These videos are very nicely done, but entirely NSFW — they are intended for children in Norway, though, which is impressive. The narrator is simultaneously enthusiastic and not at all salacious, a tough line to draw.
I’d have shown these to my kids, if I’d had them available back in the middle ages.
Here, learn about the vagina:
And for balance, here’s the penis:
I am 59, grew up in Calgary, Alberta. We had NO, I mean NONE, as in ZERO sex ed.
I wish, I wish, I wish I and my classmates (boys AND girls) had been exposed to these 11 minutes of explicit, nonjudgmental education.
It would have made things SO much easier!
40 from Edmonton. We did get sex education as of Grade 5, but it was sex-segregated, and decontexualized. Lots of talk about hormones and interior anatomy, virtually nothing on sex itself or exterior anatomy. The book “Where Did I Come From?” was closer to the point than most of the sex education I had before Grade 11, which was the year my class finally got the “Condom-over-the-produce” demo.
This would have been far more effective.
Why the latex gloves being used to display the female genitalia, but not the male? Like there is something dirty/infectious about female genitals?
Also, PZM, you say “These videos are very nicely done, but entirely NSFW”. I think you should have added the modifier “in the US”, as in your very next sentence you pointed out these were being shown to school children in Norway.
Well Norway has child labor laws doesn’t it? :)
Wasn’t there a big oogenesis annoucement a while back?
/Googles. Ah.
Article: Nature – Egg-making stem cells found in adult ovaries (2012-02-27)
Article: World Journal of Stem Cells – Ovarian stem cells: From basic to clinical applications, an overview (2015-05-26)
Here in the US northeast, back in the ’70’s, we were quite progressive and had in depth sex education classes.
Yeah, there was some giggling and jokes from the class, but there was the knowledge of hormones, changes and the mechanics, as well as birth control methods covered.
Today, it’s a bit of a regressive climate, with parents, such as my sister in law, who pulled their children from the class and objecting to the mere existence of that class.
Said sister in law, never having properly educated her daughters and additionally preventing them from attending said class then experienced an early grandmotherhood.
Something that I predicted when her eldest was two years old and getting into mischief and mom said, when I indicated it, “I don’t care, as long as she’s out of my hair”.
That eldest daughter just married this year, to a man who wasn’t the father of her first child, is working for minimum wage and mom gets to babysit while daughter works. New hubby and that daughter have had her second child, who is treated a bit better by dad than the child that he didn’t help create.
Oh, the sister in law was a heavy bible thumper, Southern Baptist type, who has matured a lot over the years. Still addicted to biblical nonsense, but she’s learned a little from her mistakes.
At least she let her youngest daughter attend sex ed.
Now, to be less depressing and humorous…
Sax is evil in my hands and mouth. Any attempt at it causes severe genital pain, as well as agony to the auditory system. This characteristic is shared among all woodwind instruments that I attempt to utilize.
The only harm beyond that that is worse is me with string and bow, while not utilizing the same to fire an arrow with tolerable accuracy.
Give me a violin and one’s ears will bleed, followed by liquifaction of the brain.
I’m a keyboard man. Piano, organ, synthesizer, even accordion are my instruments.
Brasswind is flat out, unless you like the sound of flatulence through a tunnel.
But, on the piano, some favored and requested tunes are from Fiddler on the Roof.
“Far from the Home I Love” being a favored request from ex pat workers abroad, both US and foreign.
Something that lead to a quite interesting experience, the request for a copy of Fiddler on the Roof from an Iranian ex pat worker. I gave him my disc and ordered a new one. :)
All life is suffering, pain, and misery, so one’s duty is to try to help lower that suffering. One’s own suffering then is equally lowered.
I suppose you must have had to rely on copies of Algizar’s Viaticum or the Trotula stolen during viking raids you did while at graduate school…
/eyeroll
Sort of – the vulva is considerably more moist than the penis. Parting the labia in particular would impart fluids to the fingers; handling a penis would only do this if the presenter touched the foreskin underside / glans. (I only partially watched them, so I’m not sure to what extent the presenter handled either… but I doubt she put her finger under the foreskin!)
@CompulsoryAccount7746, I vague recall that paper on ovarian stem cells. It came on the heels of a study on stem cells in the human brain.
Who knows what the future will hold, as once we challenge our assumptions and actually look for the unexpected, such as stem cells in tissues we previously didn’t expect them, what stimulation methods may be discovered?
