Sex-Ed in the 70s

For my health class, we had to ask our parents about what sex-ed was like for them. I went to interview my mother, and her response was that there wasn't any. However, I had to get a full 3/4s of a double spaced page, so I dragged it out a lot and talked to my father as well, producing the following literary gem:

My mother had no sex-ed in high school. The only thing she remembers is that in fifth grade, they separated the boys and the girls into two different classrooms and watched a movie about puberty and development and getting your period and stuff like that. It was probably the same animated movie that we watched in fifth grade. She doesn’t recall having any classes in high school about health, sex, sexually transmitted diseases, alcoholism or drug abuse. There was nothing. They basically had to learn everything on their own. They didn’t even the many resources available on the internet today. They had to rely on what their friends told them and what they read in magazines. “We were clueless,” Mom says. She also didn’t learn anything at all from her parents.

My Dad also didn’t have sex-ed in high school. If he did have it, he has completely forgotten about it because it was so ineffectual. He does remember that they had something in sixth grade. They called it some sort of health class, and it definitely wasn’t sex-ed. They pretty much had a couple of classes with a guy teacher while the students were segregated into two classes. The guys got to watch movies. He thinks that he watched Reefer Madness, which was about the dangers of marijuana as a gateway drug. He also watched one movie about STDs. He’s fairly certain that while the boys were watching the movies, the girls were learning about menstrual cycles and stuff like that.