous dilemma surrounding the pill at this time was of course related to
its widespread use and to the enormous investment many women (and men) had made in its
potential to function as a safe, simple, reliable method to control fertility. One of the public
health historians interviewed in The Pill summarizes its significance in terms of the mixed
blessing and the lessons it offers:
I think it captures in a macrocosm of space and in a microcosm of time... everything
that’s good and bad about science, about medicine, about research, about how
countries use each other, about the manufacturing process, about how money talks, and
about how people make decisions related to the most intimate things in their lives on the
basis of a lot other people who [were] out there in some cases constraining decisions
that they make.
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The ambivalence toward the pill as a great technological invention is certainly addressed in
many of the women’s movement films produced in the 1970s. For example, a female voice
over in Healthcaring (1976, d. Denise Bostrom and Jane Warrenbrand) states that there are
“forty-six known side effects of the pill.” The issue of side effects is illustrative of the
paternalism that dominated medical thinking at this time. Watkins, for example, argues that
physicians drew a rather arbitrary medical distinction between side effects and health risks that
was, in this case, profoundly at odds with patients’ perceptions. The “suggestibility” of side
effects meant that many doctors wouldn’t mention many of them to their patients, thinking that
this would prevent them from occurring. Moreover, the deployment of the term “oral
contraceptive therapy” reveals the degree to which medical management of the pill was cloaked
in the rubric of medical conditioning and management. As Watkins surmises: “The use of the
term ‘therapy’ is curious, because there was no disease to treat in the healthy women who took
the pill. What this term does indicate is the extent to which physicians had medicalized birth
control. By referring to oral contraception as ‘therapy,’ doctors implied that the prevention of
pregnancy was in effect a medical condition to be treated by medical professionals.”9 0
The other contraceptive breakthrough of the 1960s, the IUD, would never achieve the
widespread popularity of the pill. By 1967, only 2 percent of American women were using this
method as opposed to 30 percent using the pill.9 1 While the reasons for this are difficult to
determine with any certainty, Watkins and others have suggested that women were perhaps
more comfortable with taking pills, or doctors found it easier to write prescriptions for them
rather than to insert IUDs. Perhaps pharmaceutical manufacturers pressured both private and
publically supported clinics to recommend the more profitable oral contraceptives.9 2 This
possibility has some force when considering the fact that IUDs were frequently used in
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population control clinics in third world countries, not only because they were cheaper than the
pill, but because they were devices that, when inserted, were beyond a woman’s control. This
point throws into sharp relief the discrepancy between the population control view and the fight
for women’s emancipation, two projects which were frequently at odds with one another. As
Linda Gordon points out in Woman’ s Bodies, Woman’ s Lives, sterilization has been a popular
procedure offered to women in third world countries. Even in the United States into the 1970s,
privileged white women often had difficultly finding doctors willing to sterilize them whereas
working-class and especially nonwhite women were often sterilized against their will.9 3 This
scenario is presented in Taking Our Bodies Back: The Women’ s Health Movement (1974, d.
Margaret Lazarus, Renner Wunderlich, Joan Fink)9 4 in a sequence involving a round table
discussion where six or seven African-American women talk about their racist, classist, and
sexist experiences with the medical establishment. Several mention instances in which the
implications of tubal ligation had been insufficiently or misleadingly explained to them and have
resulted in an inability to conceive. Others mention the automatic assumption by doctors that
symptoms for which they were seeking treatment were related to sex-trade work and venereal
infection. Earlier in the film, Barbara Seamen describes a clinical experiment conducted on
poor Chicana-American women who were told they were being prescribed oral contraceptives
but were given placebos at their doctor’s whim.
What these films reflect is the growing cynicism and doubt that began to replace the
optimism and confidence that had pervaded much o f North American society in the postwar
boom. This cynicism extended far beyond science and the medical establishment to include
various institutions which had been previously viewed as venerated pillars of society, such as
government, big business, even the hallowed halls of academia. In the early 1970s, as Elizabeth
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Siegel Watkins points out, “a popular bumper sticker exhorted its readers to ‘Question
Authority”’ of all kind and manner. In the field of healthcare, she posits:
The pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession fielded criticism about the
necessity and wisdom of developing so many expensive new drugs and medical
technologies....Dissatisfaction with the medical profession extended beyond charges of
excessive reliance on drugs and technology to a far-reaching indictment of the practice
of medicine. With rising costs, people began to resent the increasingly impersonal
nature of medical care and to question the expertise and judgment of physicians.9 5
As one historian of American medicine commented with regard to this period, “medicine, like
many other American institutions suffered a stunning loss of confidence in the 1970s.”9 6
It is in this climate that the women’s liberation movement will take up issues of
women’s sexual health both on screen and off. As the voice-over (which we could later identify
as Barbara Seaman) begins the film:
There are some people who don’t really want autonomy over their own lives; that prefer
to let their doctors do the worrying for them or who are squeamish or whatever.
However, there’s another group of us - and I used to think that we were a minority but
now I’m starting to think that actually we may be the majority after all — that want
autonomy over our own bodies. We want to like our bodies and feel comfortable in
them and feel in control over our own lives.
This voice-over is accompanied by the film’s credits, a series of still images (or freeze frames)
of women talking, listening, smiling in small groups, a woman giving birth and breast-feeding,
doctors in a surgical theater, and a woman performing a gynecological self-exam in front of an
audience of young women - all of which will be images that recur in the body of the film itself.
While issues pertaining to birth and birth control have often been connected to a more disguised
campaign for female sexual liberation, what becomes apparent in the modem women’s
liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s and in these films specifically is a reclamation of
the body and knowledge of its processes. Here we see an open assertion and celebration of
women’s sexual self-discovery. While technological advances such as the pill marked
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important shifts in the ability for women to control their fertility, the problems associated with
its dispersal and side effects really foregrounded the need for more critical pedagogies of sexual
health. It is to these critical pedagogies that we will now turn.
Consciousness-Raising and Critical Consciousness
Much has been written about the link between feminist consciousness-raising (CR)
groups popularized in the 1960s and 1970s and the North American antiwar and civil rights
movements from which they emerged. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman describe the
women who banded together at this time as relying on the process of consciousness-raising to
help them generate “both an individual understanding of their condition and the raw material
from which to fashion a feminist world view.”9 7 As part of a mobilization process, largely
precipitated by the “paucity of radical analysis of women’s place in society,” CR groups
enabled women to exchange and share experiences on a wide range of topics:
...these women discovered that their problems were not idiosyncratic, the peculiar
outcome of unique relationships or family upbringing. Rather, their situations were
widely shared. Out of this came the perception that ‘the personal is political,’ that
dilemmas women encountered came from a socially constructed and enforced system of
gender roles that consigned women to an inferior position in society. In reaching these
conclusions, radical women’s liberationists laid the foundation for a vastly expanded
terrain of politics. Marriage, the family, and motherhood were reinterpreted as
institutions that maintained the oppression of women.9 8
Linda Gordon goes back even further to at least the 1870s as a period in which feminists began
to use consciousness-raising group discussions to examine the interface between women’s
“personal” and “political” problems.9 9
In the context of films produced by women activists involved in the liberation
movement, Julia Lesage reads the structure of the CR group as the “deep structure” repeated
over and over again in these films. Whereas the surface structure of the films is “the new
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iconography of women’s bodies and women’s space” which “implicitly challenges the general
visual depiction of women in capitalist society,” this deep structure marks an important use of
(and shift in) the aesthetics of cinema verite. Lesage says of these films: “Within such a
narrative structure, either a single woman tells her story to the filmmaker or a group of women
are filmed sharing experiences in a politicized way.”1 0 0 Acknowledging that the visual portrayal
of women in these films is often criticized for its “transparency,” or the “visual dullness of
talking heads,” Lesage defends these sequences of filmed talking heads as more than mere slices
of life. “These stories,” she argues, “serve a function aesthetically in reorganizing women
viewers’ expectations derived from patriarchal narratives and in initiating a critique of those
narratives.”1 0 1 An important part of this deep structure is that the filmmaker is in “a mutual,
non-hierarchical relation to her subject,” according to Lesage. This is a radical departure from
the male filmmaker’s “act of ‘seizing’ the subject and presenting one’s ‘creation’ and indicates
what she hopes her relation to her audience will be.”1 0 2
One of the film’s Lesage discusses at length in her essay is Self Health (1974,
Catherine Allan, Judy Irola, Allie Light and Joan Musant) which she views as illustrative of an
important iconographic shift in the portrayal of women’s sexuality, nudity, and alternative
health care. Made in conjunction with the San Francisco Women’s Health Collective, the film
begins with a series of extreme close-ups of a nude female body. We see the rise and fall of an
indeterminate body part - perhaps a belly - as we hear the sound of breathing, then close-ups of
a breast, perhaps pubic hair, lips, fingers touching the breast, and so on. Alongside these
images a female voice-over asserts:
Self Health breaks down the mystery that says medical care is difficult to understand.
We’re learning from our own bodies; teaching ourselves and each other how each of us
is unique and the same and what we need in order to be healthy. We see it as reclaiming
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lost territory that belonged traditionally to our doctors, our husbands, to everyone but
us. And now it’s time to get it back.
Part of the project of reclamation here involves dialogue and discussion among these seven or
eight women who are visualized participating in various self-health strategies including breast
exams, bimanual exams and gynecological self-exams. The persistence of the voice here, both
as voice-over and within the consciousness-raising structure, is suggestive of what some
feminists have described as a powerful metaphor to describe the learning experiences of such a
structure. Moreover, even voice-over functions in these films less as the didactic voice-of-god
authority of earlier sex ed material prescribing conformity to certain middle-class standards of
behavior, and more as provocation, engagement, and critique of the status quo.
In this sense, voice is much more than mere point of view, but becomes a metaphor to
apply to women’s experience and evolution. As the authors of Women’ s Ways o f Knowing
posit:
In describing their lives women commonly talked about voice and silence: “speaking
up,” “speaking out,” “being silenced,” “not being heard,” “really listening,” “really
talking,” “words as weapons,” “feeling deaf and dumb,” “having no words,” “saying
what you mean,” “listening to be heard,” and so on in an endless variety of connotation
all having to do with sense of mind, self-worth, and feelings of isolation from or
connection to others. We found that women repeatedly used the metaphor of voice to
depict their intellectual and ethical development; and that the development of a sense of
voice, mind, and self were intricately intertwined.1 0 3
The prominent use of the metaphor of voice grounds feminist pedagogy in the female body and
is problematically tied to an essentialist notion of a core “self’ who produces a language of
“voice” from experience. Indeed its easy to see how the utopian ethos o f films such as S e lf
Health, so grounded in the evidentiary status of experience through voice and talking head
testimony has been troubled both by poststructuralist semiotics and Lacanian psychoanalysis.
Nevertheless, Lesage reads Self Health as serving a number of important functions: “This film
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directly attacks the medical establishment. Women who see the film immediately want to talk
about two things - sex education and health care - in terms of what patriarchal society
lacks.”1 0 4 In this way, the film can be seen to act as a trigger to discussion, though it doesn’t
pose the questions it raises literally, they didactically evolve from the contents of the film itself.
In an essay from the recent documentary collection entitled Collecting Visible Evidence
(1999), Alexandra Juhasz defends and complicates these so-called realist practices of these
films against a body of feminist film theory from the 1970s and 1980s which (counter to
Lesage’s canonization of them) criticizes these works as unsophisticated. The primary focus of
much of this criticism from theorists such as Claire Johnston and Eileen McGarry is part of a
tradition in feminist film theory which was suspicious of realist film practices and of
spectatorial identification as an effective means of interrogating the ideology of images.1 0 5 As
Johnston argues: “...it is not enough to discuss the oppression of women within the text of the
film; the language of cinema/the depiction of reality must also be interrogated so that a break
between ideology and text is effected.”1 0 6 In a similar vein, E. Ann Kaplan intones: “Realism as
a style is unable to change consciousness because it does not depart from the forms that embody
the old consciousness.”1 0 7 On the other hand, Juhasz reclaims this “realist” political aesthetic
not only for its use value with respect to the historical juncture from which it emerged, but also
as a film and videomaking practice that, even today, must be reconsidered for the multiple ways
in which it functions. Thus her project becomes a retrieval of the 1970s feminist documentaries
from their “devalued position in feminist film history by looking more closely at what these
films did accomplish and by using other theoretical grids, beyond feminist film theory, to do
so.”1 0 8 Juhasz points out that, in fact, many of these films used multiple film styles and that
“there are many formal and thematic elements within even a realist talking head video that refer
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to the act of representation, that call attention to video as video, [or film as film], that remind
the viewer that realist representation is not necessarily transparent.”1 0 9
For example, after the opening sequence of Self Health described above, which plays as
we hear a number of women’s voices talking simultaneously, we are shown what would
conform to a talking heads, CR formation as a group of women sitting comfortably around a
room talk about their experiences with gynecological procedures. One of them speaks of the
need for sanitary conditions at the same time that the use of gloves and antiseptic conditions
promotes a view of the female body as dirty and contaminated. Another speaks of an
experience with a gynecologist in which she tore down the drape he used to separate her upper
body from lower as he performed a gynecological exam. To her comments on the humiliation
and distanciation of such staging, her doctor reportedly replied: “I’d never thought about how
ominous that is.” Yet another woman mentions the surprise she experienced after doing “self
health” in finally learning precisely where her IUD had been inserted long after she had
acquired one. From this talking head scenario in which the hand-held camera roams the room,
mostly framing those speaking, but sometimes showing us women listening, one of the group
facilitators begins a lesson in female anatomy staging her own body as “text” for the other
women to view. As she begins to describe and name the specifics of the external genitalia, the
camera alternates between close-ups of her body and reaction shots of her audience. Shortly
after this, our “teacher” inserts a speculum and, with the aid of mirror and flashlight,
demonstrates how to perform a gynecological self-exam, as she names what the camera once
again shows in tight close-up: the vaginal canal, the cervix and the os at its center.
From the group discussion preceding and proceeding from this performance, it is clear
that talking heads are merely a small part of the film. And certainly body as much as voice is
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central to this “lesson” as it were. But while our teacher here is not distinguished as a doctor,
nurse or clinical expert (as is the case in more traditional sex ed films), and the film’s setting is
clearly not situated in an austere clinic or traditional classroom, she is nevertheless set up as
“the one who knows.” Lesage says as much when describing another scene from the film where
the group of women simultaneously perform self exams: “women filmmakers have found a way
to show and define women’s sexuality on their own terms -- not with the thrill of possession and
not with objectification, but with the excitement of coming to knowledge”1 1 0 Lesage describes
this sequence as a filmic first for the way it presents women’s sexuality: “Women occupy the
whole space of the frame as subjects in a collective act of mutual, tangible self-exploration. As
one of my students said of this sequence, ‘It has none of the ‘Wow!’ of Candid Camera and
none of the distance of sex educational or so-called educational films.’”1 1 1 While Lesage’s
language clearly reflects the time period in which this essay was produced (1978) with words
like “possession” and “objectification” generally maligned as masculine strategies, this reading
squarely positions the film’s importance as an educational text.
Another film from this period, Near the Big Chakra (1972, Anne Severson) deploys the
spectacular aspects of imaging the body by using explicit imagery of female genitalia for
pedagogical purposes. The film has neither narration nor the use of sound of any kind and
shows in tight close-up a series of views of women’s genitals. The variability of female bodies
is emphasized not only by age (the women used in the film ranged from 6 months to 56 years of
age), but in the differences in shape, size and periodicity of the body (some vulvas are shown
with fluid emissions, some show tampon strings, etc.). While this text falls more into the
category of non-narrative, experimental film than several of the films I mention here, it
nevertheless met with strong responses in the art film and college circuits through which it
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circulated.1 1 2 In contrast to a longstanding tradition of turning the female body into a passive
erotic image, these tight close-ups of vulvas avoid any “romanticization” or eroticization of the
female body, speaking loudly despite the film’s aural silence.
A more “traditional” text which relies on the apparent simplicity of talking heads is The
Politics o f Intimacy, a video by Julie Gustafson (1972-73). Here a group of women talk about
various aspects of sexuality: arousal, orgasm, masturbation, desire, pleasure, power, how and
when they were initiated into sexual practices, and so on. Interspersed with the comments by
these women is Dr. Mary Jane Sherfey who is singled out by her professional status and via her
surname. All of the other women in the tape are identified by first name only at the beginning
of each subject segment in which they variously appear. The women are shown in close-up and
background space is our only clue to the possibility that they may well be in different places, in
spite of the fact that the film is edited thematically to suggest a dialogue among them.
Considerable age variation and perspective is depicted here: all but one woman is white; at least
one is clearly (a self-identified) lesbian; and all have a diverge range of experience and opinion.
While talking heads dominate the mise-en-scene, we frequently hear questions posed from off
screen; the microphone occasionally moves into the frame to capture the words of the women
speaking; freeze frames are frequently deployed, and the gaze of the women is sometimes
directed to the camera, sometimes to the screen space off to the side of it, sometimes to the other
women who are clearly scattered around the room in the off-screen space. Close-ups of hands
sometimes offer a variation or complement to the talking head emphasis. There are occasional
two-shots which at least suggest some of the interviewees are co-present for these discussions.
In one sequence, a woman holds her infant in her arms as she talks about her attitude toward
masturbation and her desire to curb such behavior in her young daughter who is then shown
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playing on a sofa. The range of filmic devices certainly foregrounds the techniques of the
video’s production in ways that challenge the simplistic realism often attached to feminist
documentaries. While this video would be classified as “telling” more than “showing” in a
strict sense, it nevertheless offers no voice-over commentary and privileges no voice (perhaps
beyond the scientific descriptions offered by Sherfey) as the voice of authority here. Moreover,
the simple fact of having women use their bodies for anatomy lessons (as in Self Health), or
discuss the mechanics of arousal, orgasm and masturbation are a marked departure from the
content of any previous sex ed films dealing with female sexuality.
Coming on the heals of the famous studies published as Human Sexual Response
(1966) and Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), most famous for countering the psychoanalytic
assumption that the vagina was the source for mature female sexual experience, Masters and
Johnson’s laboratory research would lay the foundation for a new social meaning for sex, most
particularly in women’s experience of it beginning in the end of the 1960s.1 1 3 As Barbara
Ehrenreich et al suggest, while Masters and Johnson “have received most of the credit for the
new understanding of female sexuality that emerged in the 1960s,...they were....only providing a
scientific rationale for a new social reality that women were creating for themselves.”1 1 4 One of
the significant results of the Masters and Johnson research was taken up on Anne Koedt’s
widely reprinted essay entitled “The Myth of the Female Orgasm” (1970) in which she argues
that a clitorally-centered sexuality has the potential to offer women sexual pleasure from other
women just as easily as other men, acknowledging that men might well have good reason to
“fear that they will become sexually expendable.”1 1 5 In Re-making Love, Ehrenreich, Hess and
Jacobs argue that the women’s movement thus had the significant effect of changing sex in
several fundamental ways: “It is not that women simply had more sex than they had in the past,
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but they began to transform the notion of heterosexual sex itself: from the irreducible ‘act’ of
intercourse to a more open-ended and varied kind of encounter.” From this, they posit that “the
social meaning of sex changed too: from a condensed drama of female passivity and surrender
to an interaction between potentially equal persons.1 1 6 Mary Jane Sherfey will in fact argue that
women, not men, are sexually aggressive and orgasmically potent as she says in The Politics o f
Intimacy:
I think it’s one of the tragedies of the female body that...the more orgasms a woman has
the more she can have. And therefore she can never be fully satisfied except in terms
of just sheer physical exhaustion....If you’ve had many orgasms you will know there is
a great sense of satisfaction and even triumph in knowing you can have them but the
pelvis can be acutely uncomfortable and that’s what I mean about it being a tragedy of
the body. It’s not a tragedy of the spirit.
It is this orgasmic potency in women that leads Sherfey and others to ague that women’s sexual
potential may indeed pose a threat to the social order.1 1 7
That these films generally rely on formal devices that were by the time of their
production widely practiced is very much in evidence. But as both Julia Lesage and Martha
Gever point out, formal sophistication is less the object here than is the deployment of these
texts in the service of consciousness-raising and political activism. Lesage argues that many
many women learned filmmaking techniques in the 1960s and 1970s through their involvement
in New Left and particularly the production of anti-war films.1 1 8 Gever talks about early
feminist video projects and their deployment of what was then new, relatively cheap portable
video equipment which became widely available in the U.S. beginning in the late 1960s. The
affordability and user-friendliness of the technology meant that video was quickly assimilated as
a powerful tool for the counter-culture.1 1 9 Gever, like Lesage, argues that these feminist
documentaries generally rely on established codes of realism, but employ them to create new
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social meanings rather than merely duplicate old ones. “As such,” claims Gever, “the works
are direct descendants of the nineteenth-century fusion of social realist art and scientific social
philosophies (Marxism, et al.), and more recently, the radical left-wing cinema and photography
of the ’20s and ’30s. For feminist artists, then, making documentary films, photographs and
now videotapes...usually proposes a redefinition of ‘reality’ by asserting the validity of
women’s existence and experiences, by challenging accepted ideas about those experiences, or
by a combination of both strategies.”1 2 0 These assertions are central to the project of
reclamation going in all of these films with respect to women’s sexuality and sexual health
which stage and perform the strategies of consciousness-raising in the struggle to effect change.