That said, some tissue create their own problems, such as if stem cells are found in testes. Testes are immune privileged tissues, which may be a barrier for some potential stimulating hormones.*
*Immune privileged areas are also a new concern with viral infections, as viral infection seems to persist in those tissues for an uncertain amount of time after systemic infection has been cleared.
miles links @ 3
I think it’s more like not wanting to touch mucous membranes with dirty hands than the said mucous membranes being dirty. I wouldn’t want a doctor putting a ungloved hand in my mouth, but would have no problem with them touching my forehead with a bare hand.
I had sex education at school (late 80s/early 90s, Finland), and it was OK, but the videos we saw didn’t have production values like this one.
The Norwegians (their state-owned broadacating company, NRK) seem to make a lot of documentary TV these days. When I look at programs broadcast by the Finnish state-owned broadacating company, Yle, a significant proportion come from Norway.
I’m a Norwegian school librarian and consider this totally safe for work. :-)
Christ – Youtube wants me to spgn in and prove my age ffs.
Holy carp, I didn’t expect it to be THAT nsfw. We had sex ed in school with somewhat explicit videos here (germany), but I’m pretty sure there weren’t any clitoral close-ups there.
I was born in 1938 in England and went to a number of schools before I was 13 – and have no recollection of the subject even being mentioned – beyond the fact that at one school there were separate playgrounds for the boys and girls while several others were boys only.
At the age of 13 I had a shock. I went to another school where many of the pupils had been there from the age of 5 – so that while I got no specific sex education I suspect most may have had something in their pre-teen years. It was an unconventional co-educational school (Dartington Hall) where the pupils made the rules – and where a rule was not needed there wasn’t one. So the rules at the swimming pool were only concerned with safety – and no one cared a damn whether you wore a bathing costume or not. So I suddenly discovered what naked teenaged girls actually looked like! After a few weeks I started to take nudity at the pool for granted (as nearly everyone else did) and if there was any “sexy” curiosity it concerned the few girls who did wear costumes – as what did they have to hide?
Of course there were liaisons – but in the four years I was at the school I did not hear of one pregnancy – while at a nearby conventional segregated school it was rumoured that there were several girls in trouble every year.
I am continually baffled about the American (among others) idea of pretending that sex do not exist to children. What is the point?
Bonus link: Explicit stories about how it is to get a their younger sibling. The “making of” ones are explicit (and originally German, I believe @prae):
http://www.carlsen.dk/jeg-vil-hoere-historier-om-faa-en-lillesoester-eller-lillebror
OK, that’s even more explicit then what we have in GErmany. We are pretty fond here of schematic drawings instead of pics. But I’ll say that we covered all that stuff when I taught sex ed. And yes, many boys hated having to learn about female anatomy. Because there’s nothing like a dude who thinks you have your period just to spite him…
The warning at the beginning of the videos is brilliant.
Loose translation:
@Giliell: how old were these boys? From what I remember, the topic was quite a popular one, even though accompanied by a lot of giggling. I also rember having a *ahem* hard time standing up and leaving the room after certain educational movies… Though, I had probably somewhat of a lead in the whole puberty business.
Regarding negative reactions, I mostly remember the girls and child birth, especially the placenta. There was this one girl who was extremely grossed out by that thing coming out after the baby.
Public high school in Maryland, class of ’86. We got basic sex ed, but nothing this detailed.
You know what’s uncomfortable, though? Go to the puberty section of the Amsterdam science museum with your 12 year old daughter, who’s first grossed out by the French kissing display (basically, two giant tongue waldoes that you stick your arm into to practice), then really wants to try it out with you. Nope.
prae
6th grade, so somewhere between eleven and fourteen. Some explicitly listed it as “what I didn’t like” in my feedback section. I did have different worksheets for intim hygiene where they only had to pic the one applying to their anatomy, but because they never listen half of them ended up with both versions and then they asked if they needed to have this one or that one*. When I said to the guys “you’ll need the one on female anatomy when you have a baby daughter and need to change her diaper” they were like “ew, that’s women’s work!”
*We did the topic as an “independent learning” topic: they had to read and fill in work sheets and every three weeks or so we’d do a recap and a wrap up. For their grade I graded their folders.
Derek Vandivere
We had our youngest ask us why we use our tongues for kissing and could we give her such a kiss? Also fun: your oldest asking loudly in the supermarket what condoms are and why we’d need them.
I am 57, and I remember the only sex-ed I had was a filmstrip in the eighth grade health class (segregated boys and girls). I watched both of the above videos. Very informative and factual, and slightly humorous. There is nothing in them that is offensive, but the mere showing and handling of genitals would drive christians into a frenzy. As wzrd1 @6 illustrated, they would rather their children be ignorant and pregnant than informed and having safe and protected sex. Idiots.
