Birds, bees and hippies: sex education on TV and in Oz magazine in Britain of the 1960s-70s

ABSTRACT

Despite the much-touted ‘sexual revolution’, during the 1960s-70s, at the time most Western education systems avoided sex education. This article identifies contradictory discourses about sex as manifested in two distinct cultural expressions that co-occurred in those years in the UK. The first represented mainstream social conservatism – in the form of short sex education films produced for schools and colleges. The second, more radical alternative was the British-Australian underground magazine Oz, which expressed the sexual freedom of the counterculture. Both are discussed from the perspective of visual cultural history as competing agents of sex education – one reproducing the conservative paradigm, and the other aiming to dismantle it. While the films took a biomedical and preventive attitude to sex and embodied a patriarchal heteronormative approach , Oz supported sexual freedom and shattered taboos about such issues as abortion and sexual diversity, as well as celebrated women’s sexuality. Nevertheless, male-dominant culture was also reflected on its pages, particularly in gratuitous images of female nudity. Despite this visual sexism, the article highlights the magazine as a countercultural entertainment medium educating for sexual pleasure and offering a creative, nonconformist perspective on sex that was way ahead of its time, and also of our own.

KEYWORDS:

• Oz magazine
• sex education films
• sexual revolution
• counterculture
• visual culture
• visual media
• entertainment (sex) education

Introduction

The late 1960s were characterised in many Western countries, and particularly in the UK, by the tension between a rising wave of sexual freedom and a powerful conservative backlash (Alomes 1999; Hampshire 2005; Mills 2016; Zimmerman 2015). During the 1960s, the British sexual revolution saw an important series of legislation on issues such as abortion, the contraceptive pill, and the decriminalisation of male homosexuality, and by the 1970s, the older generation had begun to accept the fact that many young people engaged in premarital sex (Cook 2014; Hall 2005; Iyer and Aggleton 2015). Nevertheless, the main message of sex education in schools during those years was preventive (Hampshire 2005) and ‘schools continued to instruct students to avoid sexual activity’ (Zimmerman 2015, 85).

Two major media cultural expressions that illustrated the clash between conservatism and sexual permissiveness in Britain of that time are short (~15-minute) sex education TV films for high school and college students, and the countercultural London Oz magazine (1967–1973), whose ~50-page issues were rich in text and visual images.¹ This article discusses the visual and textual contents of these media as two opposing approaches to sexuality, with the emphasis on Oz as an informal alternative that challenged mainstream and offered an early example of the potential of (underground) entertainment sex education as an advanced and open-minded alternative to formal sex education.

By 1971, sex education films had been viewed in thousands of schools (Davis 2021; Zimmerman 2015). Most dealt with the standard ‘birds and bees’ topics: the sex organs, how children are conceived, and prevention of pregnancy and venereal disease. At the same time, they communicated a hidden curriculum that idealised a heterosexual monogamous middle class, with the man as the main provider, a free and sexual person, and the woman as motherly, domestic and asexual. Despite being welcomed in many schools for their conservative approach (Gregory 2015), ironically these films faced a strong ‘family values’ opposition led by evangelist teacher and activist Mary Whitehouse (Tracey and Morrison 1979). Oz London too was targeted by Whitehouse. Founded by Australian students who moved to London, it boasted a readership of tens of thousands of youngsters. Its visual-verbal transgressive rhetoric, provocative and witty, though not free of the genre’s sexism (Doggett 2007), served as an agent of sexual socialisation that was way ahead of its time, and in certain respects our own.

Notwithstanding growing contemporary interest in the critical study of visual expressions of sexuality, sex education visual media are still significantly understudied (Bauer et al. 2022; Gregory 2015). In particular, British sex education films have hardly been researched, nor has Oz been studied in the context of sex education and sexual literacy (Fileborn et al. 2017; Herdt, Marzullo, and Polen Petit 2021). In this article, the messages conveyed by seven typical films are examined, whereas the magazine is characterised as a fresh alternative, providing essential information, correcting misconceptions, and legitimising sexuality that is not strictly heterosexual or focused on male pleasure. The discussion of the magazine also contributes to contemporary discussion of entertainment media as significant contributors to learning outside the classroom, and particularly the positive role of entertainment sex education (Albury and McKee 2017; McKee 2017; McKee et al. 2018), and of sex education for pleasure (Kantor and Lindberg 2020; Lamb, Lustig, and Graling 2013; Wood et al. 2019). The contradictory messages of the films and magazine are examined through an analysis of the visual-audial rhetoric of the former and the visual-verbal rhetoric of the latter, in the context of the sexual revolution and sex education in Britain in the 1960s-70s.

Sex education and its opposing media cultural expressions in 1960-70s Britain

The sexual revolution of the 1960–1970s simultaneously promoted ‘radicalism and repression’ (Alomes 1999, 179), and ‘a complex overlapping of conservative and liberal values and behaviours’ (Mills 2016, 470). In Britain, it involved growing sexual freedom thanks to the pill and advances in pregnancy termination, as well as in non-heterosexual rights, but also a conservative-religious backlash. Likewise, the same years saw a confrontation between the rising power of the feminist movement and patriarchal values. Despite this power, in retrospect it has been argued that in terms of social legitimacy, the revolution benefitted mostly men (Hall 2004, 2009; Smith and Squaid 2017).

This clash of values was also reflected in sex education lessons. Introduced in the 1960s as part of biology classes (Davis 2021), these lessons focused largely on the health hazards of promiscuity, in keeping with earlier times when sex education was limited to rules and warnings, on the assumption that young people were prone to promiscuity and sin (Foucault 1978). Even in the 1970s, when it was widely recognised that many young people engaged in premarital sex and the lessons were included in health and social education classes, their main motivation remained the prevention of venereal disease and unwanted pregnancy (Hampshire 2005; Iyer and Aggleton 2015).