While much has been written about the CR structure, much less has been written about
the link between this formation and the pedagogical theories popularly espoused by Paulo
Friere, whose work gained considerable currency in North America beginning in 1970 with the
translation of what remains his most widely read book, Pedagogy o f the Oppressed}2 1 While
the argument that Brazilian-born Friere makes is derived from his experience as an educator to
oppressed, largely impoverished/illiterate communities in various Central and South American
countries, his theories have profoundly influenced literacy programs throughout the world as
well as what has come to be called critical pedagogy here in North America. His theoretical
works, particularly Pedagogy o f the Oppressed, provide classic statements of liberatory or
critical pedagogy based on universal claims of truth. One of the most provocative claims that
Friere makes regarding the necessity of coming-to-consciousness lies in his critique of
traditional teaching methods. This he describes as a “banking system,” a narrativized education
in which pedagogy becomes an act of depositing. In this model, which Friere suggests is the
dominant model in Western pedagogy:
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...the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of
communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students
patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the “banking” concept of education, in
which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving,
filing, and storing the deposits. They do, it is true, have the opportunity to become
collectors and cataloguers of the things they store. But in the last analysis, it is the
people themselves who are filed away through the lack of creativity, transformation,
and knowledge in this (at best) misguided system.1 2 2
Feminist pedagogy as it evolved particularly in the 1970s and 1980s provides a
historically situated example of critical pedagogy in practice. Both feminist pedagogy (as it is
usually defined) and Frierian pedagogy rest upon visions of social transformation. Underlying
both are certain common assumptions concerning oppression, consciousness and historical
change. The belief in the transformative potential of education that both pedagogies share rests
on truth claims of the primacy of experience and consciousness that are grounded in historically
situated social change movements. In both Frierian and feminist pedagogical terms, education
is a practice of freedom, one that is participatory, experiential, nonhierarchical, liberatory,
oppositional and/or radical. A shared goal of such liberatory pedagogies has been concepts
such as “empowerment” “dialogue”, “critical thinking” and “women’s or students’ or workers
voice.” Emphasis is on a new understanding of the role and nature of knowledge insofar as the
dynamic between teachers and students is intended to function horizontally rather than vertically
with, for example, feminist teachers set up more like assistants or facilitators as opposed to
knowers among a group of nonknowers.
In Healthcaring, for example, interspersed with talking head interviews with woman
who discuss their varied experiences with the medical establishment as well as voice-over which
offers some history of gynecology, the formation of the American Medical Association, and
technological developments associated with the obstretical procedures, are various scenarios
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showing women helping other women. A Chinatown clinic in New York is shown helping with
patient outreach and education on a variety of levels, from dental care to birth control
information. An alternative women’s health clinic, the Somerville Women’s Health Project in
Somerville, Massachusetts shows the interaction between patient advocates and the women to
whom they are offering their services. As a consumer and community-controlled effort, the
Somerville project was set up both to help with varying degrees of medical and preventive care
as well as to instruct women in how to be better “consumers” of the health care they receive
from the mainstream medical establishment. Healthcaring also shows two women — a mother
and daughter team - who offer self-health education through their participation in “Global
Gynecological Self-Health Clinics.” The mother, Molly Hirsh, performs a gynecological self
exam for the camera as she explains how to use the speculum, mirror and flashlight while her
daughter looks on. In an article on the film published in Jump Cut, Marcia Rothenberg
criticizes Healthcaring for its “good vibes” ethos at the expense of intelligent analysis and
discussion of preventative medicine. Of this scene in particular she writes:
They [the mother and daughter] smiled at one another, and it was implicit and explicit
that there ought not to be a generation gap among women - a woman is a woman. The
high point of this lauding of self health is when the mother produces a speculum and
proceeds to demonstrate the ultimate in liberation - self-insertion of the speculum while
sitting in your living room chatting with your daughter. Voila! - nothing to it. Cool,
casual, self-satisfied. What do you see at the other end of the speculum which is why
you put it in to begin with? That is never dealt with. The point seems to have been the
insertion itself. There is a bizarre smugness and self-indulgence about the whole scene
- and an isolation from reality....1 2 3
That both women talk about the benefits o f learning about one’s body, its fluctuations and the
empowering effect this can have for women when they visit their gynecologists seems to have
been either dismissed or ignored by Rothenberg here. Her critique of the scene in failing to
adequately “show” the cervix and discuss variation in its visual signifiers as a marker of
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medical health highlights less a weakness in the film than in the kind of expectations imposed
upon the text by its viewer here and, quite possibly, a kind of resistance to such gynecological
display which is similarly singled out for criticism in other writings on these films.
For example, we are shown what is at the other end of the speculum in both Self-Health
and Taking Our Bodies Back as well, though these scenes are nevertheless subject to skeptical
interpretation. Self-Health, as mentioned, shows one of the group facilitators, Lucy, using her
own body for an anatomy lesson on female genitalia before staging a “specular” self-exam in an
informal self-health seminar. In Taking Our Bodies Back, demonstrator Jennifer Burgess
performs a gynecological self-exam in front of a classroom filled with young college women,
who are invited to come up to the front of the room and view her “normal, healthy” cervix.
While this performance is clearly constructed for pedagogical purposes, it predates by over a
decade the “Public Cervix Announcements” so famously performed by Annie Sprinkle in front
of mixed audiences in more theatrical/ performance art scenarios.1 2 4 In Sprinkle’s work, the
cervical self-exam is performed by a new breed of sexual pedagogue: the “sexpert” whose
credentials include a career in hard core pornography. Sprinkle’s work is characteristic of a
decisive move in the late 1970s and 1980s away from the “victim oriented” feminism associated
with Second Wave struggles against rape, pornography, sexual and health risks and danger to a
cultural politics which emphasizes the potential empowerment for all.
A discussion of Self-Health and Healthcaring published in Camera Obscura takes
aim at the gynecological self-exam once again. Authors Stephen Grosz and Bruce McAuley
criticize both films for confusing sexuality with health in ways which leave women
“unprotected from some genuine dangers to their health.”1 2 5 They defend the effort to
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disseminate accurate and useful information about female anatomy and physiology as an
important component of the films:
When a woman in Self-Health allows that during her IUD insertion she had no idea
where the doctor “put that thing,” we can see the value of sharing basic facts. Yet
when a group of women are shown learning to look at the cervix (with the aid of
speculum, mirror and flashlight) the importance of this activity is less clear. Moreover,
the fact that the cervix shown is abnormal goes virtually unnoticed and raises important
issues of how these women are going to use the observations of self-examination. Is the
goal of self-examination simply to provide women with the ability to recognize early
abnormalities that would warrant consulting a gynecologist or is it meant to be a more
provocative activity which challenges the domain of the physician and the current
organization of health care? It is not made clear in the film.1 2 6
To be sure, the inadequate theorizing of the health care system more broadly in these films is a
flaw recognized even in Julia Lesage’s celebration of them.1 2 7 But the elisions/ exclusions in
this summation are curious. For one thing, the cysts on Lucy’s cervix do not go “virtually
unnoticed,” but in fact are observed and asked about by one of the participants in the group.
They are acknowledged as benign, as we see another close-up of Lucy’s cervix showing them,
and information about the ability to have them removed is discussed, albeit only briefly. The
whole staging of the self-exam is of course a provocation insofar as such images, such
performances of the female body were very new at this time. That this provocation serves no
political effectivity is rather easily dismissed by the authors here, especially since there is indeed
emphasis on what to look for, benign variation, and how to use self-knowledge to be better
informed patients when going to the “specialist” who will of course have more extensive
medical knowledge. These seminars would hardly advocate replacing annual pap smears under
the guidance of medical expertise with the simple mechanics of “self-exam” by the untrained
eye. What the visual training here is providing need not be an alternative to the medical
establishment. At the same time, moreover, it can serve significant pedagogical and
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empowering functions. That the self-exam gets singled out as problematic may be suggestive of
another kind of resistance to its performativity.
Donna Haraway has famously argued that while the speculum served as an icon of
women’s claiming their bodies in the 1970s, “that handcraft tool is inadequate to express our
needed body politics in the negotiation of reality.” As she puts it: “Self-help is not enough. The
techniques of visualization recall the important cultural practice of hunting with the camera and
the deeply predatory nature of photographic consciousness.”1 2 8 In a position that recalls Laura
Mulvey’s famous view of spectatorial desire and its profound links to the unconscious of
patriarchy in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Haraway casts suspicion upon “the
look” and its political potential. In countering this view, Terri Kapsalis argues that in the
gynecological theater, by “placing emphasis on woman’s experience of the exam, and therefore
her role as an active performer, decision maker, spectator and possibly self-spectator” women
can indeed confound traditional spectator-spectacle gendered power relationships such as those
outlined by Mulvey. While Kapsalis claims that self-spectatorship could be interpreted as
“both ‘evils,’ both ‘bearer of the look’ and the scopophilic voyeur,” she instead proposes that
“cervical self-exam specifically and self-spectatorship in general offer a critique of Mulvey,
representing an almost complete departure from the traditional gynecological and cinematic
apparatuses.”1 2 9 In her defense of these practices Kapsalis remarks that the impetus behind
self-exam was not necessarily pathology-oriented, but an attempt to understand well women in
their norm al states:
As the many practices, projects, and clinics that arose from the women’s health
movement illuminate, the practice of cervical self-exam is about larger issues than
simply investigating one’s own cervix. It is about imaging a new kind of health care
that organizes the female body and its relationship to health and pathology in new ways
and therefore reconfigures issues of power and control. As imaging technologies
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become more and more sophisticated, the impetus behind the practice of cervical self
exam becomes all the more important. Participation in one’s own care is vital in a
medical world of escalating technologies....The use of the speculum in cervical self-
exam may only provide a limited view, what Haraway refers to as ‘situated
knowledge,’ but it is worth having and knowing.1 3 0
If, from Donna Haraway, we accept that all knowledges are situated and hence ultimately tied
to subjectivity, then what do we make of the pedagogical potential of this experiential
knowledge which forms the basis of the consciousness-raising structure as the deep structure to
these feminist films and videos? How can we grasp the complexities of obtaining knowledge of
the body and its processes? Indeed what precisely is raised in the consciousness-raising
process? And where does this elevation/enlightenment come from? Is it part of the unconscious
or merely the false consciousness that (to paraphrase Christine Gledhill) “promotes a passive
subjectivity at the expense of analysis”?1 3 1 The ostensible “realism” of the consciousness-
raising structure performed here and elsewhere begs numerous questions regarding
performativity, the profilmic event, and cinemas of nonintervention. Moreover, it also invites
debate about the evidentiary status of experience as the point or the most important point to
glean from the process of consciousness-raising performed in these texts, not to mention the
degree to which this pedagogical process can be viewed as nonhierarchical. As the case of
Lucy and the deployment of her body as textual, pedagogical performance attests: the
educational scene requires, on some level, a “subject supposed to know.” The very fact of
positing mastery in another person (or text) creates the effect of transference. As Lacan puts it:
“As soon as there is a subject supposed to know, there is transference.”1 3 2 Viewed another way,
this voice, this talking cure of coming-to-consciousness always already implies the unconscious
subjectivities from which knowledge, self-awareness and hopefully political action might
emerge.
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What I want to offer by way of a provisional conclusion here relates to something that
both Lesage and Juhasz point toward but leave undeveloped in the very different trajectories of
their forceful arguments. This relates to a reconstitution and reclamation of these films within
the context of theories of feminist pedagogy and discourses of desire and the unconscious which
are powerfully implicated in the pedagogical scene. Situating these films within both
psychoanalysis and feminist critical pedagogy can shed new light on more recent ideas related
to the changing landscape of documentary studies, from its singular focus on documentary film
history, aesthetics and ideological criticism to what Michael Renov refers to in Collecting
Visible Evidence as a more “situated knowledge in which cultural representation is linked to
larger social and historical forces.”1 3 3 Renov makes a claim for the value of reconstituting
documentary film/video within the framework of psychoanalysis when he says:
I find the refusal to articulate this epistephilia in relation to desire unduly rationalist in
its alignment of documentary wholly with consciousness rather than in traffic with
unconscious processes. I challenge that position’s preference for knowledge effects
over pleasurable or ecstatic looking and for its enthronement of sobriety at the expense
of the evocative and delirious. I would argue for the documentary gaze as
constitutively multiform, embroiled with conscious and unconscious desires, driven by
curiosity no more than by terror and fascination.1 3 4
Re-positioning the consciousness-raising structure in these films in the framework of
psychoanalysis, sexual citizenship and coming-to-consciousness (or what Paulo Friere calls
conscientization) problematizes the popular critique which reads the structure in these films as
fundamentally unsophisticated. Instead, I propose that there is something fundamentally
opaque and nontransparent about this structure.
What these films illustrate, indeed the point to be made here is that all pedagogy -
including feminist pedagogy - is driven by a psychic interplay of desire among teachers and
students, students and their peers, and, for our purposes, between spectators and texts. Our
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provisional position of spectatorial mastery in these self-health texts which demonstrate various
techniques of feminist/medical self-surveillance points toward the structures of identification
(and also resistence) that accompany the pedagogical scene. In many ways, these films blur the
epistephilic tendency aligned to nonfiction film’s sober educative function by simultaneously
engaging the scopophilic pleasures of viewing long associated with feminist film theory’s
masculinist spectatorial paradigm. Counter to the expository form of so many sex educational
films, these works express the pleasures and pains of female sexuality and the politics of
enfleshment through a variety of means (not just talking heads), all of which are linked to
grounding experience (both mental and corporeal) as foundational to empowerment. This is a
view of pedagogy which, like Friere, sees its ultimate potential as a practice of freedom. This
practice is one that needs to be staged and performed repeatedly, functioning more as journey
than as conquered destination.
Despite the antirealist critique lodged against these films, perhaps indeed the pleasures
of seeing and the pleasures of knowing are not so far apart - even - perhaps especially - as
looks can be deceiving and knowledge as we all know is situated, mediated and relational. The
disidentification of so much feminist film theory (and general critical writing) from this body of
work says something about what Gregory Jay calls the “pedagogical unconscious.” This is a
term used to describe student resistance and ignorance not as a passive state - as an absence of
information - but as an “active dynamic of negation.”1 3 5 As Shoshana Felman puts it,
ignorance can be interpreted as “nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature less cognitive
than performative.”1 3 6 The rejection of much of these feminist documentaries says a great deal
about a period in feminist writing that, under the influence of poststructuralism and
psychoanalysis, questioned the efficacy of such body-centered feminist practice. On the heels
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of realism and its critique, structuralism, poststructuralism and feminist interventions into
psychoanalysis, a reconsideration of these films within the framework of an epistephilic desire
to know, a coming-to-consciousness, suggests that the impetus for so much of what we call the
“committed documentary” is powerfully implicated in our desire to know.
Felman’s link between psychoanalysis and pedagogy is suggestive. From Freud’s
original discussion of transference in which he describes it as both “the energetic spring” and
“interpretative key” to the psychoanalytic situation, Jacques Lacan has further argued that it is
what accounts for the “functioning of authority in general.” In other words, transference is
essential “not just to any pedagogic situation but to the problematics of knowledge as such.”1 3 7
This transference, he says “is love....; it is love directed toward, addressed to, knowledge.”1 3 8 In
a related vein, Diana Fuss suggests that if seduction is, after all, a question of transport - not
“of moving in space but of moving the desires of another person” - and if bonds of
identification provide critical channels of this transport, then “the mimetic function of the
educational process is precisely what invokes, impels, or institutes desire, which is to say that
all pedagogy comes under the sign of sexuality. The question is thus not When does a scene of
instruction become a scene of seduction? But rather When is a scene of instruction not a scene
of seduction?”1 3 9
Despite the suspicion cast upon experiential knowledge and the body-centered
pedagogy performed in the self-health documentaries of the 1970s, I would argue that they
mark a paradigmatic shift in the visualization o f sex education on film and video. This shift; not
only privileges the mimetic value of staging “real” bodies as texts, but also captures the
struggles and pleasures of acquiring knowledge which runs counter to the indoctrination that
many women (and men) had previously received. In this respect, these texts - beyond whatever
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“realism” gets attached to their techniques of production - strive to imagine a very new way of
conceiving female sexuality and identity. Beyond this, they also reflect more broadly a form of
pedagogy not from the detached position of some professed and impossible objective knowledge
but one that is derived from passionate commitment. This sexualized interpretation of the
pedagogical scene will become the focus of my next chapter in which the problematic
confrontations of ignorance and knowledge in relation to HTV/AIDS pedagogy will be my
central focus.
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Notes
1. This was a public statement made by Trudeau when he was a newly appointed Minster of Justice.
Though the omnibus bill for reform of the Criminal Code which made the sale or advertisement of
contraceptive information illegal died on the order paper, as newly Prime Minister of Canada in 1969,
Trudeau would successfully shepherd the same bill through the House of Commons, a maneuver which
would help contribute to his reputation as a daring, progressive young politician of the 1960s. Quoted
in George Radwanski, Trudeau (Toronto, 1978), 90.
2. Alex Shulman, “Organs and Orgasms,” Woman in a Sexist Society, Eds. Vivian Gomick and
Barbara Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 301.
3. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity,” Michel Foucault: Ethics Subjectivity
and Truth ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press1997), 172.
4. John D ’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History o f Sexuality in America,
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 300.
5. Louisa Randall Church, “Parents: Architects of Peace,” American Home (November 1946) 18-19.
Cited in Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York:
Basic Books, 1988), 135.
6. Angus McLaren and Arlene Tigar McLaren, The Bedroom and the State: The Changing Practices
o f Contraception and Abortion in Canada, 1880-1980 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1986), 125.
7. As McLaren and McLaren point out, these statistics mask the striking fertility differentials among
differing ethnic, religious and regional groups, with rural communities being particularly inclined to
higher fertility rates. For example, at the start of the twentieth century, the average family size in
rural, French, Catholic Quebec and New Brunswick was twice that in urban, English, Protestant
Ontario and British Columbia. For more information on these differential see The Bedroom and the
State, especially the introduction and pagesl25-128.
8. May, Homeward Bound, 59.
9. McLaren and McLaren point out that while Canadian fertility began its long-term decline by at
least the mid nineteenth century - with a thirty percent drop between 1851 and 1891 alone, this
decline was temporarily offset by the arrival of “prolific” immigrants from southern and eastern
Europe around the turn of the century. This pause in the drop of birth rate was a unique phenomenon
among Western nations, but was abruptly offset by a rapid decline recommencing on the heals of WWI
when (especially in the 1920s) Canada’ fertility decline, once again, began to match the Western
nation trend. See The Bedroom and the State, 11.
10. May, Homeward Bound, 9.
11. Ibid., 9
12. This essay was first published in Quarterly Review o f Film Studies (Fall 1978) [get pages] and is
reprinted (sometimes with excisions and revisions) with the title “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics
and Politics” in Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics o f the Committed Documentary
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1984) 223-261; reprinted in Films For Women. Ed. Charlotte
Brunsdon (London: British Film Institute Publishing, 1986), 14-23; All citations in this chapter are
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from Show Us Life where the essay’s title is modified slightly to “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics
and Politics.”
13. Lesage, “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics,” 225.
14. No authors are cited for either of these articles. “The Morals Revolution on the U.S. Campus,”
Newsweek (April 6, 1964) 52-59; “Morals: The Second Revolution,” Time (January 24, 1964) 54-59.
15. “The Morals Revolution on the U.S. Campus,” 52-53.
16. Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, On the Pill: A Social History o f Oral Contraceptives, 1950-1970
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 12.
17. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State, 9.
18. Ibid., 9
19. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping o f Adolescence in the 2(Th Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 160.
20. Ibid., 156
21. Robert A. and Frances R. Harper, “Are Educators Afraid of Sex?” Marriage and Family Living,
Vol. 19:3 (August 1957), 240.
22. Obviously much has been written on the creation and scrapping of the Production Code, a useful
summary of which can be found in David A. Cook, A History o f Narrative Film (New York: W. W.
Norton & Company, 1990), 535-537.
23. The book was such a success that within two months of its publication it was purchased by Warner
Bros and made into a feature film with Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in 1964. Warners paid
$200,000 for the rights to the book, the most any Hollywood studio had ever paid for a non-fiction
text. For an interesting analysis of the film in terms its production history and its relation to the PCA
and social history more broadly, see Charlotte Pagni, ‘“Does She or Doesn’t She?’ Sexology and
Female Sexuality in Sex and the Single Girl," Spectator 19:2 (Spring/Summer 1999), 8-25.
24. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Pocket Books, 1962), 246.
25. Barbara Ehrenreich, Elizabeth Hess, Gloria Jacobs, Re-making Love: The Feminization o f Sex,
(Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1986), 57-58.
26. Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl, 206.
27. Lester Kirkendall, “Values and Premarital Intercourse: Implications for Parent Education,”
Marriage and Family Living 22 (November 1960), 321.
28. Ibid., 319
29. Ibid., 317
30. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex, 161.
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309
31. Cited in John Kobler, “Sex Invades the Schoolhouse,” Saturday Evening Post 241 (June 19,
1968), 27.
32. Mary Calderone, “Sexual Energy: What to Do?” Western Journal o f Surgery, Obstetrics and
Gynecology 71 (Nov-Dee 1963), 276, Cited in Moran, Teaching Sex, 162.
33. Ibid., 160-161
34. Ibid., 161
35. Ibid., 161
36. Ibid., 163
37. Moran, Teaching Sex, 166.
38. John Kobler, “Sex Invades the Schoolhouse,” 27.
39. Ibid., 27
40. Laura J. Singer and Judith Buskin, Sex Education on Film: A Guide to Visual Aids and Programs.
(New York: Teachers College Press, 1971), 76.
41. Mimi Orner, “Open-Ended Films, Dead-End Discussions: An Ideological Analysis of Trigger
Films,” The Ideology o f Images in Educational Media: Hidden Curriculums in the Classroom (New
York: Teachers College Press, 1990), 44.
42. E. Newren, “The Trigger Film: Its History, Production, and Utilization,” Paper presented at the
annual meeting of the Association for Educational Communication and Technology, Atlantic City, NJ
(March 1974). Cited in Orner, “Open-Ended Films,” 45.
43. Orner, “Open-Ended Films,” 45.
44. Ibid., 50
45. George Kaczender would go on to make feature films at the National Film Board perhaps most
famously with D on’ t Let the Angels Fall (1968, written by acclaimed novelist Timothy Findley),
which became the first English-Canadian feature to be invited to compete at Cannes, though it
ultimately achieved only modest success both in Canada and abroad. An interesting discussion of this
and a few other minor Canadian feature film of this period is found in Tom Waugh, “Sexual
Revolution, Canadian Cinema and Other Queer Paradoxes,” Spectator 19:2 (Spring/Summer 1999)
26-39.
46. Gary Evans, In the N ation al Interest: A C hronicle o f the N ation al F ilm B o a rd o f C an ada fro m
1949-1989. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 103. Other titles from this period which
deal with the topic of teen pregnancy include Teenage Pregnancy (1970, Moreland-Latchford) and
Unmarried Mothers (1966, Granada TV) which are listed in Sex Education o f Film alongside Phoebe.
Thus far I have been unable to view these films.