I was taught sex ed the old fashioned way; In the ninth grade by creepy Coach Ball (his real name, not a sick joke) who was “dating” a senior student. His idea of fun was rewinding and replaying the birth scene in The Miracle of Life while he chuckled like a, not to be redundant, creep.
Wow, these are some great presentations. It has never occurred to me that the penis is kind of a boy tampon
Sex ed at US catholic school in 5th grade in late ’90s was segregated with the boys only getting an extended list of STIs to be used as insults for a while. Never had an active social life and – despite lots of porn and a bit of chafing – I did not even realize I was circumcised until early college.
This brings two memories to mind. No, three. No, four.
First was my “sex ed” in 7 class (at ~13 years of age). In the communist Czechoslovakia. What sex is was not explaned, even the word was not mentioned. The classes were gender segregated and the teacher explained the whole thing via proxy by describing the pollination of a tulip flower – and with a picture of a tulip flower. AFAIK girls watched some vaguely educational video to which some boys tried to listen to at the window.
Second memory is a visit of “sex ed” exhibition in some sort of museum (?) in former DDR. I was on a summer camp and teachers took us there probably by mistake. The exhibition was very detailed, with models of genitalia etc. but of course it was german so it was not of much practical use to czech children. Nevertheless we were curious and enthusiastic and the teachers were embarrassed as hell and tried to surreptitiously shoo us away from the more explicit exhibits.
Third memory is a first usable sex ed in high school, short after the iron curtain fell. It was delivered by a physician, who happened to be a friend of our czech language teacher and who consented to give extra-curricular lesson for free. In the “freedom enthusiasm” after the velvet revolution nobody got into trouble, but today even we have fundie christians who object to any sex ed in school, so today this could be problematic.
Fourth memory is when I was giving a lecture about human reproductive system as a biology teacher trainee just a few years later (year 1999). I have thrown some sex ed into the lesson and I was trying my best to be “enthusiastic and not at all salacious” which indeed is a tough line to draw, especially in front of a class of 15 year olds. I think it went well and everybody was happy in the end, but I never knew if it was of any use to any of the kids.
On high school we moaned – “Oh no ma’am, no sex ed again” so you can guess sex ed was pretty well done.
to chrisreynolds@15: My parents, stiff Englishpersons both, became nudists after the age of 70, spending 6 months of the year with their fellow naturists in a privately-owned park just outside of San Diego. One day, when looking through the camp’s well-illustrated newsletter I noted the naked presence of a number of pre-teen and just-turning-teen children, and asked my parents what effects of daily casual nudity they saw in the youngsters.
They replied that nudist children almost never got into sexual trouble (pregancy/STD’s) in adolescence because, having seen every body part in every variation of size, age, etc., for years, they were NOT DRIVEN CRAZY just by seeing/or showing a breast or other “naughty bits”. It doesn’t mean the kids were under-sexed, pre-debauched or dysfunctional in their response, it’s just that they’re not overexcited to the point of poor decision-making, i.e. – going directly from second-base fondling to PIV-pregnancy-making sex.
oynaz, #16
It’s so stupid as to be beyond words. If the system worked as they intended, America would be empty, and since it isn’t we must assume that people still found out what sex is, but were ill-informed about it.
#29
Or, the United States (which aren’t Canada or Mexico) of (North) America would be, rather.
Giliell @16 — I’m still not entirely convinced periods aren’t the product of a spiteful and angry uterus. Or maybe it was just my uterus, I don’t know.
Fuck, I wish we’d had frank(er) sex-ed growing up. I mean, what I got was pretty extensive, for American sex-ed, but there was still a LOT of STD scaremongering. I wish we’d been taught more about healthy relationships, how to be a good partner, more of the interpersonal stuff. And I’d have LOVED more queer visibility, but this was the mid to late 1990’s, and people were somewhat less enlightened.
Hell, know what I’d like to see? Age-appropriate sex-ed starting in pre-k, that emphasises establishing and maintaining and enforcing healthy boundaries. Then build on that every year, with age-appropriate lessons on consent, and being a good friend, and then, with the concepts of boundaries and consent as a foundation, teach them about sexuality and sexual health. It just makes so much more sense to me than this “keep them in the dark until puberty, then tell them their urges are ‘bad’ and never to give in, but don’t dare mention how to protect themselves from disease or pregnancy because that might ‘promote’ sexual activity” thing we have going here in the USA.