47. Ibid., 103
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310
48. Moran, Teaching Sex, 161
49. Moran, Teaching Sex, 188
50. Moran, Teaching Sex, 189
51. Alan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History fo Venereal Disease in the United States Since
1880, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 175.
52. For American budget statistics see Brandt, 176.
53. Ibid., 175
54. Ibid., 175
55. Given the year of this film’s production and Fonda’s oeuvre, the film must be Barbarella (1968,
Roger Vadim) though this is not clear from the images shown.
56. Michel Foucault, The History o f Sexuality Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 61-62.
57. Ibid., 62
58. Moran, Teaching Sex, 186.
59. Linda Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman’ s Right: A Social History o f Birth Control in America
(New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976), xiii.
60. Ibid., xii
61. Ibid., xii
62. Ibid., xiii
63. Ibid., xvi
64. In spite of what had been a decade of work of Margaret Sanger and others, including Dr. Robert
Dickinson, onetime president of the American Gynecological Association and the Committee for
Maternal Health which he founded in 1924, the AMA only began to investigate the birth control issue
in 1935 when a Committee on Contraception was formed. As Carole R. McCann points out in her
history of the movement, the Committee ignored the social and economic reasoning of Sangerists and
outlined a very restrictive list of severe illnesses that might warrant contraceptive prescription. The
Committee went so far as to recommend that those with serious ailments should avoid marriage and
thereby preclude their need for contraception, an obvious influence of eugenic thinking. See Birth
C on trol P o litic s in the U n ited States, 1916-1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 93-94.
65. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State, 141.
66. Ibid., 44
67. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State, 22.
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68. Ibid., 22
69. James Reed, “Doctors, Birth Control, and Social Values: 1830-1970,” The Therapeutic
Revolution: Essays on the Social History o f American Medicine, eds. Morris J. Vogel and Charles E.
Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 128-129.
70. Gordon, Woman’ s Body, Woman’ s Right, 396.
71. Robert Eberwein, Sex Ed: Film, Video and the Framework o f Desire (Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1999), 176.
72. Robert Eberwein points out that the source of entertainment being a radio rather than a television
is another signifier of the national otherness here. He suggests that the questions asked by the man
“indicate a knowledge of English, thus a hint of assimilation, but he and his family are clearly not of
this country.” See Sex Ed, 176.
73. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State, 134.
74. Ibid., 104-123
75. Ibid., I l l
76. Gordon, Woman’ s Body, Woman’ s Right, 344.
77. Ibid., 345
78. D ’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 309.
79. McLaren and McLaren, The Bedroom and the State, 126.
80. Ian Schlanders, “The Birth Control Explosion,” Macleans 77: 6 (March 21, 1964), 38.
81. Sanger introduced Gregory Pincus to Katherine McCormick whom she had met through their
mutual interest in women’s suffrage, particularly the birth control aspect of it. Like Sanger,
McCormick believed that the right to birth control was as important as the right to vote for women.
As one of the first women graduates of MIT in 1904, McCormick was heavily invested in
progressivism’s faith in experts and science. To that end, she had enormous faith in the ability of
technology to help solve social problems. As the widow of a wealthy businessman, McCormick was
able to make financial contributions which would be the most significant source of funding to help
Pincus’s research and the eventual creation of the pill. In fact, Pincus would dedicate his book, The
Control o f Fertility to McCormick, “because of her steadfast faith in scientific inquiry.” See Watkins,
On the Pill, 26-28.
82. Cited in Watkins, On the P ill, 29.
83. Ibid., 29
84. Ibid., 9-33
85. For a detailed analysis of this work, see Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates: Performing Gynecology
From Both Ends o f the Speculum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) 31-60.
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86. Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston: New England Free Press,
1971), 1.
87. Watkins, On the Pill, 104.
88. Ibid., 107
89. Ibid., 107
90. Ibid., 79
91. Ibid., 71
92. Ibid., 71
93. Gordon, Woman's Body, Woman’ s Right, 401.
94. Wunderlich, along with her partner Fink decided to self-distribute Taking Our Bodies Back,
which was so successful that they founded Cambridge Documentary Films, a production and
distribution company, as a result. The company continues to make “socially committed”
documentaries on a variety of topics.
95. Watkins, On The Pill, 73.
96. Cited in Watkins, On the Pill, 73.
97. D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, 311.
98. Ibid., 311
99. Gordon, Woman’ s Body, Woman’ s Right, 409.
100. Lesage, “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics,” 246. For another essay on the
feminist talking head documentary see Barbara Halpem Martineau, “Talking About Our Lives and
Experiences: Some Thoughts about Feminism, Documentary, and ‘Talking Heads,’” “Show Us Life”:
Toward a History and Aesthetics o f the Committed Documentary, Ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen,
N.J.:The Scarecrow Press, 1984), 252-273.
101. Ibid., 236
102. Ibid., 231
103. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clincher, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck
Tarule, W om en ’ s W ays o f K now ing: The D evelopm en t o f Self, Voice, an d M in d (New York: Basic
Books, 1986), 18.
104. Lesage, “Feminist Documentary,” 130.
105. Alexandra Juhasz, “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality - All I Want to Show is My
Video: The Politics of the Realist Feminist Documentary,” Collecting Visible Evidence. Eds. Jane M.
Gaines and Michael Renov. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.) 190-215. The
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canonical essays to which Juhasz refers are by Eileen McGarry “Documentary, Realism, and Women’s
Cinema,” Women and Film Vol. 2:7 (1975), 50-57 and Claire Johnston, “Women’s Cinema as
Counter-Cinema,” Movies and Methods Volume I, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1976), 208-217. Coming from the British tradition, though nevertheless according some value
to realist strategies, Christine Gledhill defends realist epistemology in “Recent Developments in
Feminist Film Criticism,” Quarterly Review o f Film Studies No. 3:4 (Fall 1978) 458-93.
106. Johnston, “Women’s Cinema and Counter-Cinema,” 215.
107. E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides o f the Camera (New York: Methuen, 1983), 131.
Cited in Juhasz, “They Said We Were Trying to Show Reality - All I Want to Show is My Video,”
191.
108. Ibid., 196
109. Ibid., 209
110. Lesage, “Feminist Documentary: Aesthetics and Politics,” 230.
111. Ibid., 229-230
112. Paula Rabinowitz, They Must Be Represented: The Politics o f Documentary (New York: Verso,
1994), 164.
113. William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Response (Boston: Little Brown,
1966); William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson, Human Sexual Inadequacy (Boston: Little
Brown, 1970).
114. Ehrenreich et al, Re-making Love: The Feminization o f Sex, 7.
115. Anne Koedt, “The Myth of the Female Orgasm,” Woman in Sexist Society, eds. Vivian Gomick
and Barbara Moran (New York: Basic Books, 1971), 39.
116. Eherenreich, et al, Re-making Love, 5
117. Mary Jane Sherfey, “A Theory of Female Sexuality,” Sisterhood is Powerful, ed. Robin Morgan
(New York: Random House, 1970), 220-230.
118. Ibid., 223
119. Martha Gever, “Video Politics: Early Feminist Projects.” Afterimage. Vol. 11: 1-2 (Summer
1983), 25.
120. Ibid., 25
121. Paulo Friere, Pedagogy o f the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 2001).
122. Ibid., 72
123. Marcia Rothenberg, “Good Vibes and Preventative Medicine: Healthcaring From Our End o f the
Speculum," Jump Cut 17 (April 1978), 3.
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124. For discussion of Annie Sprinkle’s performance art work see, Chris Straayer, “The Seduction of
Boundaries: Feminist Fluidity in Annie Sprinkle’s Art/Life,” Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 233-252; Terri Kapsalis, Public Privates, 113-134; Linda
Williams, “A Provoking Agent: The Pornography and Performance Art of Annie Sprinkle,” Dirty
Looks, eds. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 1993), 176-191.
125. Stephen Grosz and Bruce McAuley, “Self-Health and Healthcaring," Camera Obscura 7 (1981),
131.
126. Ibid., 131
127. The strength of The Chicago Maternity Center Story is highlighted by Lesage in this regard. See
“Feminist Documentary,” 228-229.
128. Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late
Twentieth Century,” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention o f Nature (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 169.
129. Kapsalis, Public Privates, 166-167.
130. Ibid, 171-172. Reference to Haraway is from Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, 198.
131. Christine Gledhill, “Women’s Cinema as Counter-Cinema,” Feminism and Film, ed. E Ann
Kaplan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 30.
132. Cited in Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and
Interminable,” Yale French Studies 63 (1982), 35.
133. “Documentary Horizons: An Afterward,” Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M. Gaines and
Michael Renov, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 321.
134. Michael Renov, “Documentary Horizons,” 321.
135. Gregory Jay, “The Subject in Pedagogy: Lessons in Psychoanalysis and Politics,” College
English 49 (1987), 789.
136. Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable,” 30.
137. Ibid., 35
138. Ibid., 35
139. Diana Fuss, Identification Papers (New York: Routledge, 1995), 125-126.
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Chapter 5: Practices of Ignorance and Knowledge:
Rethinking Sex Education in the AIDS Era
Sex education in the decades after the 1960s became a potent symbol of contention in
the “culture wars” over the moral direction of the United States, for it involves both
sexuality and family authority, and the debates necessarily become debates over control
of the coming generation. Too often, however, commentators and activists have taken
this political cleavage to be the central issue in sex education, and have failed to look
beyond the immediate past for a clearer perspective. Sex education at the turn of the
twenty-first century is organically connected to the sex education of the previous
century.
Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex (2000)1
Teaching, like analysis, has to deal not so much with lack of knowledge as with
resistances to knowledge. Ignorance, suggests Lacan, is “passion.” Inasmuch as
traditional pedagogy postulated a desire for knowledge, an analytically informed
pedagogy has to reckon with “the passion for ignorance.” Ignorance, in other words is
nothing other than a desire to ignore: its nature is less cognitive than performative; as in
the case of Sophocles’ nuanced representation of the ignorance of Oedipus, it is not a
simple lack of information but the incapacity - or the refusal - to acknowledge one’s
own implication in the information.
Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education:
Teaching Terminable and Interminable (1982)2
The performative aspect of knowledge and ignorance, and the idea that resistances to knowledge
are crucial to the scene of instruction is the point with which I ended Chapter 4 when I
developed a link between teaching, critical pedagogy, consciousness-raising and the pedagogical
unconscious. This chapter will expand upon these issues in relation to a small sample of the
hundreds of sex education videos that have emerged in the wake of the AIDS crisis. The
epidemic and its initial association with homosexuality (and slightly later, intravenous drug use
and hemophilia) has led to a proliferation of sex educational strategies from a range of
subcultural communities, especially since the conservative governments in both Canada and the
United States in the early years of the crisis were so slow to respond to a disease afflicting a
small, disenfranchised group. As the AIDS crisis entered a second decade, it became clear that
educators needed to rethink AIDS pedagogy, especially as a rise in HIV transmission rates
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began to take place after years of steady decline.3 This statistic is a clear indication of the
“passion for ignorance” that AIDS educators were forced to confront. Of course, evidence that
a fact-based, instrumentalist approach to knowledge acquisition was not necessarily a
prescription for behavioral change had long been obvious to many involved in sex education.
As Jeffrey Moran argues:
Facts alone seldom alter sexual behavior. Nothing is more obvious to educated adults
in the AIDS era than the absolute necessity of either abstaining from risky behavior or
protecting oneself from the consequences of this behavior. Sex education programs in
the schools and publicity campaigns in general have made clear both the dangers of
contracting HIV and the ways in which to protect oneself. Yet every year millions of
Americans continue to engage behaviors that place them at risk, and adolescents
consistently take even more risks. Why?4
To begin to answer this question, I will trace a brief history of the HIV/AIDS crisis,
emphasizing its important links to older venereal diseases, its links to identity-based politics,
and to the reimagining of community that it has inspired.
This chapter situates AIDS pedagogy as both a repetition and extension of models from
past practices in order to better understand the current state of sex educational film/video, as
well as to imagine possibilities for the future. To this end, I continue to address sex educational
strategies directed towards teens as an extension of material covered in Chapters 3 and 4.
Another continuity I explore relates directly to the contribution of feminist interventions into sex
education in the 1970s and 1980s. The second category of tapes I will examine, therefore,
comprises AIDS videos made by and for women with an emphasis on racial minorities. The
final category o f production I will cover highlights a very new approach to sex education. The
highly explicit safer sex material produced for gays and lesbians which incorporate aspects of
pornographic vernacular as part of a strategy for eroticizing safer sex practices is, I argue, a
radically different way to conceive of (safer) sex education by explicitly addressing (and
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visualizing) sexual pleasure. To paraphrase Cindy Patton, pornography can be viewed in these
tapes as a form of dissident pedagogy.5 Before looking at this material, however, I want to
briefly situate AIDS discourse within the broader history of venereal diseases in order to
establish both continuities and discontinuities with the past, particularly in terms of the ways
that HIV/AIDS education is conceived and deployed.
The Old and the New: Epidemics, AIDS, Identity Politics
Making sense of AIDS -- Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome — is a project undertaken by
a plethora of scientists, journalists, political and cultural activists, educators, artists and
academics since first reports of the disease surfaced in medical literature in the early 1980s.
Like other sexually transmitted diseases, AIDS conformed to a Western tradition of sexualizing
evil by initially linking the disease to deviant practices rather than viral infection. The first
name of the disease - Gay-Related Immunodeficiency (or GRID) as it was called in a 1981 New
England Journal o f Medicine article - makes clear the initial attribution of mysterious causal
relations between a sexual subculture and a series of diverse illnesses from which many young
men (recorded most prominently in New York and California) were dying.6 Within a year of
these initial reports, similar information from physicians throughout North America
demonstrated that many nongay people were also being diagnosed and that the problem -
whatever it was - was growing at epidemic rates. That gay men were the overwhelming
statistic in North America at this time, however, meant that mainstream stereotypes of AIDS
were initially presented through the figure o f the young, m ostly white, contaminated
homosexual body.
AIDS emerged as a public health crisis and cultural phenomenon in the wake of the
historical development of identity politics beginning with the black liberation movement in the
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1950s, the counterculture/youth movement of the 1960s, women’s and gay liberation
movements of the 1960s and 1970s. I chart some of these identity-based movements in relation
to sex education practices in Chapter 4, most prominently the impact of feminist and of
women’s self-health movements surrounding issues of pregnancy, abortion, female sexuality,
the pill and contraception more broadly. These issues begin to be addressed in sex ed films in
new ways as women take control of cameras and speak for themselves, as new technologies
(most prominently video) enter into widespread circulation and use, as challenges to medical
and scientific authority get staged, and as older pedagogical traditions and techniques come
under increasing scrutiny. With the emergence of the AIDS crisis beginning of the 1980s, the
importance of various social groups claiming politicized identities derived from shared
characteristics such as gender, race, sexuality and ethnicity, takes on a different set of meanings
and mobilizations. Since AIDS primarily affected disenfranchised groups, debates about how
to represent the crisis overlapped other debates related to political correctness and the
usefulness of identity politics. Marita Sturken historicizes the emergence of AIDS within the
legacy of cultural upheavals in the 1960s and 1970s:
Those social movements formed the basis for....identity politics....and fostered public
policies such as affirmative action that have come under attack in the 1980s and 1990s.
AIDS began killing many young gay men at a moment in history when the visibility of
the gay and lesbian community was at its height. It started killing many intravenous-
drug users at a time when black and Latino communities were struggling to confront
the explosion of drug use in inner-city neighborhoods and when the legacy of the civil
rights and Chicano movements had produced active criticism of racist public policies
and media representations.7
That this health crisis emerged alongside the election of conservative governments in
Britain, Canada and the U.S. is integrally linked to the devastatingly slow response of
governments to properly respond to the crisis. AIDS also coincided with the rise of the
politically powerful religious right which sought to “scale back public policies begun in the
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1960s and wielding a rhetoric of morality, shame, and narrowly defined ‘family values.’”8
Moreover, its initial spread - as mentioned, most prominently within the gay community -
clearly facilitated a pro-family, anti-sexual rhetoric justified not simply by conservative
morality but in the name of safety and medical health. While the publicity surrounding Rock
Hudson’s diagnosis of the disease in 1985 created a media blitz surrounding his persona,
especially his desire to hide from public purview both his homosexuality and his positive
serostatus, it also “put a face to AIDS” which seemed to have a positive impact of heightening
public awareness and U.S. governmental response to a disease which had been ravaging the gay
male community since 1981 but which Ronald Reagan famously failed to mention in any public
address until well after his friend and former colleague’s death.9 This disparity between
Hudson’s star image as a strapping, beefcake model of health heteromasculinity (his star body)
and the images which permeated the media following the revelation of his AIDS status (the
ravaged, emaciated anti-body)1 0 are illustrative of a much longer legacy of diseases whose
history reflects a longstanding tradition of depicting diseased people as contagious vessels.
In her discussion of AIDS, for example, Susan Sontag describes the dual metaphoric
genealogy of the disease. Viewed simultaneously as a microprocess caused by HIV which
“invades” the body like a cancer or alternatively gets interpreted from the point of view of
transmission and hence is read in terms of older metaphors of pollution, AIDS carries a legacy
of meanings attached to infectious diseases such as the plague and tuberculosis.1 1 By the end of
the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was invested with a multitude o f meanings and metaphors. As
with Progressive reform efforts to understand disease from a medical rather than moral
standpoint beginning in the end of the nineteenth century, scientists, physicians, and public
health authorities began to argue repeatedly that AIDS was “an epidemic of infectious disease
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and nothing more.” While Paula Treichler sees this “uncompromisingly medical argument” as
an important, powerful one, she also interprets the AIDS epidemic as simultaneously and
continually eluded such containment, producing a parallel epidemic of meanings, definitions,
and attributions.1 2 Treichler calls this semantic epidemic an “epidemic of signification”1 3 the
significance of which continues into the twentieth-first century, though today the AIDS
pandemic is most frequently presented (in mainstream media at least) in terms of a disease of
the other ravaging heterosexual populations in sub-Saharan African countries and now quickly
wending its way into South and Southeast Asia - especially India and China - as well as
Eastern Europe.
While AIDS is in many ways a unique response of bodies - via a range of what are
called “opportunistic infections” resulting from the HIV virus, AIDS pedagogy bears important
links other sexually transmitted diseases and efforts to halt their spread, especially in the early
decades of this century. Indeed, like the Progressivist efforts to medicalize rather than moralize
venereal disease, the cultural tendency to attribute cause continues to retain the spectre of
immorality. Since disease is read as “abnormal” and unnatural, it continues to be associated
with specific social groups - for example, gay men, intravenous drug users, promiscuous men,
women and teens, hemophiliacs and infants - with varying links to transgression, immorality or
innocent victimization. In an overview of the ways in which disease is assigned meanings,
Sander Gilman argues that AIDS most closely resembles syphilis. With Western society’s
persecutorial attitude toward sexual variation, AIDS was the most likely candidate to replace
syphilis when an apparent cure for that disease was found in the 1940s:
[T]he taming of syphilis and other related sexually transmitted diseases with the
introduction of antibiotics.... left our culture was a series of images of the mortally
infected and infecting patient suffering a morally repugnant disease but without a
sufficiently powerful disease with which to associate these images. During the 1970s
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there was an attempt to connect these images with genital herpes, but even though it is
a sexually transmitted disease, its symptomology was too trivial to warrant this
association over the long run. AIDS was the perfect disease for such associations, even
if it was not a typical sexually transmitted disease.1 4
Despite considerable evidence that HIV is not easily communicated, as more and more
nongay people began to contract it, widespread fears, hysteria and misinformation about its
transmission began to spread. The mainstream media, as has been widely chronicled, was quick
to perpetrate myths and sensation around the disease’s infiltration into the heterosexuality
community as Life magazine famously reported in bold red letters on a 1985 cover “NO ONE
IS SAFE FROM AIDS.”1 5 Many cultural critics have argued that this message carried with it
the implication that ‘“no one is safe’ from gays and intravenous drug users,” the groups initially
most widely equated with the disease. As was the case with syphilis and gonorrhea earlier in
the century, myths surrounding transmissibility of HIV (for example, through toilet seats,
drinking cups, cutlery and door knobs) revealed much deeper concerns about cultural “others.”
Just as “innocent syphilis” had often been interpreted as the contamination of a respectable
middle-class via modernity’s demographic shifts by bringing that class into closer contact with
a corrupting, ethnic, working-class “sexual underworld,” now AIDS threatened the heterosexual
culture with homosexual contamination. As Allan Brandt argues, we suddenly had a similar
situation in which homosexuality - rather than a virus- was perceived to be the cause of
AIDS.1 6 After a generation of political activism to have homosexuality removed as a disease
from the psychiatric diagnostic manuals, it suddenly seemed to be reappearing as an infectious,
terminal disease.
In this climate, the gay urban white middle-class community with its sophisticated
understanding of media and marketing began to contest the various issues surrounding access to
health care, government indifference and mainstream media representations of AIDS. The
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persecutory practices to which primarily gay men, intravenous drug users and promiscuous
individuals were increasingly subjected in this climate has been extensively scrutinized by a
range of critics, activists, theorists and artists in a vast range of provocative material which, for
a time, became one of the most active fields of cultural, academic production. The gay
community in particular responded as a politicized subculture with the mobilization of groups
such as ACT UP which began in New York City but quickly led to branches forming in major
cities throughout North America (including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, Montreal and
Vancouver), as well as Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) in New York. Indeed while
important continuities from past venereal diseases continued to inflect the understanding of
HIV/AIDS, Treichler is persuasive in arguing that this “epidemic of signification” is also
historically unlike any other disease preceding it.1 7 Simon Watney argues along this vein when
he says: “AIDS is not only a medical crisis on an unparalleled scale, it involves a crisis of
representation itself, a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body and its
capacities for sexual pleasure.”1 8
Where government efforts to regulate VD during World Wars I and II were waged as a
home front war to protect the populace and thus the security of nations at war, the AIDS crisis
necessitated another kind of war effort, this time frequently waged by subcultural groups
against governments and their failure to adequately respond to the crisis. Indeed, where
govemmentality is a crucial aspect to sex educational strategies in the early decades of the
twentieth century, the AIDS crisis frequently inspired a new pedagogical position in which the
notion of govemmentality is under surveillance - viewed simultaneously as rigid, fluctuating
and under constant contestation. One obvious analogy of the war metaphor that circulates
around older venereal diseases and AIDS is the proliferation of the term “PWA” or “PWLA”
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for people with (or living with) AIDS to replace connotations of victimization associated with
this (and other) illnesses. The embattled resonance of this term PWA with POW (prisoner of
war) is reflected in the militant political activism of groups such as ACT UP (AIDS Coalition
to Unleash Power) and Queer Nation as collectives of identity-based, in-your-face political
organizing waging war on AIDS. These groups, among others, suggest important, powerful
reconfigurations of community - including sexual communities - as they began to mobilize and
criticize mainstream coverage of the crisis and government inaction on municipal,
state/provincial and federal levels.1 9 This bottom-up, grassroots organizing, I argue, reflects
both continuities and discontinuities with past models, offering important avenues through
which the future of sexuality and sex education may be reconceived.
One of the crucial aspects of this organizing involved the unprecedented production and
dissemination of AIDS education and cultural activism through video. In a climate in which
video technology virtually exploded during the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS video activists quickly
begin to make use of camcorder technology, low cost consumer editing, cable and satellite
broadcasting, as well as growing interest in nonprofessional documents of “real people.” Some
of the video collectives to emerge in response to the crisis include Granfury and DIVA TV
(Damned Interfering Video Activist Television) as offshoot/affinity groups of ACT UP as well
as Testing the Limits (TTL), initially composed of six artists and AIDS activists who also knew
each other either from ACT UP or from the Whitney Independent Studio Program. Gay Men’s
Health Crisis (GMHC), formed in 1982 in New York, also began production o f an extensive
series of tapes in 1987 when Jean Carlomusto was hired as a fulltime audiovisual specialist for
the organization.2 0 Jan Zita Grover marks 1985-86 as a transformative year for such grassroots
work with, for example, GMHC producing Chance o f a Lifetime, the first safer-sex erotic
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videotape.2 1 In a climate where mainstream coverage was viewed from an increasingly
problematic perspective by various subcultural groups, gay communities, says Grover,
countered with “massive campaigns to affirm values of gay liberation: re-sexualizing gay men
by redefining sexual pleasure and sexual acts.”2 2
In her chronicle of this vast output, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative
Video, Alexandra Juhasz lists dozens of related video projects to emerge from this time leading
to a situation in which, by 1987-1988, the number of alternative AIDS videos rose into the
hundreds.2 3 Juhasz covers important video work (including her own) directed to educating
minorities. While she covers material directed to gay men, she also includes material made for
women - especially black and Latina minorities - often ignored in initial coverage of the
epidemic. The challenges and problems posed by AIDS education on both national and
subcultural fronts highlights an issue that had been circulating around sex education for some
time: that is, the importance of tailoring educational efforts to specific demographics rather than
offering one model as standard for all. Clearly, sex education strategies were believed to work
best when “students”could learn from their “peer group,” a point suggested by the production of
training films depicting servicemen tailored to each army branch during WWII (discussed in
Chapter 2). This point is apparent in the failure of much “white” urban, queer-oriented North
American safer sex material to speak to urban black and Hispanic heterosexual populations.
O f course, sex education strategies have long been divided along the lines of gender and age.
But following the important shift to identity-based politics in the 1960s and 1970s, new models
emphasizing race, ethnicity, sexuality, (as well as age and gender) begin to emerge.
Furthermore, while it’s hard to imagine a tape that stresses a class perspective exclusive of
these other domains, class issues inflect all of these models in different ways, most pointedly in
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tapes emphasizing race and ethnicity. In sum, the assumption of white middle-classness which
is depicted as the idealized norm of sex education material through most of the twentieth
century is gradually eroded as pedagogical materials begin to represent and address the needs
and concerns of specific subcultural communities.
Juhasz outlines the many differences between mainstream and alternative video in AIDS
TV including the low-tech, low budget values in alternative work which is as much a reflection
of limited financial resources as impelled by “[T]he urgency of getting out a certain message”
and overriding “the financial motivations of mainstream production.”2 4 Catherine Saalfield
characterizes alternative video as illustrative of qualities of “amongness” between producers
and audiences.2 5 She cites Julio Espinosa’s influential essay, “For an Imperfect Cinema,”2 6 in
her defense of “low production values, glitches, and jerky camera movements” in activist tapes.
While Saalfield cautions against Espinosa’s assumption that “perfect cinema - technically and
artistically masterful - is almost always reactionary,” she nevertheless agrees that: “It’s a
question of priorities. ‘Armed propaganda’ goes nowhere if bogged down by corporate
approaches to the technical aspects of logo manufacturing and unfathomable cost of crystal-
clear images and sound. Plus, ‘perfect cinema’ remains fundamentally incompatible with the
unpredictable and spontaneous activist approach towards life-and-death situations.”2 7 This
position of amongness and “imperfection” resonates with Julia Lesage’s argument regarding
feminist verite filmmakers, their low-tech realist aesthetics and compassionate identification
with the subject matter o f so many feminist documentary films produced in the 1970s.2 8 Juhasz
expands on this distinction from mainstream production more broadly:
The production and viewing of alternative media involves a willingness and often
sought-out dialogue among producer and audience because the people involved need
the dialogue; they need lifesaving information, need to see their lives and problems
represented with dignity, need to hear politically inflected interpretations of the issues
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which affect them, and need to speak to each other about what they know. People with
highly specific demands and opinions use alternative media because it can “narrowcast”
crucial information among a limited audience of like minded people....The particular
power of alternative media production is its unique capacity to allow individuals from
the “minority,” “disenfranchised,” and “marginal” communities of our culture to
extract and distinguish themselves from the “general public” by making and seeing
diversified, individualized media images.2 9
Remarking on how the camcorder has equipped people to engage in political activism and
critique of dominant culture in unprecedented ways, Juhasz interprets video technology as
simultaneously a dominant cultural form available to the general public yet in a personal voice
by, for, and about various disenfranchised communities.3 0
The alternative media to which Juhasz refers covers a very broad range of work, only a
small subsection of which includes AIDS activist material dedicated to providing specific
education on transmission and protection against HIV as well as safer-sex tapes that I will talk
about here. Other categories in this huge output include cable access shows; documents of
performances and plays addressing AIDS; experimental works by artists deconstructing mass
media hysteria; documentaries portraying the vast range of AIDS service organizations; activist
tapes; and tapes made for PLWAs, all of which may be read as educational vehicles to varying
degrees and many of which have been extensively written about elsewhere.3 1 Of the three
categories of AIDS video I will examine, teen sex ed material is most consistently made if not
by at least from more of a mainstream than “alternative” perspective. It is to this material than
I will now turn.
Teen Education: Right, Left and Center
As AIDS suddenly got framed from a perspective in which everyone was at risk in the
mid-1980s, the question of sex education for teens came under renewed scrutiny and fierce
debate. By the late 1980s, considerable concern revolved around teens and their susceptibility,
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particularly as greater numbers became HIV positive. While the number of teenagers with
AIDS was certainly small compared to statistics for gay men and intravenous drug users, as the
incubation period for the virus was extended and better understood, it became clear that many
adults who were developing AIDS symptoms were likely infected in their teenage years.
Gradually, researchers began to fear that HIV infection among this group had been drastically
underestimated and that the actual number of HTV-positive teens was doubling every year.3 2 In
fact, on a global scale, the Director of the World Health Organization estimated in 1993 that
half of the worldwide infections since the beginning of the pandemic occurred between fifteen-to
twenty-four-year-olds.3 3
I have described in Chapters 3 and 4 the history of the construction of adolescence over
the course of the twentieth century as a modem concept, viewing adolescence as a precarious,
highly sexualized, even probationary stage between childhood and adulthood. The
susceptibility of teens at this stage as they assert their independence from adults and experience
the disruptive hormonal transformations which promote interest in sexuality is frequently
viewed as potentially volatile and dangerous, especially insofar as young people are likely to
take risks and experiment. With Family Life Education now virtually moribund and marriage
losing is privileged position as the sole site for sexual relations over the course of the 1960s and
1970s, interest groups from both liberal and conservative positions began to lock heads in the
debate about AIDS education for youth.
On the one hand, cultural conservatives who subscribed to a “risk group” model with
respect to AIDS, often saw no reason to educate youth about the epidemic other than to instill
an old, moralistic pedagogy of fear dichotomizing the worried well and the scapegoated sick (or
bodies and anti-bodies). Underlying this position is the fear of teaching about AIDS because of
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its subcultural affiliation with homosexuality and drug use. Such fears are grounded on a
principle of knowledge and desire as infectious and infecting. In other words, learning about
homosexuality (or drugs) may increase curiosity and possible seduction to their “dangerous”
practices. Robert L. Simonds, president of the National Association of Christian Educators
argued in 1993 that liberal educators were using their “supposedly nondirective methods to
‘turn schools into institutions of psychological manipulation and to produce robotic students on
political correctness.’”3 4 Beyond this, Simonds proclaims that AIDS education, by introducing
discussion of homosexuality in the classroom, became an agenda for “homosexual/ lesbian
recruitment.”3 5 Many of these right wing models stick to value-laden abstinence-only models
such as the “Teen-Aid” and “Sex Respect” education programs in the U.S.3 6 Authored by
Colleen Kelly Mast, Sex Respect for example, promoted a Christian orientation, erroneously
charging mainstream sex education programs as instruction for genital activity. Fuelled by
federal education grants beginning in the late 1980s, these abstinence-based programs were
offered in more than two thousand junior and high schools in the U.S. by 1993 and were widely
quoted for their sound bite sloganeering with phrases such as “Pet your dog, not your date!”;
“Don’t be a louse, wait for your spouse!” and “Do the right thing, wait for the ring!”3 7 Nancy
Reagan’s anti-drug slogan of the era to “Just say no!” was applied to sex as well, though this
message was dismissed by as a failed one reflecting what is often called “adultspeak” which
fails to engage adolescent listeners:
“Just say no” was useless because it was based on an incorrect assumption about
actual choices many young people have with respect to drug use. To put it bluntly, the
kids who could just say no did not need to be told to do so, and to the kids for whom
involvement in the drug world was one of very few choices available, this message
offered no alternatives.
“Just say no” is a member of the class of prevention messages that have no apparent
link to the day-today reality of the message’s target audience. For many adolescents,
the process of drug initiation is linked to powerful social processes. These include drug
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use by siblings, parents, and other adults; widespread heavy use by residents of the
neighbourhood where a young person lives; and pressures from peers who, despite their
tender years, may be powerful, well-armed, and well-respected members of the
. -20
community.
What is said here in the context of drugs applies equally to sex. To be sure, the injunction to
“just say no,” to frame sex as forbidden to adolescents in a culture where young people are
bombarded with messages about its myriad pleasures most probably acts as an inducement to
find out precisely what it is that they’re supposed to say no to. As the cliche goes: “Kids,
unfortunately, do what we do, not what we say.”
An example of this fear-based, abstinence-only model can be found in No Apologies:
The Truth About Life, Love and Sex, a 1998 video from Focus on the Family, a Colorado
Springs-based ministry headed by Dr. James Dobson.3 9 Hosted by actor Austin O’Brien,4 0 No
Apologies is part of a Focus on the Family Series for teens entitled Life on the Edge, which is
marketed as a series dedicated to offering “practical biblical support for today’s youth.” Two
other videos advertised in this beginning of the tape deal with finding spiritual truth (My Truth,
Your Truth, Whose Truth?) and to understanding/negotiating media from a Christian
perspective (Mind Over Media: The Power o f Making Sound Entertainment Choices). The
trailer for the series deploys MTV video aesthetics including a rock score accompanying fast
paced images and quick cuts of teens skateboarding, snowboarding, playing touch football and
hanging out at malls. Using “scratchy edits” to self-consciously mark breaks between images,
stylized jump cuts, frequent shifts from colour to black and white, as well in multiple camera
angles which often self-reflexively reveal a behind-the-scenes-position on the interview process,
No Apologies is conversant with a consumer-oriented visual aesthetic that is decidedly up-do-
date.
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The tapes begins with a series of quick cuts/close-ups of various coffee drinks, muffins
and images establishing a hip Starbucks-like cafe filled with young people. The first scene
takes place at a table in the cafe where two teens, Jen and Jason discuss their predicament. As
rock music plays in the background, they talk about Jen’s pregnancy and what to do about it.
Jason suggests taking a second job; that both of them forgo college; and that welfare remains an
option. Jen dismisses all of his suggestions with the scene ending inconclusively as she says:
“Sony’s not going to cut it this time, Jason. It’s too late to apologize.” This latter sentence is
repeated about a dozen times through sound manipulation as the camera cuts back and forth
between the distraught teens. From here, the title “No Apologies” expands onto the screen in a
wavering, mishapen, graffiti-like style used with titles throughout the tape. Austin O’Brien then
emerges into the same cafe, now empty, to directly address the viewer about the topic/problem
of teen sex, the “spiritual conflict” that it arouses, and the issues the tape will cover. From his
introduction, a title “So what’s the problem?” frames the first segment of what will dominate
the tape: a series of talking head interviews with mostly teens and a few adults.
This allies No Apologies with many contemporary sex ed videos (and videovangelism
more specifically),4 1 by relying on the confessions/testimony of the talking head structure.
While the adults are all identified at various points in the half hour tape according to their
professional status and hence expertise, none of the talking head teens are identified by name
except for three “case studies” of young women who “confess” to the devastating consequences
o f their experiences with teen pregnancy. In fact, the tape is certainly not an AIDS video per
se, since its agenda is to “teach abstinence,” however oxymoronic that may sound.
Nevertheless, that it concentrates on problems related to sexuality, pregnancy and STDs
certainly enables it to be framed as a sex ed tape of a sort. After this first series of talking
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heads suggests that most young people are having sex, with many confessing to having done so
and a few promoting abstinence, we return to O’Brien in the cafe who says:
It seems like no matter who you are or where you live there’s a lot of pressure to have
sex before marriage. And when you consider the safe sex message, well, it’s pretty
clear that we’ve been mislead. It’s not like because we’re teenagers we’re animals or
something. We’re certainly capable of making wise decisions and controlling
ourselves. But we’re only human and we do make mistakes. But making just one
mistake about sex can have lifelong consequences.
From here, O’Brien introduces the three women, one of whom Leslie (now thirty-six), retells the
story of getting pregnant at sixteen, being forced into marriage and, within weeks of that event,
being subjected to violent abuse at the hands of her new husband. Another, named Adrienne
(still a teen), tells us of repeated cancellations to a wedding that the father of her child clearly
didn’t want. This young man, she recounts, eventually raped her and then shot himself in front
of her and their child after breaking into her parents’ home only months prior to this on-screen
confession. The third case study, Sarah, retells the horror of an abortion at 16, followed by a
second pregnancy with a baby she ultimately kept at 17. Sarah is shown visiting high schools
as a peer educator with a teddy bear named “Abby Elizabeth” named after her daughter who,
she claims “died in an abortion clinic” because of her “ignorance” and “selfishness.”
The dramatic stories recounted by these women clearly illustrate the melodramatic,
confessional tenor of therapeutic discourse to which this tape subscribes. The interviews with
Leslie, Adrienne, and Sarah are not only singled out by O’Brien’s introductions, but their
stories are strategically spread through the tape to culminate with their most startling
revelations positioned near the end of the tape, just before is narrative denouement. Each
confession is enhanced by soft musical underscoring which serves as punctuation to certain
parts of their revelations and contrasts sharply with the pop music or percussion-based
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underscoring of the other talking head interviews. For example, a gentle clash of symbols
marks Sarah’s admission to having an abortion.
Mimi White evaluates from a Foucaultian perspective, the prevalence and significance
of confessional or therapeutic discourses (or “talking cures”) in relation to various types of
television programming, demonstrating the discursive association between religious rituals and
melodramatic narratives via the force of confession.4 2 The talking heads in No Apologies are
similarly illustrative of what Foucault calls the “millennial yoke of confession” especially
insofar as they enact a highly dramatized form of Christian penance around the privileged theme
of sex.4 3 The important links between confessional discourse and its interpellation with
specific power/knowledge relations in bolstering regimes of truth is glaringly obvious in the
segment of the tape that deals with STD and HIV more directly. The talking head sequence is
preceded by another fictionalized scenario at the same cafe. It begins with a long shot framing
a young white couple kissing and follows the male, Nate, who joins his friend (again, this
punctuated by a loud rock music score). His friend expresses disapproval over Nate’s romantic
choice, remarking that “Lisa” (the girl) has “been with everybody.” Nate defends Lisa against
such rumours, but their conversation is interrupted by Kim (a Chinese-American teen) who
joins their conversation to tell them that Leslie has reportedly “tested positive,” and ponders
aloud: “I wonder who she got it from?” “Tested positive” clearly suggests HIV, though the
virus is unnamed in the sequence, which ends with Nate’s friend saying in a very
unsympathetic, judgmental tone directed to his male friend: “I wonder who she gave it to. You
got any ideas, Nate?” The sequence ends with a close-up of Nate looking stunned and scared as
he wipes lipstick off his face.
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This fictionalized scenario is followed by another talking head sequence which is
remarkable for its manipulative sound bite strategy. No clip is more than ten seconds long and
many are as short as three or four seconds. The sequence is comprised of young teens infected
variously with HPV and herpes, with one teen recounting her contraction of HIV. The teens are
interspersed with various doctors/experts who report “facts” and “statistics” about a range of
possible STDs, condom failure and sterility risks. Interestingly, while the tape certainly
includes representation from a range of races and ethnicities (both as teens and adult/experts),
nowhere does the issue of homosexual transmission of STDs come up. Even the one young
African-American woman depicted with HIV reveals that her transmission came from a former
drug-dealing boyfriend which certainly implies his drug use as probable cause of infection. Of
course, the dramatization sequence shows transmission among white teens (stereotypically, with
the source linked to a promiscuous female), although I would argue that the “realism” of the
talking head sequences carries a different dramatic “weight.”
By deploying the vernacular of MTV, the video attempts to speak to teens in their own
language through fast cuts, lively and accessible footage, fairly constant musical scoring and
conventional strategies of realism and identification. By “realism” I clearly mean a set of
established, mediated practices. In this case, referring to teens on-screen looking and acting like
the contemporary, imagined viewers of the tape. By wearing similar, current fashions; engaging
in familiar, recognizable activities, speaking the same language (and lingo); and
debating/confronting similar issues and experiences as those with which many teen viewers o f
the tape presumably engage, No Apologies is clearly trying to speak to a generation raised on
MTV. In fact, the tape incorporates a Christian rock video by recording artist Rebecca St.
James who is interviewed in brief cuts between segments of the video for her single “It’s God”
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talking about secondary virginity and how she encourages her young fans who have strayed
from their appropriate Christian path to re-embrace it.
While No Apologies reflects a consumerist approach to contemporary lifestyles, it also
clearly reflects videovangelism’s inspirational advice for living as a conservative Christian in a
secular world.4 4 Appropriating one contemporary trend in pedagogical theory which suggests
that students often learn most effectively from their peer group, the tape uses Austin O’Brien as
its grounding presence: the host who digests the opinions expressed by the multitude of
divergent voices presented in the tape and who remakes this heterogeneity into a moral message
for both himself and the viewer. The tape ends with O’Brien’s direct address to the camera as
he states:
I guess the point of all this is that, as teenagers, we have to make our decision about
sex in advance and avoid compromising situations. That doesn’t mean if you’ve been
sexually active in the past that it’s too late to change. That’s what secondary
virginity’s all about. And whether you’re a virgin or not, you can decide right now to
say no. That way, when we do get in those situations where we’re tempted to have sex,
we can stop ourselves by remembering our commitment to abstinence. I’m making that
commitment right now: a commitment to God, to myself, to my future wife, to my
parents, and to the kids I hope to have some day. This way, I have a chance to honor
my relationship with Jesus; to accomplish all the things I want to; and to live life
without making too many apologies.
The promotion of an “unapologetic life,” the video’s injunction to imagined teen viewers to “be
cool,” “be a leader,” and enjoy the “freedom” that comes from bucking the trend toward teen
promiscuity is revealed by the careful sequencing of confessions which culminates with
virtually every teen interviewee in the tape who has had premarital sex expressing their
profound regret.
As a lesson on “what to think” rather than “how to think”, No Apologies offers only
one option to teens who are induced to conform to a certain (the only) code of conduct through
an age-old pedagogy of fear. That this method requires a certain shuffling of statistics and
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offers absolutely no explicit discussion of contraceptive options, masturbation and other sexual
activities which are completely safe is, of course, telling. The litany of distortions is too long to
detail here, though a couple of examples are worth pointing out. Through a series of cross cuts
between talking heads, it is implied (though discontinuity editing prevents this from being
completely clear) that one young man who used a condom and whose partner used Norplant
nevertheless got her pregnant. This is a statistical anomaly which is hard to believe. Beyond
this, Thomas E. Elkins credited as “Chief of Gynecology at John Hopkins Medical Institutes”
and who appears throughout the tape effectively says that ‘there is no such thing as safe sex and
that condoms don’t work.’ Another medical doctor quotes statistical evidence stating that
“There has never been a study that has shown that condoms are 100% effective against
pregnancies and STDs.” Of course, the epistemological asymmetry of this careful management
of facts and rhetoric says nothing of, say, the relative safety of latex condoms when used
properly (where various studies measure its success rate in the 95% to 98% range). Moreover,
despite its widespread use in mainstream culture, “safer” sex is not part of the tape’s
vocabulary, nor does it explain what is meant by “safe sex” in any way, even though it tells us
this message is a completely misguided one. Beyond this, the tape fails to engage in any
comprehensive way the issue of desire; the appeal of taking risks; how to negociate risky or
potentially dangerous conditions, all issues particularly relevant to young people as they assert
and establish their autonomy in myriad ways.
An AIDS tape representing a more mainstream perspective on sex ed for teens is
Talkin’ About AIDS, made in 1989 for Health and Welfare Canada by Atlantis Films in
Toronto. Talkin ’ About AIDS shares many formal similarities to No Apologies: it includes the
use of teen stars, fictional scenarios, talking heads of teens and medical experts, as well as
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direct testimony from three PWAs. It even begins and ends with an MTV-styled rap
performance of a song about avoiding AIDS (called “Practice Safe Sex!”), the lyrics for which
carefully and explicitly list routes (and myths) about HIV transmission. The song is
interspersed throughout the video and also shifts back and forth from a studio performance to
street scenes as a mixed crowd of young teens dance to the band’s groove. The three PWAs in
the tape are all white including Paul - a man who of thirty; Ken, a seventeen-year-old; and
Patricia, thirty-six. While Paul never officially “comes out” and/or mentions the “cause” of his
serostatus, it is certainly implied that he is gay. Ken and Patricia, on the other hand, both
attribute their infection to intravenous drug use. This is a curious elision of the way in which
homosexuality gets framed as the “cause” of HIV unless otherwise specified. Paul is shown
talking to a group of teens in a high school auditorium early in the tape. In slow motion, he
walks to the front of the room, announces his AIDS status and that he’s “not here to be judged”
but to tell the young people about the disease. He states: “I’m sure a lot of you must be saying
to yourself‘AIDS can’t affect me. I’m not gay. I’m not a junkie.’ Let me be the first to tell
you how wrong you really are.”
The tape jumps back and forth between teens talking about their knowledge of the
disease and myths and misconceptions they hope to dispel. Rather than show extended talking
head interviews of people demonstrating their lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS, the tape
relegates its “myths about AIDS” sequence to an animated mini-narrative played for humour
about “Ed: The AIDS Nerd.” The cartoon goes through the transformation o f Ed from “cool
guy to nerd” because of his misconceptions about the disease which make him afraid of
everything from toilet seats, donating blood, public water fountains, restaurant utensils, kissing
his girlfriend and hugging his grandmother. Another use of humour gets deployed through a
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scene demonstrating proper application of a condom. Here, a very bad ventriloquist argues
with his dildo/puppet about how to properly cover him up. Yet another fictionalized scenario
comments on narrative entertainment’s absence of safe sex practices by staging a scene from a
soap opera in which an actress decides to stray from her script in a seduction scene to ask her
would-be lover if he has a condom. When her director angrily yells “Cut!” and interrogates her
about her audacious ad lib, she makes an argument for “realism,” saying that her fictional
presective partner “has slept with everyone in the firm” and that “no intelligent businesswoman”
(the character she plays) would sleep with him without one. After the director and co-star
reluctantly agree to her demands (won over by manipulation of her star status less than by
ideological conviction), the director asks if someone from props or anyone else in the crew has a
condom. Virtually everyone behind the camera pulls one out of their pockets.
Interestingly, the teen stars who appear in the tape, Pat Mastrionni from Degrassi High
and Megan Follows from Anne o f Green Gables, are merely placed as talking heads among
others, though they are conveying a direct message to the viewer rather than being interviewed
(and looking slightly off camera) as the talking head teens of the tape are framed. While
Follows and Mastrionni administer advice about sex as a vital expression that we have the right
to enjoy, advocating condom use and self-protection, they nevertheless do not play “hosts” in
the tape, which seems to offer no particular voice as the voice of authority here. The tape does
include a medical expert, Dr. Catherine Hankins of the Centre for AIDS Study in Montreal,
who is identified by a subtitle as she briefly tells of the three ways of contracting HIV and goes
on to say: “The safest thing is not to have sex or take drugs. If you choose to have sex, then
use a condom. If you’re not ready to have sex, then what’s the rush? There are lots of other
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safe, sexy things you can do instead: touching, petting, message, use your imagination. But
play it safe all at times.”
Clearly, it is only the formal techniques that most resemble anything from No
Apologies here. Rather than establish a message based on a pedagogy of fear, Talkin ’ About
AIDS uses similar formal strategies to promote a safe sex message. While the tape pays lip
service to abstinence as a viable option, it also assumes some level of sexual activity among
teens and is therefore predicated on sending a safe sex message. While No Apologies abstains
from any use of humour, Talkin ’ stages several vignettes aimed at instruction though
entertainment, though it also uses melodramatic devices as well. One scene, shown in grainy
black and white perhaps to highlight an older convention of realism, shows two teens drive up
to a “Downtown Youth Clinic” where the male is about to find out the results of an HIV test.
Voice-over reveals the concern of his girlfriend for both him and herself as she awaits his return
to find that their worst fears are true. He has tested positive and the scene ends abruptly. In
another vignette, a mixed race couple is shown on a rooftop making out. Both are clearly
thinking about sex, as their voice-overs inform us about their desires and fears, most pointedly
around how to discuss condom use. This dilemma is resolved through a playful strategy in
which the boy gives the girl his jacket to keep her warm and she accidentally discovers a
condom in his pocket, which immediately ignites discussion with the teen then saying to his
girlfriend that even though she’s on the pill, it would be best for both of them to use a condom
as well: a happy resolution to their mutual desire.
While Talkin ’ aims primarily at an upbeat message, the use of three case studies (two
of whom are well into AIDS symptomatology at the time of production) grounds the tape in a
sober message about the consequences of unsafe sexual (and drug) practices. And while it aims
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to offer some explicit information about condom use and transmission routes, the film certainly
relies most pointedly on an instrumentalist educational model that assumes knowledge will
automatically and fairly simplistically lead to behaviour modification. The scenario about
condom negotiation, for example, is staged as the problem of talking about it, rather than
offering any instruction, for example, on how to negotiate with someone who refuses to use
them or how to defend one’s limits and values regarding boundaries and behaviours (common
problems for girls who, in a sexist world, are frequently given little discretion to set boundaries
in sexual situations). Moreover, the ramifications of adding drugs (including alcohol) into the
mix is not addressed in any substantive way. While this is not to dismiss the tape out of hand, I
would nevertheless argue that Talkin’ About AIDS reflects the degree to which even mainstream
AIDS pedagogy (since this is a government-sponsored tape for widespread distribution in
schools) has distorted the shape of sex education by concentrating on the disease itself rather
than offering other kinds of sexuality education which could include instruction about sexism,
homosexuality, desire and ethical values. As Jeffrey Moran argues:
Despite the political uses of the epidemic, the AIDS crisis has in many ways narrowed
the parameters of the sex education debate. Most obviously, AIDS has restored the
fear of disease to a central position in sex education. The centrality of fear handicaps
the teacher’s ability to discuss more positive aspects of sexuality, for the prevention of
mortal illness has become the primary rationale for sex education.4 5
While Moran says little about educational film and video in his book, the pedagogical model
that he critiques applies equally to the one deployed in sex ed videos. While visualizing
multicultural diversity, Talkin ’ About AIDS says little about the issue o f desire and/or diversity
across the sexual spectrum.
A tape to the left of the political and pedagogical divide from Talkin ’ About AIDS and
decidedly on the opposite end of both spectrums from No Apologies is Safer and Sexier : A
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College Student’ s Guide to Safer Sex (made by undergraduate students at Swarthmore College
in 1993 under the supervision of AIDS media activist and scholar Alexandra Juhasz). Safer
and Sexier clearly lacks the production values reflected No Apologies and Talkin ’ About AIDS ’
slick aesthetics, although an MTV vernacular is still very much in evidence in this cheaply
made tape. Using quick cuts (though not rapid fire edits as in No Apologies), popular rap and
pop songs, vignettes, and peer educators, the video uses many of the same formal tactics,
though the message is clearly one that is framed around how to think instead of what to think
about the subject of sex. Rather than assume the model from No Apologies that all sex is
risky/dangerous and to abstain, Safer and Sexier is modelled on a principle of “risk behaviors”
to which many liberal educators subscribe. It differs from Talkin ’ About AIDS insofar as it
attempts to engage ethical values at the same time that it promotes the necessity of explicit safer
sex education for young teens under the assumption that precisely because adolescence is a
highly sexualized stage of development, experimentation (with both sex and drugs) is likely to
occur.
Safer and Sexier is structured reflexively like a guide book. It begins with a young
African-American woman going to the campus library where she consults a book entitled Safer
Sex Philosophy. As Salt’N ’Papa’s 1992 hit “Let’s Talk About Sex” plays over the images, the
young women consults the Table of Contents for the book which, in turn, becomes the
structural template for the tape with seven sections entitled respectively: “Why aren’t you
having safer sex?”; “Why have safer sex?”; “Hooking up”; “Exploring risk-free sexual
options”; “Buying condoms”; “Learning the nuts and bolts”; and “Developing your own safer
sex philosophy.” As the tape engages each subject heading one at a time, a hip hop musical
score called “My Philosophy” marks each division.
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The tape uses the traditional talking head format as various teens address a diverse
range of sexual issues. In “Why aren’t you having safer sex?” for example, a young male in
four different guises gives four different reasons why he isn’t. First, he argues that being safe
and being sexual are incompatible for him. Second, he says he doesn’t like to even talk about it
and dismisses further discussion. Third, he says he’s a virgin (although he admits to “fooling
around”) and adds that on his small campus where he knows “just about everybody,” safer sex
is not an issue. Finally, the teen claims to be in a monogamous relationship and therefore
dismisses the need to practice safe sex out of hand. From here, the section entitled “Why
practice safer sex?” discredits all of the reason for the boy’s reluctance, as a series of young
men and women talk about how monogamy is a moot point, and how stereotypes don’t keep you
safe. Statistical information - for example, that one in three American college students has an
STD and that AIDS is one of the leading causes of death among young people - are offered in
this section as well, placed as intertitles between talking heads.
Interestingly, all of the talking heads in this tape look directly at the camera, rather than
slightly to the left or right behind it, as is the more typical structure in tapes such as No
Apologies and Talkin ’ About AIDS. Dai Vaughn has talked about how various camera
placements hierarchize authority in documentary films more generally: “If we switch on our sets
and see a man addressing us directly, we know he is a narrator or presenter. If his gaze is
directed slightly off-camera, we know he is an interviewee, a talking head. If he is turned away
from us by an angle of more than about 15 degrees, he is part of an action sequence. It is clear
that there is a hierarchy of authority implicit in this code.”4 6 According to this model, virtually
everyone is Safer and Sexier is positioned/coded as a narrator/presenter, thus challenging
traditional hierarchies of authority by giving virtually all talking heads the same statis.
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Moreover, no “adult” medical or scientific experts are photographed in the tape which is
completely framed by and for college students (though Juhasz does speak in a group discussion
scenario at one point).
Safer and Sexier stages various scenarios of young people — both same and opposite
sex couples — negotiating safer sex issues. In one scene, for example, two women are shown
naked in bed as one says to the other: “I didn’t know you’d been with Patricia, whose been with
just about everybody.” As the two women discuss their various safer sex options, they turn to
the camera for advice. From here, a range of alternatives are offered as “no risk” and listed
alongside a montage of images from various mainstream and alternative film and video. The
list of activities - “dance, feed, ride, breathe, wrestle, caress, cuddle, masturbate, stroke, kiss
and flirt” - are spread across images from Gay M en’ s Health Crisis Safer Sex Shorts, Cheryl
Dunye’s She D on’ t Fade, Looking fo r Langston, A Room with a View, Desert Hearts and an
MTV show called The Grind, to name a few. In another scenario, a young mixed race couple
naked in bed says to the camera that they’re ready to have sex, but need more information.
This leads to the “Learning the nuts and bolts” segment of the tape in which a young woman
with a range of latex products tucked under her belt gives an explicit latex lesson.
One of the striking aspects of this “lesson” is that the teen talks so comfortably about a
range of practices which are classified as precisely that: “practices” rather than identities based
on sexual acts. As she demonstrates with her hands (and tongue), she says to the viewer:
I’m going to tell you a couple of things about safer sex. If you’re having sex with a
penis, you’ll want to use a latex condom. If you’re having penetrative sex, you’ll want
to make sure that it’s lubricated with nonoxynol 9. If you’re giving head to a penis,
then what you want to do is you can use a full condom that’s not lubricated (because
lube tales nasty) or let your fingers do the walking and make a half condom. [She
demonstrate with three fingers]. Then roll the edge under so it doesn’t roll out while
you’re giving a blow job. If you’re having sex with an anus or a vagina, then you can
use a dental dam...
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From here, she shows how to make a dental dam from a condom, and from a latex glove where
she leaves the thumb in place “for finger fucking as well.” This highly explicit discussion and
display of condom use and (elsewhere in the video) the incorporation of explicit sexual imagery
from the GMHC Safer Sex Shorts is part of the tape’s direct, in-your-face strategy. While
borrowing from gay activist videos the strategy of visualizing and eroticizing safe sex through
more explicit demonstration (what Cindy Patton calls pornographic vernacular), the tape also
uses strategies of realism and identification by displaying a broad range of body shapes, sizes,
races, ethnicities and sexual preferences via techniques that include talking heads, peer
education, colloquial language, and fictionalized enactments.
Unlike No Apologies, these narrative “vignettes” rely less on melodrama than humour
as they show various couples negotiate the particulars of engaging in a range of safer sexual
practices. In one sequence, a young male goes to the drug store to purchase condoms (after his
boyfriend refuses to have sex without them) and is given a lesson on the range of products
available, including important discussion of “natural skin condoms” which offer virtually no
protection against STDs. Another sequence shows a safer sex workshop with teens cutting
condoms into dental dams. Yet another shows in close-up the proper application of a condom
on a hard penis interspersed with (in total) six or seven different teens who sit on the hallway
floor of what looks like a college dormitory and verbally describe what we are shown. Some
also use condoms on their fingers to help with the “lesson.” After all of this “Nuts and Bolts”
discussion, the tape moves into the final subsection, “Developing your own safer sex
philosophy,” which in most provocative for the ways in which is strives to move beyond mere
instrumental, fact-based (nuts and bolts) information to one that at least introduces the topic of
ethical values.
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The sequence begins as a threesome, now armed with “facts” from the previous
segment of the tap, says they’re now ready to have sex. As they look to the camera for
affirmation, we cut to one of the talking heads who interrupts and says: “Hold on. Stop. Hold
On”, thus stopping (ostensibly) their sexual interlude. From here, a series of talking heads
address the camera about developing a safer sex philosophy.
Person 1: One of the most important things about being sexual is developing your own
set of rules.... like whatever you consider to be risky, safe or completely out of the
question.
Person 2: For example, are you comfortable with the risk of vaginal sex with a
condom? And how about anal sex? And what do you think of the risk of oral sex with
a condom or a dental dam? And how about without a condom or a dental dam? Just
stuff like that.
Person 3: The important thing is to think about it ahead of time because there are times
when your judgment will be impaired so if you develop your own personal safer sex
philosophy and really think about it and ultimately celebrate it, then when you’re in a
situation where you’re afraid you’ll have to improvise, you won’t have to worry
because you’ll already know what your own rules are.
Person 4: Hopefully, this generation of people growing up and learning about sex....Sex
is like, sex with, you know, sex is safer sex basically. It’s not...like you have this type
of sex with one person and a different kind of sex with, like, a stranger. You have one
type of sex and that’s safer sex.
By urging all viewers to think about sex, their limits, and to develop their own safer sex
philosophy, Safer and Sexier conforms to contemporary strategies of sex education by
encouraging (rather than mandating) socially desirable behaviour via “social learning theory.”
According to this model, having students act out or role-play scenarios (here for the camera)
can teach them important skills such as how to recognize, resist and negotiate pressures and
personal limits regarding sex. While the twenty minute tape doesn’t detail the complex
challenges that can interfere with or compromise whatever safer sex philosophy one develops, it
does nevertheless suggest (and stage) by teens and fo r teens ways of exploring the complex,
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often unfamiliar, emotional terrain of talking clearly and explicitly to sexual partners about
these issues.
This approach is a response to criticism of the various failures of AIDS
education/prevention campaigns to understand and negotiate the emotional context with which
they are dealing. Of course, the fear-based, abstinence-only model of No Apologies is on the
opposite end of the spectrum from the explicit, direct approach to AIDS education provided by
Safer and Sexier. In between these two poles, Talkin ’ About AIDS is the more mainstream
approach which endorses abstinence but operates on an instrumentalist model of risk
elimination through less explicit instruction in safer sex practices. That both value-laden fear-
based/abstinence programs and value-neutral instrumentalist approaches to safe sex education
appear equally unsuccessful is a point reiterated by many sex educators and summarized by
Jeffrey Moran as he outlines the main problems with sex ed over the course of the twentieth
century. For one thing, he argues, “The sex educator’s expectation that students will respond
rationally to classroom knowledge is a peculiarly middle-class ideal” which fails to address the
degree to which individual sexual behaviour is powerfully enmeshed with social context.4 7 Both
models are predicated upon students’ learning a clear behavioural lesson that counteracts or
modifies the “improper” information they may leam outside the school. But the educational
scene is porous and can hardly be sealed off from the outside world but tend. Pedagogical
practices must reflect larger patterns of social meaning. Beyond this:
The dominance of danger and disease in thinking about adolescent sexuality, a deep
faith in the instrumentalist model of sex education, and a conviction that adolescence is
somehow a thing apart from adult society - these are the unchanging boundaries of the
universe within which sex education continues to be conceived. Despite the political
controversy it is an exceedingly narrow cosmos. Although teenage pregnancy and
AIDS have in some ways reinforced the boundaries of sex education, they have also
begun to underscore the inadequacy of our inherited conceptions of education, sexuality
and adolescence.4 8
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Moran and others have argued that the concept of adolescence has outgrown its use
value; that teens need to be conceptualized more consistently in terms of adult paradigms. I
would argue that Safer and Sexier can be situated in that project, particularly insofar as it does
what our culture is loathe to do in general: it conceives of teens as a highly sexual subculture
and faces that reality rather than repress and police it. To be sure, the tape does not explore in
detail the significant resistances to knowledge that are part of the problem that all pedagogies
must face. This is especially relevant in terms of issues relating to risk, danger and infallibility
which are more pronounced in younger people. The question that persists here is whether one
ever eliminates risk, especially for the things that we value. There is considerable evidence to
show that many North American adolescents (and indeed adults) know the facts about
HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and even know the ways in which they can
protect themselves. Yet every year millions of North Americans continue to engage behaviours
that place them at risk. Indeed, that one million teenagers get pregnant in the United States
every year is suggestive of the risks that young people (often) willingly take. While adolescent
behaviour often mirrors adult values and behaviours (with varying degrees of distortion), they
consistently take more risks than adults. Many sex educators agree that “Each culture, each
peer group, each social network, has a particular set of strategies for sizing up situations and
choosing appropriate responses.”4 9 A good HIV prevention method for teens, then, must be one
which provides an accurate representation of the world as seen through a teen's eyes; portrays
that world as offering choices (including right and wrong choices); and offers the specific target
audience potential “scripts” for negotiating desirable outcomes.5 0
A new and provocative approach to these ideas is one organized by a nonprofit film
company called Scenarios which has created a concept based on “sex education video as art
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film.”5 1 From a competition selecting short sceenplays made by teens fo r teens (technically,
students between the ages of 12 and 22), a pool of five are selected to be made into short films
that the teens make in collaboration with established directors. Participants have included Doug
Liman (Swingers and Go), Michael Apted (the 7-Up series), Tamara Jenkins (Slums o f Beverly
Hills) and David Frankel (of Sex and the City). Airing on Showtime as I write this chapter,
these projects address a range of issues from HIV to coming out. Described as a concept
“brilliant in its simplicity,” Amy Benfer says the Scenarios films are “without a doubt the
hippest, best-edited and most entertaining sex ed videos ever made.”5 2 While I have not yet seen
these works, the collaborative is a compelling one, especially insofar as it offers an occasion for
dialogue among the collaborators, and for a young person’s perspective to be realized and
disseminated. It may well be that the fictional narrative form, when framed less didactically
than in most sex ed films of the past, is a useful way to “instruct” by the stealth of
entertainment. Certainly the positive enthusiasm with which the work of, say, Sadie Benning is
met by my own students, suggests to me the powerful pedagogical impact that creative, teen-
made video projects may have on both coming-of-age and coming out.
Being a teenager is about testing limits, taking risks, striving to imagine the longer-term
consequences of behaviour and mortality, exploring boundaries and learning from these
experiences. It can also be about avoiding some or all of these questions and not learning from
experience. Sex education models which refuse to engage the complex interpenetrations of
pleasure, danger and desire are willfully ignoring a fundamental aspect of human (including
teen) life. What I want to suggest provisionally here is that our culture needs to re-imagine
what it means to be a teenager today by moving beyond the probationary storm and strain
theory with the fear of teen sexuality that undergirds it. This, I suspect, will enable us to better
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reckon with the “erotics o f’ or “passion for” ignorance so fundamental to the scene of
instruction. How can “safer” truly come to signify “sexier” in a culture which operates so
forcefully under the force and seduction of sexual boundaries and taboos? The invocation of
pleasure and danger harks back to central debates in feminist theory, particularly surrounding
the groundbreaking volume which came out of the Feminist and the Scholar conference at
Barnard College in the early 1980s.5 3 It is to issues surrounding woman and AIDS that I now
want to turn.
AIDS and The Woman Question
While the majority of AIDS information in both mainstream and queer communities
was originally aimed at high-risk male behaviour, after 1985-86, women increasingly begun to
produce AIDS activist video for various subcultures of women particularly at risk from the
disease. Media activists such as Amber Hollibaugh, Jean Carlomusto, Ellen Spiro and
Alexandra Juhasz were among the first to cover important issues related to woman and AIDS,
including misguided discrimination against prostitution,5 4 medical stereotypes that hindered
women’s access to diagnosis and treatment, widespread misperceptions that women were
generally not at risk, and the failure to address minority communities - especially black and
Latino women - who accounted for the majority of women with AIDS in the U.S. between 1982
and 1986. Paula Treichler carefully chronicles the misrepresentation and even disinterest in
gendered issues of the crisis until well into the 1980s. She points out that in spite of the fact
that there were documented cases o f AIDS in women from almost the beginning o f the
epidemic, AIDS was assumed by most of the medical and scientific community to be a “gay
disease” or a “male” one in any case, and therefore different from other sexually transmitted
diseases:
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Moreover, despite intense concern with gendered human bodies in contemporary
culture, the media of the 1980s were strikingly silent on the topic of women and AIDS.
And, despite the skepticism toward established science and medicine fostered by two
decades of feminist scholarship and activism, few feminists challenged the biomedical
account of AIDS or, with the exception of some lesbian writers and activists, called for
solidarity with the gay male community.5 5
While it perhaps not so surprising that biomedical scientists, physicians and the
mainstream media failed to take the “woman question” with respect to AIDS into consideration,
that feminist publications took so little leadership in the epidemic is somewhat puzzling. One of
the reasons for this omission/neglect has been the desire for many feminists to distance
themselves from the mainstream and persistent reactions to AIDS as an anti-sex response. Of
course, it is also simply that many didn’t understand the rapidity with which the disease was
spreading among women. Nevertheless, Treichler argues that the failure of feminist
publications from Ms. to New Woman to “disarticulate the data on gander, to articulate for their
constituencies ‘women’s interests’ in relation to the epidemic and to counter the conservative
forces that were aggressively constructing the social meaning of AIDS” was more difficult to
understand.5 6 As she puts it:
AIDS is complex, in part, because it exposes the artificiality of the categories and
divisions that govern our views of social life and sexual difference. It challenges the
existence of women as a monolithic sisterhood and as a meaningful linguistic entity.
But feminist theory also suggests why a woman-centered analysis remains imperative,
for women are both linguistic and material subjects who exist within language and
history. Even as we work to deconstruct and perhaps finally to dissolve the linguistic
subject, we must nonetheless keep our attention fixed relentlessly on the inequities still
embodied in the material one.5 7
What began to happen by the end o f the 1980s was, she argues, the development o f a body o f
writing, research, performance and media production which “took up the issue of women and
AIDS and carried out a diverse series of interventions in the name of women: not ‘Woman,’ or
even ‘Women’ but women.”5 8
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In her book, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video, Alexandra Juhasz
also outlines the invisibility of women in mainstream AIDS documentaries and chronicles her
own involvement in such projects as Women’ s AIDS Video Enterprise (WAVE), an AIDS
prevention campaign geared to generating community-specific information made by and for
low-income, minority women who were increasingly understood to be at great risk of
contracting the disease.5 9 One of the first high-profile activist efforts to counter the AIDS
narrative, was a tape formed in direct response to the 1988 publication in Cosmopolitan
magazine of an article reassuring women that “ordinary sexual intercourse” would not put them
at risk for contracting HIV. A group of women from the New York chapter of ACT UP
picketed the offices of the magazine, staged a number of very public actions communicating
actual statistics of HIV among women and produced a video of these efforts entitled Say No to
Cosmo: Doctors, Liars and Women (by Jean Carlomusto and Maria Maggenti, 1989). This
tape is precisely the kind of education/ activism that Juhasz applauds, offering alternative
production as a form of “direct, immediate, product-oriented activism” which, in her view, is
“...always an invitation to join a politicized community or diverse people who are unified
temporarily and for strategic purposes to speak back to AIDS, to speak back to a government
and society that has mishandled this crisis, and to speak to each other.”6 0
In this context of shared self-proclaimed difference, marginality, activism and
oppression, Women and AIDS (1988, Alexandra Juhasz and Jean Carlomusto) is a significant
contribution to this early activism surrounding gender and the AIDS crisis. O f course, class,
race and ethnicity are central to this tape as it challenges media misrepresentations of the
dangers of AIDS. The tape offers a history of how and when women suddenly began to enter
into the AIDS debate more extensively. By using images from a range of mainstream texts
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including the widely broadcast CBS program AIDS Hits Home (1986), the voice-over for the
tape marks 1986 as the year when evidence of increasing numbers of women dying from the
disease finally led to the recognition of their risk. Unfortunately, we are told, “women dying
became the symbol of the newly perceived threat to the middle-class home.” In other words, the
media began to tell the story of how “a particular kind of woman” was threatened: a white
middle-class American woman, to the exclusion of the stories of those women who were most at
risk. This despite statistics which demonstrated that, on a national level, blacks and Hispanics
make up more than 70% of all female AIDS patients. In New York City, that statistic is even
higher as the voice-over informs us that 84% of women who have AIDS are black or Hispanic
and 93% of pediatric AIDS cases are children who are from these minorities. Made under the
auspices of Gay Men’s Health Crisis for the cable series Living With AIDS, Women and AIDS
is aimed at challenging misperceptions about women and HIV, by giving voice to the various
female scientists, health care advocates, social workers and activists struggling to fight the
disease at a community-based level.
Comprised of talking head interviews, clips from mainstream/network television
documentaries about AIDS, Public Service Announcements, as well as segments from
alternative activist work such Needletalk, a New York City Department of Health Video on
cleaning needlework for intravenous drug users, Women and AIDS is aimed at the most “at
risk” female constituencies in New York — Latinas and black women. To this end, the tape
gives voice to various community health workers involved specifically with these groups. Ruth
Rodriguez of the Hispanic AIDS Forum, for example, talks about the failure of many HIV
educational strategies to reach different groups in spite of the lip service they pay to diversity.
She states in reference to her community and the specific obstacles faced: “It sounds like an
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exaggeration, but some Hispanic women will have to be convinced that it’s not such a good idea
to sacrifice your life because you love this man. It sounds implausible to some people...” She
talks about the cultural taboo which prevails around sexuality for Hispanic women bluntly: “A
good Hispanic woman does not get involved in the mechanics of sex.” Later in the tape, when
talking about condom use she argues: “As hard as it is for most women to say ‘I won’t have sex
with someone who doesn’t use a condom,’ it’s that much harder for a woman....I mean.... what
would she do with a condom? Would she have to admit a relationship with that man’s penis
when it’s hard enough for her to admit a relationship to her own body and put in a diaphragm?”
Condoms are not just a safe sex issue but part of a larger birth control issue that
contradicts religious and cultural values that many women are influenced by. She and others in
the tape talk about how many women obtain self-esteem through their children, so that
preventing pregnancy is a huge obstacle for them to overcome in the name of personal safety.
Another woman who works as research Counselor for the Montifiore Methadon Maintenance
Program talks about the unwillingness to even recognize IV drug users as a sizable population
let alone acknowledge their specific needs as a constituency. Drug users, she points out, often
see AIDS as a distant crisis beyond the problem of their mere survival on a daily basis. Sunny
Rumsey from the AIDS Educational Unit of the New York City Department of Health points
out that the black community feels betrayed “again” not only by the longstanding racism that
continues to affect them, but from the fact that for seven years, “the media has told them that
AIDS is a gay white disease.” Rumsey talks about the difficulty o f negotiating condom use for
those women who are married or in long term relationships who may suspect that their partners
are putting them at risk. She also discusses the need for specificity in AIDS education: “I think
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Needletalk brings up a larger issue for anyone who is working on literature or video, that you
cannot have a generic piece of video or literature for a particular community.”
Women and AIDS also gives specific safer sex instruction as Denise Ribble, from the
Community Health Project demonstrates condom and dental dam use and talks about the
benefits of Nonoxynol 9. Ribble’s work is primarily with women (gay and straight) who have
been infected with HIV (most of them sexually) and who, she points out, are predominantly
poor. In spite of the fact that gender is the main focus of the tape, it constantly emphasizes that
HIV as a disease o f behaviors rather than identities. Researcher Dooley North adds to this the
fact that sexuality extends out into family issues and intimacy issues in such a way that it
cannot be addressed in terms of sexual practices alone, but needs to take into account all of the
underlying values that are part of sexuality including social, cultural and economic concerns.
In sum, the tape points toward the need for much more expanded discussion about sexual
practices, pointing out that many problems confronting minority women are community-
specific. For women more generally, is the fact that, unlike the mobilization of the gay
community around the disease, many women with HIV/AIDS are profoundly isolated and/or
often more concerned with fulfilling the needs of others rather than taking care of themselves.
The tape drives home this message by beginning and ending with the voice-over of a woman
identified as Anita who is HIV positive and looking after a young child: “Women take care of
everyone....but who takes care of the women?” she asks.
While it doesn’t stage a consciousness-rasing group per se, Women a nd A ID S is clearly
indebted to the feminist verite practices described by Julia Lesage. It’s primary message it that
- beyond crucial technical information regarding safe sex practices - it is greater
communication among people which is at the heart of coming to terms with the crisis. This cuts
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across a range of practices from communication among women as classed, raced and gendered
constituencies, to communication with their sexual partners and to a culture which either
ignores (or represses) their needs in the face of this crisis. As Lynn Segal puts it:
The overwhelming problem in facing the challenge of AIDS is the continuing
significance, not the decline of guilt and secrecy about sex. It is the fact that it is still
hard for us to talk openly and honestly about sex. This, in turn, is the product of other
continuities in thought and practices surrounding sex. It connects with the continuing
reality of men’s power over women: how this is manifested, symbolized and
strengthened in the language and practice of sex. Men fear what they see as ‘feminine’
in themselves (which includes talking about feelings and relationships); women deny
and repress their own interest in sex. Yet men as well as women would benefit from
becoming more emotionally articulate (silence is no longer sexy). It might even lower
the compulsion and fear of failure which accompanies men’s sexuality. It would
certainly lower the danger that accompanies women’s sexuality, and begin to relieve the
most basic frustration of making it with men: communica interrupta.6 1
While sex has never been completely safe for women, Women and AIDS argues for an
approach to sexual practices that expands the discourses surrounding sex with attention to the
ways in which communities respond differently to the topic. Moreover, it aims to speak directly
to those female constituencies most at risk of HTV and AIDS who have previously been ignored.
As part of this grassroots activist framework, another very interesting tape is DiAna’ s
Hair Ego: AIDS Info Up Front (Ellen Spiro, 1989) which features the AIDS educational efforts
of an African-American woman DiAna DiAna. The proprietor of a hair salon in Columbia,
South Carolina, DiAna talks about how an article on the topic of AIDS sparked her interest in
the importance of the subject leading her to turn her salon into an safe sex educational space,
providing a place for people to come and learn and talk about the crisis. The grassroots quality
of her work is best explained by DiAna herself as she says in the tape:
Being in a beauty shop like this and working on-on-one with everyone, you get to talk
about everything and I get to know about people’s families and personal situations and
things that they might want to share with me because they know I don’t gossip and tell
it to somebody else. And for people who come to a beauty shop who have a need to
take out some kind of information, now they can take out AIDS information without
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worrying about any gossip. They can take things with them - we’ve got flyers and
posters and brochures and free condoms. And my customers were so interested when
we finally acquired the VCR and TV, I started showing AIDS movies here in the salon.
And I told the clients they didn’t have to have an appointment to come and see an AIDS
movie. They could come in and bring the kids. I have special AIDS videos for kids
and they could let the kids watch the movies and ask me questions. That way, it
wouldn’t put the parents on the spot.
As she makes these comments, we are seen a range of images, mostly of DiAna’s salon, as the
camera scans past hair products, condoms, HIV/AIDS brochures and posters, one of which
displays a black male with the caption “Bound by Chains of Ignorance.” If genius is a fresh
approach to the obvious, then DiAna’s idea to use a predominantly female space (and a place of
reputed gossip, dialogue and personal confession) as a pedagogical space is indeed an ingenious
project.
DiAna’ s Hair Ego relies heavily on talking heads. It begins first with the voice-over,
then the image of a woman getting her hair washed who talks about admiring the hairdo of a
friend who recommended DiAna. The women then goes on to talk about how interesting her
first visit to the salon had been, not for the hair cut so much as the knowledge she acquired from
her appointment. She talks about sending other friends to DiAna and about how they all
wanted to talk about what they learned about AIDS from her. DiAna talks about the
organization she has founded out of this interest: SCAEN (the South Carolina AIDS Education
Network.). She and others discuss workshops they run through church groups, schools and
women’s organizations to teach communities about AIDS. Remarking on the repeated requests
she had obtained both from people at her salon and those to whom she had spoken at various
public gatherings, Diana talks about the safe sex parties she subsequently began to organize
which are set up around a series of games mostly aimed to help people learn to verbalize sexual
activities. For example, one game is a “desensitization game” which recruits participants to list
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things you can do with a condom “besides just putting them on penises.” Another has
participants (men and women) put a condom onto a banana without using their hands. A strip
darts game is set up as a means to help people learn what they can do safely. When a velcro
dart lands on an anatomical part, the player must name what can be done safely and sexually to
that part. DiAna also passes around sex toys, encourages the use fantasy literature and phone
sex (since both are no risk) and sets up a game in which people are encouraged to express their
ultimate sexual fantasies with the caveat that they be imagined and articulated “safely.”
Operating out of her home, DiAna shows us some of the work of SCAEN, including a
brochure for children with the sixteen questions and answers most commonly posed to her in a
video she made asking over three thousand students to inquire about what interested them most
about the virus. A board member of SCAEN - one of the few white people depicted in the tape
- talks about how AIDS education in South Carolina operates through official channels as a
Health Department lecture. He says with a chuckle: “Now, the people who make those lectures
are very kindly and wonderful people, but they’re [the lectures] something like the way in which
sex ed took place when I was in sixth grade and that consisted of all these diagrams of fallopian
tubes and vas deferenses and discussion of physiology and anatomy. And that wasn’t what any
of those little sixth graders - including me - were interested in discussing at all.” He
complains that the public health lecture tries to explain what the virus is without giving any
information on the “nitty gritty.” Clearly the technique her is describing is an instrumentalist
one. As part o f the education for kids, SCAEN, on the other hand, has produced such things as
“culturally sensitive” coloring books depicting black characters dealing with HIV situations.
Other SCAEN members have formed a musical group within the organization, which composes
songs with lyrics aimed at HIV instruction. DiAna’ s Hair Ego is a fascinating example of
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grassroots activism at work by demonstrating so forcefully the degree to which sexual behavior
is not simply personal and private, but also socially, historically and culturally constructed
through public discourses and institutional practices. That SCAEN has been (at least at the
time of the tape’s production) unable to obtain funding from state health agencies, despite
training over eight thousand people between 1986 and 1989 in culturally sensitive AIDS
education is a sad reminder of the backwardness and bureaucracy of state and federal guidelines
with respect to sex education.6 2 The last category of sex ed video that I will now examine,
explicit soft and hardcore safer sex videos, similarly only find support from extragovernmental
agencies.
Queer Porn as Pedagogy: Eroticizing Latex and Dissident Sexualities
With gay and lesbian activism booming in the 1980s, new solidarities across genders,
generations, sexualities, political commitments and subcultures helped to galvanize the notion of
“queer community” and led to the formation of queer theory which helped to fuel and sustain an
AIDS activist movement. In the search to find increasingly provocative ways of promoting safe
sex and of visualizing nonhegemonic sexualities, many educators and activist turned to highly
explicit material as a way of attempting to demonstrate and eroticize safer sex practices by
working them into pom fantasy scenarios. While there were certainly exceptions to the
mainstream feminist position which tended to ignore the AIDS crisis as a “real” threat to
straight women, lesbian communities often turned to gay men both in alliance and support
against those who had otherwise ignored the crisis, but also in order to create explicit
representations of safer sex for queer women. As Julia Creet proclaims, “From what was
primarily a gay male crisis, rubber dams, latex gloves, and condoms on cucumbers have now
brought legitimation and laughs to public talk about lesbian sex.”6 3 This is not to say that the
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alliance of lesbian safe sex rhetoric with AIDS activism has been an uncomplicated or
unproblematic issue in many quarters. One of the most contestable points about AIDS/HIV
prevention within the lesbian community has stemmed from the fact that statistical evidence of
woman-to-woman transmission of HIV is relatively low.
In an essay published in Out/Look in 1992, Nancy Solomon addresses the important
issues surrounding safe sex advocacy within the lesbian community. Part of the problem seems
to stem from the fact that very little medical research has been conducted on sexual practices
among women.6 4 Another problem stems from a widespread misperception that lesbians
(indeed all women) are generally less actively interested in sex than men. For example, in the
late eighties, Dr. Charles Schable, spokesperson of the Center For Disease Control (CDC)
argued that the center had chosen not to devote resources to woman-to-woman transmission
because: “Lesbians don’t have much sex.”6 5 This has led to a situation in which lesbian
activists who contend that woman-to-woman transmission is virtually nonexistent or at least
highly inefficient find themselves in uneasy alliance with the staff at the CDC. Amber
Hollibaugh, on the other hand, argues that while statistics on woman-to-woman transmission
appear to be fairly low in comparison with other practices, “lesbianism is not a condom.”6 6
Writing well into the 1990s, She argues that even though some testing on women has now
begun, there is absolutely no long-range significant research into “possible transmission
activities which might be suggestive when looking at the arena of unprotected sex between
women and HIV.” She goes on to point out:
[There is]...no research on the different progressions and intensities of HIV viral load in
a woman’s bodily fluids over the course of HTV infection through to AIDS; no research
to see if there is any corollary intersection when a woman is HTV+ and has a yeast
infection or STD, which often causes an increase in the white blood cells present in
vaginal secretions and could lead to a concentration of HIV in a woman’s vaginal
secretions while fighting off that yeast infection. Where is the research we need on
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cervical warts and cancers and their impact on virus distribution in vaginal fluids?
What of HPV and HIV?6 7
Hollibaugh goes on to ask more provocative questions, but the point is clear: research into HIV
and women continues to be underdeveloped and/or ignored. Part of the problem stems from
problems of identity politics and community policing, for example, there are many women who
identify as lesbian (rather than, say, bisexual) who sleep with men. In this framework,
Hollibaugh says:
We are beached with deadend codes like “lesbian sex” or “rough sex” which tell us
nothing, in lieu of a demand for serious, multifaceted sexuality and drug use studies
which know how to ask a complicated trajectory of questions in order to capture the
web of actions, desires, identities, and ideologies we practice in bed or put into our
bodies.6 8
Other activists maintain that since the incidence of woman-to-woman transmission of
HIV is so low, that the “propaganda” about lesbians and AIDS is a pathetic attempt at
visibility. One of the complaints about Well Sexy Women (a British safer sex video by the
Unconscious Collective, Great Britain, 1992) and tapes like it quoted on the back pages of
Quim is exemplary. In a letter to the editors of the magazine, a self-identified gay male
contends:
Why is it so important for lesbians that they be considered at risk from HIV?
Is it because not being so makes them feel less than “full” members of the gay
community? Or in the case of “butch” lesbians because it does not fit in with
the male image they like to project?6 9
Unfortunately, this position is reflective of a common antagonism that has frequently divided
members o f the gay and lesbian community with respect to the AIDS crisis. It is a position
which basically accuses those lesbians who overemphasize the possibilities of woman-to-
woman transmission of suffering from “AIDS envy.” While this phrase is indeed extremely
hurtful, even pathologizing of those lesbians concerned with the possibilities of HIV
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transmission among women and has no doubt motivated and enraged many, it is important to
bear in mind that there is a sizable population of lesbians also subscribe to the view that the
rhetoric on woman-to-woman transmission is a form of scare-mongering which is actually
counterproductive to an ethos of prosex lesbianism. Such activists include Beth Elliott and
Garance Franke-Ruta (who wrote about the subject for O ff Our Backs and NYQ respectively),
Sarah Schulman and Robin Goma.
In her book, Vamps, Virgins and Victims: How Can Women Fight AIDS? Goma
argues that it is ironically the producers of lesbian pom in the vanguard of what she calls “latex
lesbianism” who have incorporated latex accessories in erotic photos and stories with far
greater frequency than in gay male pom.7 0 She remarks that “the community which has
succeeded in establishing a visible, erotic, safer-sex peer norm is the community with the least
need - at least in respect of the activities to which these norms apply.”7 1 The real reason for
latex lesbianism is not disease avoidance, in Goma’s view, but rather “a handy code for sexual
visibility. It is a symbolism which says, ‘What do lesbians do in bed? We have real sex.’”7 2
Goma argues that public discourse surrounding the eroticization of safer sex for men has led to
a scenario in which politicians (for better or worse) have begun talking about anal sex and State
Health Authorities now often list information on sucking, fisting, watersports, rimming,
bondage, and so on. And so, she says, “lesbians want a slice of the action - after all, the boys
always get more attention.”7 3
Rather than attempt to resolve either side o f this contentious debate, the line o f
argument to support safer sex practices is, of course, that it is not simply a matter of
HIV/AIDS, but of a whole spectrum of illnesses that can result from sexual exchange.
Nonetheless, in the absence of a significant body of research to indisputably resolve the matter,
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safer sex advocates maintain that, at the very least, women do bleed every month, and that
(however unlikely) lesbians can transmit HIV to one another through certain sexual activities,
most particularly through cutting and other s/m practices. Given these facts, I suggest that a
significant part of the agenda behind these safe sex tapes may indeed by less specifically related
to HIV and AIDS than to the promotion of a more sex-positive, assertive view of lesbian
sexuality and visibility in ways that depart dramatically from widespread view of lesbianism
and lesbian identity generally promoted in the 1970s. Some commentators have suggested that
in the face of prohibitive attitudes toward gay male sexuality in the light of AIDS, lesbians have
picked up where gay men left off, creating an era of unprecedented sex positivity in the late
1980s and 90s. The proliferation of lesbian erotica in the past decade may be interpreted as a
form of reinforcement for a sexual liberation movement severely debilitated by the right wing
and AIDS, but is it also a response to the initial invisibility of lesbian sex and sexuality in the
early stages of the second wave feminist movement.
In a social and cultural environment with few images of lesbian sexuality apart from
straight male pornography’s longstanding tradition of lesbian sex as a prelude to heterosexual
activity, tapes such as Current Flow (Jean Carlomusto for GMHC, 1989, 4 min), She’ s Safe!
(USA/Canada/Germany/Great Britain, 1993, 55 min) and Safe is Desire (Debi Sundahl, Fatale
Video, 1993, 45 min) serve an important function. These tapes are of interest not only because
they offer a very pointed counter to the dearth of erotic imagery depicting lesbian sex and
sexuality within independent feature film and videomaking, but because they have been so
clearly marketed both as pedagogical (self-help) tools for rethinking safer sex and as
erotic/pornographic entertainment. By reinscribing lesbian sexuality as both personal and
political (to echo an oft-repeated phrase of 1970s cultural feminist rhetoric), these videos
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resituate sex from strictly a private, personal realm to a fundamentally social project. Since
these videos are relatively new, and represent what is a recent phenomenon of depicting lesbian
sex (let alone safe sex practices) in film and video, it is interesting to consider the degree to
which these tapes borrow and differ from more mainstream heterosexual and gay male pom
aesthetics. The convergence of these aesthetics with those of documentary film is another
significant aspect of this work, particularly as it engages issues of fantasy alongside the politics
of sex and sexual representation of the female body. For the purposes of this chapter, however,
I will concentrate on the relationships between these lesbian safe sex tapes and gay male
culture.
Current Flow is packaged and widely distributed as part of Gay Men’s Health Crisis
Safer Sex Shorts. Cindy Patton described the four minute video as “one of the first projects in
the world to promote safe sex for lesbians.”7 4 The tape begins with an image of an electrical
grid in an industrial area, then quickly shifts to a scene in which a woman on a sofa (Annie
Sprinkle) is masturbating with a vibrator as we hear the voices of David Letterman with guests
Madonna and Sandra Bemhart in the background on a television screen. Just as she appears to
be reaching a climax, the electrical circuit is stopped by a black hand, a Sinead O’Connor song
begins, and a black woman enters into the frame eager to satisfy the frustrated woman with her
own sexual energies. The camera pans across a strategically placed cluster of sex toys which
are then variously deployed by the two as they don surgical gloves, dental dams and a dildo
which Patton describes as “a feminist, antirealist one that resembles a gourd more than a
penis.”7 5 This video’s final image shows the satisfied couple kiss as the music stops and we
hear (and see) Letterman and his guests on the television in the background. At the end of the
tape, two graphic/colloquial titles read: “Use a dental dam for eating her out. Cut a condom
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lengthwise to make a latex sheet” and “Wash sex toys thoroughly in between sharing them. Use
latex gloves with water-based lube for fingering or fisting.” The tape’s director, Jean
Carlomusto talked (in 1989) about the relative dearth of material such as this which depicts
lesbian sex for, by, and about women apart from a few which “trickle in from the West Coast.”
She argues: “And even fewer of these deal with safer sex for lesbians. This is both oppressive
and dangerous because in order to educate lesbians about safer sex we have to establish what it
is.”7 6
That Current Flow is marketed with a series of gay male safer sex tapes shows a kind
of crossover marketing strategy and community allegiance, particularly insofar as the Safer Sex
Shorts are fairly widely distributed at video rental establishments which stock queer material
and are also intended to be played in bars, conferences and film/video festivals, used during
safer-sex workshops, and projected before pom features. As co-producers of the shorts, Jean
Carlomusto and Greg Bordowitz described the purpose of the videos as “getting the message
out that you can have hot sex without placing yourself at risk.”7 7 According to GMHC’s
information sheet on these works, each was designed by a specific task group whose job
included arranging the scenario and character as well as deciding what sexual acts to depict:
“The objective of this project is to come up with a number of culturally sensitive tapes
addressing the need of a number of communities regarding safer sex.”7 8 Other references
(beyond pornographic vernacular) for the tapes are suggested including music videos and
advertisements which account for the “slick” look o f the finished products designed, as they are,
to be “consumable.”
Many of the Safer Sex Shorts includes interracial pairings. Midnight Snack, for
example, shows a black man come into a kitchen in the dark and open up the fridge. A light is
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switch on and the man is joined by a white partner who immediately begins licking his anus
with the use of a dental dam. The tape continues in the kitchen as they incorporate various food
items into their safe sex which ends with a close-up of the black man’s face, signifying his
sexual satisfaction. Like Current Flow, the tape includes final statements related to the sexual
practices shown. Here the viewer is advised: “Use latex condoms. Cut a condom lengthwise to
use for rimming.” Another short, Car Service incorporates more is a “narrative” with a black
businessman (suit and briefcase) getting into a cab amusingly marked as a “GMHC” taxi with
their phone number on it. The driver and passenger are shown first exchanging furtive glances
at one another and then clearly engaged in humorous conversation (though none of which is
heard since the tape is structured with a music score only). When the passenger discovers he
doesn’t have his wallet on him, but offers three condoms as “currency” instead, the driver takes
him to a secluded place where they put the condoms to use. The final title reminds us: “For
fucking use latex condoms. Use only water-based lube with non-oxynol 9.”
Canadian videomaker Richard Fung’s contribution to the Safer Sex Shorts is Steam
Clean. Fung comments that he was approached by Bordowitz and Carlomusto “presumably
because they knew and liked my work” but also because they couldn’t locate “an openly gay
Asian videomaker in the United States who would undertake such as project.”7 9 Steam Clean
shows a young East Asian man roaming through a bath house. Using a hand-held camera, as a
stand-in for his perspective as he cruises down a hallway and peers into various rooms, the
cruiser eventually exchanges friendly smiles with a South Asian man, enters his room and the
two begin to kiss and caress. After a few shots of this, the South Asian man puts a condom on
the cruiser (in close-up) and then sits on his penis. The camera then artfully pans away to show
the two men enjoying anal sex from a mirror reflection as text rolls up on the screen: “Fuck
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safely, use a condom.” This advice is repeated in Tagalong, Hindi, Chinese and Vietnamese.
Interestingly, none of these tapes deploy the straight pom convention of money shot (which
would counter to their safe sex message). Instead, they rely more heavily on the convention of
visually registering pleasure on the human face, a convention more closely allied with depicting
female sexual pleasure in both straight and lesbian pom. At the same time, the prominence of
club music allies the short with something akin to music videos, in spite of their varying degrees
of sexual explicitness.
Julia Creet argues that a gay male influence on lesbian pom is clearly present in recent
depictions of lesbian sex, citing examples from On Our Backs and the work of the Kiss & Tell
Collective. In her essay “Lesbian Sex/Gay Sex: What’s the Difference?” Creet argues that
larger numbers of gay men and lesbians recognize themselves as “sharing political or sexual
proclivities” being careful to point out that this doesn’t mean that lesbians and gay man are
necessarily doing the same things.8 0 What emerges instead, says Creet: “is perhaps the first
commonly shared homoerotic language. ‘Fisting,’ for example, can involve very different parts
of the anatomy for men and women, yet when understood in homoerotic argot, it speaks of a
sameness in practice.”8 1 Appropriation from gay bar/back room culture is presented in Safe Is
Desire, a tape structured around a mixed race couple, Dione and Allie, who have recently
begun dating, staging the conflict around Dione’s unwillingness to practice safe sex. To
convince Dione of the importance of doing so, Allie takes her to a sex club which offers a peer
education performance by the Safe Sex Sluts. After the demo, (which includes one woman
dressed as a nurse who first instructs, then participates in explicit safe sex activity on stage with
two other performers), the couple ventures upstairs to a ‘back room’ where an orgy is in
progress. This scenario presents a spectrum of sexual orientations/activities with slapping,
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strapping, spikes, studs, leather, tattoos and piercings. Catherine Saalfield states that there is
even what she calls “lesbian faggotry” presented as one butch leans over to suck another
butch’s dick/dildo.8 2 Moreover, Safe Is Desire mocks sex ed strategies which rely on medical
expertise as a source of instruction. Here the “nurse” blurs the instruction/seduction divide,
revealing a common trope in pom’s use of “disciplinary” bodies such as policemen and women,
school teachers, doctors and nurses.
Two of the shorts included on She’ s Safe! employ similar tactics: Jill Jacks O ff (1993 3
min) and Girls Will Be Boys (1993 3 min) made by Texas Tomboy (a.k.a. Heidi Deming). In
Jill Jacks Off, a woman with a short crew cut dances to club music in front of a mirror in a
bedroom and slowly strips off a frilly dress to reveal her combat boots, strap-on harness and
leather gear. As she continues to dance, apply a condom to her dildo and “jack off,” another
butch (in a suit and tie) is shown spying on her (with binoculars) through her bedroom window.
This short clearly incorporates elements of gay male iconography in terms of dress codes.
Stylistically, this is accomplished through fast cutting, carefully orchestrated lighting
techniques, stop and slow motion photography and the use of club music (as opposed to
synchronous sound). This creates a sense of sexual energy which constitutes the tape and its
message as conversant with MTV aesthetics, therefore fashionable and “in the know.” It also
mobilizes interesting issues related to voyeurism and exhibition (long associated with the male
gaze and female performance) that are reappropriated here from a woman’s point of view.
These sequences highlight a gender-bending performativity o f sex and may also be read
as a parody of gay male pom conventions which (often) centralize sexual performance around
the penis. I ally this with gay male pom rather than straight (which also privileges a male
sexual narrative around the genitals) because the butch-butch pairing here clearly has more in
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common with same sex tropes than with heterosexual conventions. Julia Creet speculates (and
these tapes seem indicative of this) that gay men have become fetishized sex symbols for many
lesbian sexual fantasies, as she states: “...butch-butch sexuality is easily fed by images of two
men doing it. Because gender-bending is a time-honoured tradition in queer culture, it makes
our imaginary crossings of sexual boundaries perhaps predictable in the more fluid realm of
fantasy.”8 3 Creet goes on to point out that AIDS activism (in which lesbians have played a
significant role) and safe sex discourse have also provided a shared language and forum for
lesbians and gay men. Gay-lesbian rapport, in fact, is a repeated theme in Safe Is Desire. For
example, when Allie and Dione are making their way to the bedroom on their first date, Allie’s
gay roommate comes running out of his bedroom and begs her for a condom (he has run out).
Allie chastises him, but quickly pulls one out of her purse in ready supply. This tape shows her
roommate’s ‘trick’ and the trick’s hard on (which is certainly unusual in a lesbian safe sex
tape) with deliberate nonchalance. It is precisely the kind of graphic representation of the
overlapping between lesbian and gay male culture for which Catherine Saalfield lauds this
particular tape most.8 4 In these ways, these safer sex videos for lesbians may be seen to
employ self-conscious, and exhibitionistic strategies to build a lesbian audience that perceives
itself in a sexual vanguard for women. This includes images of lesbians appropriating phallic
objects and sexual role-playing in an attempt to rewrite female sexual pleasure as specific and
local, instead of essential and universal.
A gay male influence is only part of what comprises lesbian sex representation, since
lesbian imagery develops in several directions, some closer to existing forms and structures, and
others more divergent. Of course, the lesbian community can hardly be defined as a sexual
community to the degree that, say, the gay male community has. But in the absence of a
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longstanding tradition of women-produced sexual imagery, one could argue that these tapes -
generated under the sobering discourse of the HIV/AIDS epidemic - actually function,
simultaneously, as a celebration of lesbian sex. In other words, while they function under the
rubric of a pedagogical agenda seeking to advise lesbians on safe sex practices, perhaps these
tapes accomplish something else as well. For example, a significant part of the standard for
success in these tapes has to do with how sexy the actual depiction of sex is deemed to be.
While this doesn’t mean that the instructive or educational value of these tapes is irrelevant,
many reviews of the tapes seem to concentrate more on the qualitative evaluation of the sex
scenes than on how effectively or efficiently the important information allied with its practices
is relayed. The fantasy of believing that this sex is somehow believably and realistically “hot”
seems to be a consistent and significant part of the criteria for judgment. This marketing
strategy is evident in the publicity for Safe is Desire which promises “Romantic desire and club
sex passion— safe sex style.” In her review of the tape, Catherine Saalfield underscores this
dual strategy of education and entertainment, describing the video as “the latest, hottest and
most coherent lesbian safe sex tape to date...Fatale’s...romp through the romance between this
interracial pair rectifies the omission from mainstream media of lesbians’ experience with
HIV/AIDS. It will also jump-start your girlie-engines.”8 5
As with all of the sex education film/video I have discussed throughout this project, it is
impossible to know how these tapes are actually used/received on anything other than a case-
by-case basis. Nor do I have empirical/ethnographic data to indicate whether viewers use these
tapes strictly as self-help manuals to latex use and safer sex methods, as a cue to engage in
sexual acts, or as a form erotic fantasy production for the viewer. Some of these issues relate
to the more widespread and unresolvable debates surrounding the confusing and (often) class-
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based distinctions between pornography and erotica which are indeed multiple and complex.8 6
Moreover, the political and representational strategies at work in sexually explicit imagery
produced by women are similarly complicated, given the inherited feminist discourse about
objectification. In theorizing a pornographic vernacular as a concept from which to produce
better strategies for organizing communities or subcultures around safe sex, Cindy Patton
argues: “The primary goal of safe sex advocacy in a video is information, not eroticization.
Although pornography might be able to provide information, the specific requirements of safe
sex representation are probably at artistic odds with pornographic conventions.”8 7 While
Patton’s point is well-taken, in the context of the queer community, it is interesting to note that
gay and lesbian-produced safe sex videos explicitly strive to be both instructive and “sexy” at
the same time. Indeed artistry seems to be the way to subsume the proselytizing aspect of the
educational material contained within them.
The possible reasons for this are multiple. In the case of lesbian-produced material,
this may be explained by the fact that women pomographers are trying to reach audiences that
may be especially hostile to pom given its visibility as a target for feminist anti-pom activism
and conservative crusades. Moreover, the dual influence of both the feminist and gay
movements on lesbian feminism, leads to important points of convergence between lesbians and
gay men in the area of sex on the one hand, and feminism’s political analysis which may seem
to be at odds with gay male sexual culture, on the other. Julia Creet summarizes this conflict
when she states: “Our brothers have created institutions out o f fantasies, while we lesbians are
still arguing over whether to engage in fantasy in the first place. They have not been shy about
their extensive repertoire; we need only the inclination to look.”8 8 Within feminist theoretical
(especially film theory) paradigms that have problematized the whole notion of looking in the
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first place, the explicit representation of sex in lesbian safe sex video practices may be read
(and rendered more acceptable), under the rubric of necessary instruction.
Some Provisional Conclusions
To educate about safer sex means to address the variety of ways in which bodies
(which are also understood along axes of gender, race, class and so on) are sexual. In this
sense, these safe sex pom tapes blur the epistophillic tendency aligned with nonfiction film’s
educative function by simultaneously engaging the scopophilic pleasures of viewing long
associated with feminist film theory’s masculinist spectatorial paradigm. Perhaps, to invoke
Diana Fuss’s argument from Chapter 4, the pleasures in knowing and the pleasures in seeing
are not so very far apart. The blurring of scenes of instruction and scenes of seduction that so
many contemporary sex education videos invite further inquiry into the possible mimetic
function of the educational process beyond older fear-based and instrumentalist models.
Alongside the proliferation of lesbian pom, dyke bars with back rooms, high profile sex
radicals and overall a more erotically charged lesbian scene both in mainstream culture and in
queer communities, these lesbian safe sex tapes offer an unprecedented variety of sexual
choreographies. In the myriad ways in which lesbians may identify - including (however
provisionally), positions of race, class, age, ablebodiedness and ethnicity - reconceptualizing
identity politics without abandoning it altogether is part of the challenge of contemporary
concerns. Beyond their strictly informative value with regard to safe sex practices, these tapes
may be seen as pedagogically valuable for any woman grappling with identity and sexuality in a
culture that polices and represses both. Moreover, much of this work is dedicated to
demystifying sex. Foucault has famously argued that a peculiarity of modem societies is “not
that they have consigned sex to a shadow existence, but that they dedicated themselves to
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371
speaking of it ad infinitum, while exploiting it as the secret.”8 9 I now only partially agree with
this claim. This project, my immersion into sex educational strategies as they are visualized in
film and video, suggests to me that the most innovative pedagogical strategies today are
precisely aimed to remove the shroud of secrecy surrounding sex. No doubt the “crisis of
representation” caused by the AIDS crisis is implicated in these transformations creating, as
Simon Watney contends, “a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body
and its capacities for sexual pleasure.”9 0
Foucault has argued that the nineteenth century and twentieth centuries have been
epochs of multiplication calling this a “dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their
disparate forms, a multiple implantation of perversions.” “Our epoch,” he says, “has initiated
sexual heterogeneities.”9 1 For better and worse, this implantation of perversions has gradually
led to the celebration and visualization of dissident sexualities in the struggle to fight against
this devastating epidemic and the marginalized communities it afflicted most - including gay
men, IV drug users and minority women. The plethora of various sex educational strategies
that have developed, most pointedly in reaction to the AIDS crisis, is another important
heterogeneity in contemporary culture which is illuminated by the vast range of sex ed
film/video deployed in its service. I am not suggesting that a magic bullet has been found to the
question of pedagogy (which is still sadly true of AIDS), but the questions and reconfigurations
of identity politics and sexual citizenship that this crisis has precipitated have no doubt opened
up the field o f debate.
AIDS cultural commentator Walt Odets reflects on the pedagogical failure of much
HIV/AIDS education as it developed through the 1980s: “As a society,” he argues, “we do all
kinds of things that may or may not be in the interest of our long-term health because we
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consider them important. We weigh the risks against the value. If you say to a man, ‘In order
not to get H.I.V. you are never going to have sex again without a condom,’ his response would
be that that seemed impossible. But there’s a difference between going out with a guy you’ve
never met whose status you don’t ask about, and a friend you’ve known for 10 years who tells
you he’s negative. Education has refused to allow gay men to even think about that difference.
It’s like telling people that if they want to be safe drivers, they must always drive 35 miles per
hour without any regard to when, where or road conditions. Which any sane person would
reject.”9 2 While Odets is talking specifically about the gay male community here and
pedagogical failures reflected in the sudden upsurge in HIV transmission rates in the early
1990s his point, I would argue, is equally applicable to sexual practices more generally.
What is needed here is some theorization of ignorance, or ignoring as a significant and
intertwined aspect of knowledge acquisition. Eve Sedgwick reflects on the complex
machinations of ignorance and knowledge in Epistemology o f the Closet, arguing that
knowledge in itself is not power. “[Although it is the magnetic field of power,” she says,
“Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in the mobilizing flows of energy,
desire, goods, meanings, persons.”9 3 Sedgwick continues: “Insofar as ignorance is ignorance o f
a knowledge - a knowledge that may itself....be seen as either true or false under some other
regime of truth - these ignorances, far from pieces of the originary dark, are produced by and
correspond to particular knowledges and circulate as particular regimes of truth.”9 4 Rather than
sacrifice the notion of ignorance, then, Sedgwick is interested in pluralizing and specifying it.
“...[IJgnorance is not,” she says, “a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from which
the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, insights, freedoms, progress.”
Instead, she proffers, there exists “a plethora of ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions
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about the labor, erotics, and economics of their production and distribution.”9 5 In this case, we
might inquire about the “labor, erotics and economics” of abstinence-only or instrumentalist
models of sex ed or even of pom as a pedagogical practice: what knowledges and ignorances
are privileged and why? Perhaps asking these different kinds of questions may give us a fresh
approach to rethinking adolescence, sexuality and identity. Put another way, we need to re-
imagine how we negotiate both our initiation into sexual practices alongside the labor, erotics
and economics that circulate around them.
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Notes
1. Jeffrey Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping o f Adolescence in the 20th Century (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 217.
2. Shoshana Felman, “Psychoanalysis and Education: Teaching Terminable and Interminable” Yale
French Studies 63 (1982), 30.
3. An insightful overview of this trend can be found in Jesse Green, “Flirting With Suicide,” The New
York Times Magazine (September 6, 1996), 38-46+.
4. Moran, Teaching Sex, 223.
5. This is a position which runs through Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
6. M. S. R. Gottlieb, R. Schroff, H. M. Schanker, et al. “Pneumocystic carinii Pneumonia and
Mucosal Candidiasis in Previously Healthy Homosexual Men.” New England Journal o f Medicine
305: 1425-31.
7. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics o f
Remembering (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997), 146.
8. Ibid., 146
9. Paula Treichler gives April 1, 1987 as the date for when President Reagan finally made a public
statement about the AIDS epidemic. See How to Have Theory in an Epidemic: Cultural Chronicles o f
AIDS (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 57. Tom Stoddard points out Reagan’s “virtual
abdication of responsibility on the issue,” arguing that virtually all achievements surrounding isolation
of the virus and efforts to halt its spread came from outside of government, from private individuals
and organizations who discovered the problem and sought to address it. Writing in 1989, he goes on
to say: “A nation that devised Project Apollo, the Marshall Plan and the Manhattan Project has been
unable to agree with itself on what to do about any aspect of the crisis posed the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus. The government cannot even achieve a consensus on what to tell ordinary
citizens about the virus, with some officials urging warnings that are explicit and other advocating
more circumspect messages for reasons of propriety, personal morality, or politics.” See “Paradox and
Paralysis: An Overview of the American Response to AIDS,” Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural
Politics, Eds. Erica Carter and Simon Watney (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1989), 98.
10. The body/antibody argument comes from a very useful star analysis of Hudson by Richard Meyer,
“Rock Hudson’s Body,” inside out/Lesbian Theories/Gay Theories, ed. Diana Fuss (New York:
Routledge, 1991), 155-170.
11. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York: Anchor Books,
1989), 105.
12. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 1.
13. Ibid., 1
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14. Sander Gilman, Disease and Representation: Images ofIllness from Madness to AIDS (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 258.
15. Life 8 (July 1985).
16. Allan Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social History o f Venereal Disease in the United States Since
1880 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 193.
17. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 1.
18. Simon Watney, Policing Desire: Pornography, AIDS & the Media (Second Edition)
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 9.
19. ACT UP was formed in New York City in 1987. As a collective of individuals deploying direct
action strategies to fight homophobia, raise awareness of the crisis and of government inaction to it,
ACT UP was peopled by media savvy individuals who creatively made use of power of representation.
Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston’s text, AIDS Demo Graphics is an excellent chronicle of this work,
including reproductions of many of their widely disseminated posters, banners and crack & peel
stickers (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990). As an offshoot of ACT UP (founded at an ACT UP meeting in
April 1990), Queer Nation was geared to extending the activism and counterpolitics on behalf of AIDS
of that older group by striving to transform public sexual discourse more generally. Lauren Berland
and Elizabeth Freeman describe its politics as decidedly “street.” They outline the diverse, even
contradictory, performative, in-you-face “cultural pedagogy” of the movement in “Queer Nationality,”
Fear o f a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory, Ed. Michael Warner (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 193-229.
20. For a history of these various video collectives, see Alexandra Juhasz, “A History of Alternative
AIDS Media,” in AIDS TV: Identity, Community and Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995), 31-73.
21. Gay Men’s Health Crisis was formed in 1982 in New York which, along with Kaposi’s
Foundation in San Francisco formed the same year, were the first AIDS service organizations formed
in North America.
22. Jan Zita Grover, “Visible Lesions: Images of People With AIDS,” Afterimage (Summer 1989), 12.
23. Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV. For interesting discussion of mainstream coverage of the crisis see
Timothy Cook and David Colby, “The Mass-Mediated Epidemic: The Politics of AIDS on the Nightly
Network News,” Eds. Elizabeth Fee and Daniel Fox, AIDS: The Making o f a Chronic Disease
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 84-124; Timothy Landers, “Bodies and Anti-Bodies:
A Crisis in Representation,” Global Television, Eds. Cynthia Schneider and Brian Wallis (New York:
Wedge Press, 1988), 281-300 and Paula Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, especially
Chapters 2 and 4.
24. Juhasz, AIDS TV, 8.
25. Catherine Saalfield, “On the Make: Activist Video Collectives,” Eds. Martha Gever, John
Greyson, Pratibha Parmar, Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video (Toronto:
Between the Lines, 1993), 31.
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26. Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema” [1969], Ed. Robert Stam and Toby Miller, Film
and Theory: An Anthology (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 287.
27. Saalfield, “On the Make,” 29. Cited in Juhasz, 7.
28. The Julia Lesage essay which I discuss at length in Chapter 4 is “Feminist Documentary:
Aesthetics and Politics,” “ Show Us Life": Toward a History and Aesthetics o f Committed
Documentary, Ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, 1984), 223-251.
29. Juhasz, AIDS TV, 7-9.
30. Ibid., 8-9
31. John Greyson outlines these subcategories in “Strategic Compromises: AIDS and Alternative
Video Practices ,” Reimaging America, Eds. Mark O’Brien and Craig Little (Philadelphia: New Society
Publishers, 1990), 61. Beyond the material that I cite directly in this chapter by Alexandra Juhasz,
Cindy Patton, Paula Treichler, Simon Watney, John Greyson, Richard Fung and Greg Bordowitz there
is a wealth of other work. A small sample of this other material includes essays in Democracy: A
Group Project ed Brian Wallis (Seattle: Bay Press, 1990); other essays in Taking Liberties: AIDS and
Cultural Politics, Eds. Erica Carter and Simon Watney; Fluid Exchanges: Artists and the Critics in
the AIDS Crisis, Ed. James Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990); Art, Activism and
Oppositionality: Essays from Afterimage, Ed. Grant Kester (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998);
Sexual Cultures and the Construction o f Adolescent Identities, Ed. Janice M. Irvine (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1994) and The AIDS Movie: Representing a Pandemic in Film and
Television, Kylo-Patrick R. Hart (New York: Hayworth Press, 2000).
32. Margaret L. Stuber, “Children, Adolescents and AIDS,” Psychiatric Medicine 9 (1991), 441.
33. Cited in Douglas Tonks, Teaching AIDS (New York: Routledge, 1996), 2.
34. Robert L. Simonds, “A Plea for the Children,” Educational Leadership 51 (Dec. 1993-Jan 1994),
12. Cited in Jeffrey P. Moran, Teaching Sex: The Shaping o f Adolescence in the 20th Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) 212.
35. Ibid., 12. Cited in Moran, 212.
36. A useful listing of these programs can be found in “The Far Right and Fear-Based Abstinence-
Only Programs,” SIECUS Report (December 1992-January 1993), 16-18.
37. Patricia Goodson and Elizabeth Edmunston, “The Problematic Promotion of Abstinence: An
Overview of Sex Respect,” Journal o f School Health 64 (May 1994), 205. Cited in Jeffrey P. Moran,
Teaching Sex, 214.
38. Robert E. Fullilove, Warren Barksdale, and Mindy Fullilive, “Teens Talk Sex: Can We Talk
Back? Sexual Cultures and the Construction o f Adolescent Identities, Ed. Janice M. Irvine
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 312.
39. Trained as a academic psychologist, Dobson was on various committee’s during the Reagan
administration although he is far better known as head of the nonprofit Christian organization and as a
radio evangelist. For an excellent analysis of Focus on the Family in terms of their Christian Video
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377
agenda, see Eithne Johnson, “The Emergence of Christian Video and the Cultivation of
Videovangelism,” Media, Culture and the Religious Right eds. Linda Kintz and Julia Lesage
(Minneapolis: University Of Minnesota Press, 1998), 191-210.
40. Although certainly not as well known as many other young actors, O’Brien would nevertheless
maybe known to some viewers for roles in Lawnmower Man (1992), The Last Action Hero (1993),
Apollo 13 (1995) and several Christian-themed made-for-television movies.
41. I borrow this term from Johnson, “The Emergence of Christian Video and the Cultivation of
Videovangelism”
42. Her chapter on The 700 Club is especially relevant here. See Mimi White, “A Traffic in Souls:
Televangelism and The 700 Club,” Tele-Advising: Therapeutic Discourse in American Television
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 110-144.
43. Michael Foucault, The History o f Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Vintage
Books, 1978), 61.
44. Johnson, “The Emergence of Christian Video and the Cultivation of Videovangelism,” 202-203.
45. Moran, Teaching Sex, 210.
46. Dai Vaughn, “Television Documentary Usage,” New Challenges for Documentary, Ed. Alan
Rosenthal (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) 27.
47. Moran, Teaching Sex, 222.
48. Ibid., 217-218
49. Fullilove, Barksdale, and Fullilive, “Teens Talk Sex: Can We Talk Back?, 314.
50. Ibid., 314
51. Amy Banfer, “Sex Ed as Art Film,” salon.com/sex/feature/2003/02/14/scenarios
52. Ibid
53. See Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Ed. Carole S. Vance (New York:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984).
54. Prostitutes, Risk and AIDS (Alexandra Juhasz and Jean Carlomusto, 1988) is an interesting
examination of the scapegoating of prostitutes for HIV/AIDS that took place in the wake of
information that AIDS had penetrated the heterosexual community. The tape examines the media
distortion s around who is at risk of HIV infection and shows clips from one of Carol Leigh’s (aka
Scarlot Harlot) videos in defense of prostitution, Safe Sex Slut (1987).
55. Treichler, How to Have Theory in an Epidemic, 42.
56. Ibid., 95-96
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57. Ibid., 96
58. Ibid., 96
59. I will not replicate the important work that Juhasz does in this book, which includes extensive
analysis of one of WAVE’S efforts, with a specific chapter devoted to one tape entitled S elf Portraits
(1990) a tape about health care providers and what motivates them to fight AIDS. See AIDS TV.
60. Juhasz, AIDS TV, 3.
61. Lynn Segal, “Lesson From the Past: Feminism, Sexual Politics and the Challenge of AIDS,”
Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, 140-141.
62. A follow-up tape also produced by Ellen Spiro called Party Safe! D iana’ s Hair Ego (Ellen Spiro,
1992) shows DiAna and her partner Bambi Sumpter travel to various locations including Toronto,
New York, Chicago and Los Angeles where they hold their safer-sex informational parties to help
people learn to more comfortably vocalize about sexual practices. Judging from her entry in Women,
AIDS and Activism (1990), DiAna continues to be denied funding. She cites her sources as mostly
“through my Mastercharge and through my clients’ tips from the beauty shop and through donations
that Bambi and I have received for doing presentations.” See “Talking That Talk,” Women, AIDS and
Activism, Eds. ACT UP/New York (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 221.
63. Julia Creet, “Lesbian Sex/Gay Sex: What’s the Difference?” Out/Look 11 (Winter 1991), 32.
64. Nancy Soloman, “Risky Business: Should Lesbian Practice Safer Sex?” Out/Look 16 (Spring
1992), 46-52. This is a point that is emphasized in Women and AIDS when one scientist talks about
how clinical studies for AIDS often make being a gay male a requirement for participation. That the
trajectory of the opportunistic infections was very different (and barely studies) for women also led to a
situation in which many medical insurance companies refused to acknowledge certain treatments as
viable condition related to AIDS. Treichler covers much of this history in “The Burdens of History:
Gender and Representation in AIDS Discourse, 1981-1988,” in How to Have Theory in an Epidemic,
42-98. See also Amber Hollibaugh “Transmission, Transmission, Where’s the Transmission?” in
Gendered Epidemic: Representations o f Women in the Age o f AIDS, Eds. Nancy L Roth and Katie
Hogan. (New York: Routledge, 1998), 63-72.
65. Quoted in Soloman, 50.
66. Hollibaugh, “Tansmission, Transmission,” 71
67. Ibid., 67
68. Ibid., 68
69. Unnamed letter to the editor, Quim, #5 (1994), 90.
70. Goma, Robin. Vamps, Virgins and Victims: How Can Women Fight AIDS? (London: Cassell
Books, 1996), 354.
71. Ibid., 354
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379
72. Ibid., 354
73. Ibid., 352
74. Cindy Patton, Fatal Advice: How Safe-Sex Education Went Wrong (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1996), 135.
75. Ibid., 136
76. Jean Carlomusto, “Making It: AIDS Activist Television,” Video Guide (November 1989), 18.
77. Jean Carlomusto and Gregg Bordowitz, “Do It! Safer Sex Pom for Girls and Boys Comes of Age,”
Allan Klusacek and Ken Morrison, Eds., A Leap in the Dark (Montreal: Vehicule Press, 1992), ISO-
181. Cited in Richard Fung, “Shortcomings: Questions about Pornography as Pedagogy,” Queer
Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, Eds. Martha Gever, John Greyson, Pratibha
Parmar (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 1993), 357.
78. Ibid., 359
79. Ibid., 355
80. Creet, “Lesbian Sex/Gay Sex,” 32.
81. Ibid., 32
82. Catherine Saalfield, “Review of Safe is Desire,” On Our Backs (September/October 1993), 36.
83. Creet, “Lesbian Sex/Gay Sex,” 31.
84. Saalfield, “Review of Safe is Desire,” 36.
85. Ibid., 36
86. The degree of sexual explicitness will not be presumed to be a mark of distinction between the
erotic and the pornographic in tapes which also aim to visually (and often explicitly) instruct women
on safe sex practices. As Richard Fung argues, “since convincing people to practice safe sex is the
currently favored AIDS prevention strategy, this necessitates promoting the pleasure of sex in itself by
depicting it in a more or less explicit way.” Indeed, the line between what is sexually explicit and
what is pornographic is a line that many have sought to draw but few have done so adequately. The
only line that gets mass agreement is that pom tends to be bad art. See Richard Fung, “Shortcomings:
Questions About Pornography as Pedagogy,” in Queer Looks: Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Film
and Video, 356.
87. Cindy Patton, “Visualizing Safe Sex: When Pedagogy and Pornography Collide,” How Do I
Look? Queer Film and Video. Eds. Bad Object Choices (Seattle Bay Press, 1991), 37.
88. Creet, “Lesbian Sex/Gay Sex,” 31-32.
89. Foucault, The History o f Sexuality, Volume I, 35.
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380
90. Watney, Policing Desire, 9.
91. Foucault, History o f Sexuality, 37.
92. Cited in Jesse Green, “Flirting With Suicide,” The New York Times Magazine (September 6,
1996), 45. Walt Odets’ book on the pedagogical and psychological consequences of be the epidemic is
In The Shadow o f the Epidemic: Being HIV-Negative in the Age ofAIDS (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1995).
93. Eve Sedgwick, Epistemology o f the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 4.
94. Ibid., 8
95. Ibid., 8
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381
Conclusion: Sex Education in the Historical Present
As to the problem of fiction, it seems to me to be a very important one; I am well aware
that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that
truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function
in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about
that a true discourse engenders or “manufactures” something that does not as yet exist,
that is, “fictions” it. One “fictions” history on the basis of a political reality that makes
it true, one “fictions” a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth.
Michel Foucault (1977)1
I must confess that I am much more interested in problems about techniques of the self
and things like that rather than sex....sex is boring.
Michel Foucault (1983)2
Rather late in this project, when I stumbled upon Foucault’s remark that sex is “boring,” I was
struck less by the comment itself than by my reaction to it. Of course, Foucault’s work,
especially his late writing, is fundamentally preoccupied with various discursive practices or
“technologies”/“techniques” of the self and much less invested in sex per se. But did he really
believe sex is, well, boring? Is this a provocation, especially - in hindsight - knowing that
Foucault at the time of this interview was very ill with AIDS? Part of what struck me about his
comment no doubt was related to a kind of saturation point that I had reached with my
immersion in eighty years of sex ed films and thirty years of sexuality histories. Thinking about
sex had for me become a kind of labor, a routine, and (dare I say it?) boring. Part of my
ambivalence was no doubt connected to simply completing a project that I have been living with
for so long, but it is also a reaction against the perceived “sexiness”of this topic, confronted
constantly as I was with the “drudgery” of the films themselves, many of which are at pains to
make sex “natural”, “normal” and unabashedly unsexy. On the one hand, this invites boredom
and ambivalence. On the other, it can inspire the kinds of analysis that enable these
overdetermined texts to speak the unsaid and to “say” myriad often fascinating things. Sex
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educational film and video, like sex itself, is indeed fraught with ambivalence, provocation,
anticipation and tedium. It is queer indeed.
This dissertation has posed a series of questions concerning sex, sexuality and
pedagogy in relation to film and video practices. My goal in examining a range of texts from
this under-theorized field of sex educational film and video, has been to understand how sex
educational practices are powerfully implicated in a complex web of social, cultural, medical,
economic, technological and institutional networks. These networks or “techniques of self’ are
undergirded by changing conceptions of identity which, in turn, have shaped our evolving
conception of sexuality. By starting this conclusion with yet another series of quotations by
Foucault I am reminded that his influence on this project remains as profound here and now as
it was at the outset of this long endeavor. My exploration of sex education’s imbrication in
procedures of citizenship and governance (including self-governance) is heavily indebted to the
Foucaultian project of assessing knowledge and power as discursive practices tied to the project
of democracy itself: democracy as form of imagined self-management. Sex education film and
video is nothing if not implicated in the fictional and nonfictional domains of visual culture, a
dichotomy borne out in the very first venereal disease propaganda films which combine
melodramatic (fictions) alongside the spectacle and evidentiary status of “real” diseased bodies
(truths).
My chronological approach to understanding the transformations that have taken place
in sex education strategies is an obvious way to traverse this broad, mostly uncharted territory,
but which nevertheless is filled with many flaws, not least of which is the number of exclusions
that I have had to make along the way. For example, I have seen many many more films than I
actually write about. Those texts that are included here are selected sometimes for their
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uniqueness, sometimes their typicality, and always for their illustrative potential insofar as I
have imposed a particular order (my fiction) onto these things. In the absence of a debated and
agreed upon canon (if such a thing ever truly exists), many of my choices feel somewhat
arbitrary, a product of their availability for repeated viewings; or their archived status; or
sometimes their recirculation in the form of nostalgic, “ephemeral” video complications; or
simply the ways in which they fit into the “logic” of my agenda as it began to take shape.
So while I agree with Foucault that all historical narratives are a “fiction,” then, I also
subscribe to his view that these fictions engender truths. One of the most striking truths I have
discovered is how enduring certain pedagogical tactics seem to be, in spite of the fact that they
can be deployed from politically and ideologically divergent positions. This, despite
considerable evidence which challenges their effectivity. For example, the highly dramatic,
moralizing discourse of many early VD films continues to be widely deployed to this day, as
evidenced in a range of teen pregnancy films, venereal disease and AIDS videos hoping to
frighten viewers/students into behavioral change through the specter of unwanted pregnancy
and disease. Even an “independent” feature film like Larry Clark’s Kids, while praised in
certain quarters for its liberal politics and provocative use of realist representational strategies,
can be read as preaching an age-old fear-based moralizing message in its AIDS pedagogy. To
be sure, the film’s message that adolescence is a particularly dangerous, precarious stage of
development is a nineteenth century lesson derived directly from the Victorian moralism of G.
Stanley Hall, who I discuss in Chapter 3. The democratic impulse of talking head tactics as
they begin to be widely deployed in feminist verite films in the 1960s and 1970s is easily
cooptible for anti-feminist, right wing Christian fundamentalist purposes as well, as I show in
the Focus on the Family material in Chapter 5. All of which is to say that while certain forms
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lend themselves to particular political and pedagogical tactics, many representational and
pedagogical strategies are nevertheless easily coopted to other ideological agendas. Even
critical pedagogy as a Freirian practice of freedom can be filtered/distorted through a Christian
fundamentalist to suggest that liberation is interpreted as surrendering oneself to the “freedom”
that comes with religious faith.
One of the most significant contributions to the changing shape of sex ed film and video
is undoubtedly the transformations enabled by technological innovation. With the development
of portable lightweight 16mm film equipment in the post World War II era to the democratizing
effect of camcorder technology from the 1960s onward, more and more people have gained
access to film and video production. This has meant that sex educational material has
increasingly been produced by and for politicized groups who often challenge the dominant
paradigms through which sex and sexuality have been conceived. As more and more women,
racial and sexual minorities began to produce sex education material, the field has widened
considerably, splintering into what sometimes seems like a complex, indecipherable, noisy
network of different strategies. While this makes it hard to get a focused picture of the current
state of sex education, I believe this mosaic is a positive development. What the diverse range
of sex ed film/video produced today makes clear is that the normalization attached to a white
middle-class heteronormative view of sexual practices is constantly being challenged. The
broad spectrum of historical material - especially up to the 1960s ~ produced to indoctrinate,
instruct and educate about sex helps us to see with much greater clarity the degree to which
sexual behavior is never simply personal and private, but fundamentally a product of social and
historical constructions mediated through public discourses and institutional practices.
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With the multiplication of texts, including those enabled both by the World Wide Web
and the recent creation of cable channels devoted to the topic of sex as object of study/
interest/education/entertainment, we certainly see evidence of Foucault’s view that the
inducement to speak about sex is ubiquitous. Nevertheless, what constitutes appropriate sexual
citizenship has become less a question of one coherent and stable “identity” to a more
“multicultural,” fluid and varied range of practices. This lends credence to the argument that
various sexual revolutions over the course of the twentieth century have had less to do with the
liberating effect of enabling permissive behavior than with a generative effect of widening the
discussion/debate around sexuality to the extent that new sexualities are constantly being
produced. This ever widening discussion may be seen as creating new sexualities, as part of the
productivity of power that Foucault so forcefully proclaimed. To give one obvious example,
the mobilization of the gay community around HIV/AIDS has forced us to reconceive the very
problematic assumptions we have made about an imagined heterosexual community and how it
has been historically (fictitiously) constructed. The reconfiguration of the female body and of
female sexuality through feminist film and video practices have similarly generated new models
which have dramatically altered the androcentric, heterocentric, lens through which gender has
previously been visioned.
One of many avenues left undeveloped here is the important recent work of self-
proclaimed “sexperts” such as Annie Sprinkle and Betty Dodson, many of whom are feminist in
their orientation toward developing sexual expertise, masturbatory techniques and finessing
sexual practices for the already initiated adult. This fascinating field has recently been
explored by Eithne Johnson in her important dissertation entitled Sex Scenes and Naked Apes :
Sexual-Technological Experimentation and The Sexual Revolution,3 Institutional histories of
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any one of a number of educational film production companies have yet to be written. These
could be fascinating for the ways in which they simultaneously reflect economic, industrial and
educational imperatives, as well as for their solicitation of pedagogical expertise as a form of
legitimation. The relationship between textbooks and textbook films as their audiovisual
accompaniment is another interesting domain left unexplored here though one suggested by the
number of films I have viewed which were made a companions pieces or supplements to print
material. While I certainly talk about films directed to adolescents and teens, I have not fully
developed discussion of the ways in which sex education has become so age-defined as various
discursive practices strive to develop standardized curricula around particular age-specific
stages of development.
Another line of inquiry that this project suggests is the degree to which virtually all
cinema is fundamentally about learning. In terms of sexuality more specifically, we learn a
great deal from texts produced for entertainment, though I have concentrated on those produced
more specifically for education and “classroom” use. While I have written about some of these
films elsewhere, transsexual documentaries invite important discussion of the ways in which sex
and gender are being redefined in contemporary culture. Indeed, the surgically reconstructed
transsexual body begs important questions about the degree to which not only gender but
biological sex is a social construction. Of course, the “scene” of instruction for much of this
material is now often home video (or the archive viewing station), a transformation which
invites important consideration o f the ways in which conditions o f viewing are implicated in sex
education film and video. Audience reception studies would be another provocative way of
examining theses texts, especially given the enthusiastic and provocative responses to this work
that I have received in both conference presentations and the classroom. A more specific
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history which remains a fascinating prospect to me is an examination of the menstruation film
and of the transformations in the way menarche is perceived; the strategies used to visualize it;
and the pedagogical techniques which frame this biological stage of development for adolescent
girls.
Bridging both fiction and nonfiction film/video domains, sex education film and video
powerfully reflects and refracts the “fictions” and “truths” of history, including - indeed
shaping - our conception of the “historical present.” As I mention in my introduction to this
dissertation, Jeffrey Weeks uses this oxymoronic term as a way of always already politicizing
sexuality; framing sexual history as political history; and unearthing our current dilemmas in
light of historical influences.4 My historical fiction here is a chronological one, where different
trajectories (“fictions”) may well have brought rather different “truths” to light. It is my hope
that this effort will contribute to the ever widening field of documentary and media studies. In
the scholarly trend toward interdisciplinarity, the “genre” of sex education film and video
invites important links to the often assumed but frequently unacknowledged relationship
between media studies and educational theory. This preliminary gesture will, I hope, be just
one of many in this exciting new direction. If different fictions engender different truths, I
believe that examining the rich and varied history of sex educational film and video through the
lens of the historical present will engender new modes of political (and pedagogical) action.
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Notes
1. This is from an interview originally conducted in 1977 which is translated and reprinted in Michel
Foucault, “The History of Sexuality,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings,
1972-1977 ed. Colin Gordon. (Brighten, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 193.
2. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, “How We Behave: An Interview with Michel Foucault.” Vanity
Fair (November 1983), 62.
3. Eithne Johnson, Sex Scenes and Naked Apes: Sexual-Technological Experimentation and The
Sexual Revolution. (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 1999).
4. Jeffrey Weeks, Sexuality and Its Discontents. (New York: Routledge, 1985), 10.
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Asset Metadata

Creator Milliken, Christie (author)

Core Title Generation sex: Reconfiguring sexual citizenship in educational film and video

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television Critical Studies

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,education, history of,education, philosophy of,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Renov, Michael (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Kinder, Marsha (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c16-651954

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Identifier 3116756.pdf (filename),usctheses-c16-651954 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 3116756.pdf

Dmrecord 651954

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Milliken, Christie

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the au...

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