TV sex education

Sexual expression in the media was one of the engines of the sexual revolution (Schaefer 2014). Although sex education in Britain maintained its repressive nature until the late 1970s, educators and parents had long before realised that young people learned about sex mainly through the popular media. Hence, many saw the need for sex education to counter its impact (Zimmerman 2015). One way of doing so was using the media, through the instructional films used since the 1950s in the British education system (Crook 2007). Embarrassed and ill-trained to talk about sex with adolescents, both parents and teachers found sex education films to be optimal mediators at a time when ‘at least 80% of the world’s national educational systems ignored sex altogether’ (Zimmerman 2015, 87).

The BBC blazed the trail, and was soon joined by Granada TV and the Central Council for Health Education, which produced films for a captive student audience in thousands of primary and high schools, and even colleges (Davis 2021; Gregory 2015). However, the films kept the conservative embers burning and focused on the conventional topics such as anatomy, and the prevention of pregnancy, and sexually transmitted disease (Tucker 1987). According to Gregory (2015), they were usually well-received by both teachers and students. Nevertheless, at least one of them was highly controversial: Growing Up by Martin Cole (1971) – the first in the English-speaking world to document overt masturbation and sexual relations in a non-pornographic context (Limond 2008).²

Unfortunately, only a relatively limited selection of these films is still available to view, but these can contribute significantly to the emerging literature on the history of sex education in Britain. Overall, according to Jonathan Zimmerman (2015, 92), liberal critics found such films ‘too elliptical and too didactic; concealing or omitting important topics’, and imposing ‘a singular moral code that ignored human change and complexity’. Nevertheless, as described below, they were also attacked from the conservative side of the political spectrum.

Whitehouse and the clean up TV campaign

For almost three decades, Mary Whitehouse, a former art teacher, led a conservative campaign against the depiction of sexual contents on the small and large screens. In 1963, she initiated the Clean Up TV campaign, which led, two years later, to the founding of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association (NVALA), which was opposed to the BBC’s sex education films and some of whose members objected to sex education altogether (Green and Karolides 2014; Zimmerman 2015). While she considered sex education necessary, Whitehouse (1970) thought it should be ideally provided by the family:

Sex education is an essential part of every child’s development. […] The most fortunate of children will receive it naturally and imperceptibly […] as part of a happy and sensitive family life. Many will receive it through direct teaching at school, and all will gather information and misinformation […] The television screen, the paperbacks, and magazines which litter the bookstalls, friends, associates and family influences will all play their part.

‘Littering the bookstalls’, Oz was also one of Whitehouse’s enemies, and she even took an active part in the trial held against it for ‘obscenity’ in 1971.

NVALA’s opposition to sex education broadcasts, was based on the argument that sexuality was a ‘private practice’ unsuitable for discussion in schools, and required consulting with ‘parents, physicians, pastors and (for some) psychiatrists’ (Tracey and Morrison 1979, 123). In a letter sent to the Independent Television Authority, an NVALA representative quoted one of the films: ‘The man inserts his penis into the vagina of the woman. His penis goes hard. Both find this pleasurable’. He condemned this as ‘an invitation to experimentation’, arguing that ‘by stimulating the appetite it could produce an “I can’t wait to have it” attitude with disastrous results’ (Tracey and Morrison 1979, 125–26). This criticism was rejected by Hugh Greene, then Director-General of the BBC (1960–69), who considered Whitehouse an ‘absurd and reactionary embodiment of the lower middle classes at their primmest and most narrow minded’ (Prestidge 2019, 287). Nevertheless, the mainstream conservative approach adopted by most sex education films was not all too different from her own.

Oz magazine as an alternative sex education agent

While the sex education films are illustrative of the recruitment of the media to the reproduction of the existing patriarchal order and contain the influence of the sexual revolution on their young audience, the revolution was expressed in its most refined form in another medium: the underground press. This served as a platform for countercultural ideas, including staunch support for ‘pleasure, creativity and sexual freedom’ (Rowe 1986, n.p.).

Oz – a driving force within the British underground press and a colourful source for alternative information about sex (Blaney 2005; Hudson 1983; Munro and Sheahan-Bright 2006; Renton 2004) – served as a precocious, open-minded and permissive sexual agent of socialisation. Unlike the educational films that were mandatory in the schools that chose to screen them (Zimmerman 2015), the magazine was consumed voluntarily as an entertainment medium (McKee 2017) by tens of thousands of young people.

Verbal as well as visual, sexual discourse in Oz was replete with contradictions. At a time when newer and older approaches to sexuality clashed, the magazine’s self-appointed sex education editors, were inflected by the sexism of their time (Neville 2009). The magazine featured innumerable photographs and illustrations of naked women, objectified and often gratuitous decoration in the background of countercultural articles. These sexist spectacles were in line with the films’ patriarchal worldview, but at the same time, sexual discourse in Oz also provided an example of the coexistence of sexism and liberalism in the underground press (Doggett 2007), promoting equal, healthy and pleasurable sex between women and men and between non-heterosexuals, with a rich array of positive images.

Moreover, the magazine’s feminist discourse was revolutionary, and offered a non-militant remedy to patriarchy. This effort was led mainly by its dominant contributor Germaine Greer. Her views on the revolutionary potential of female sexuality were an inspiring response to the social blindness prevalent at the time. She expressed them eloquently in Oz, with provocative humour, often with images that served as a refreshing feminist alternative to its sexist aesthetic. In fact, according to her testimony, her views challenged not only the other editors at Oz: even some members of the women’s liberation movement found her views difficult to accept (Wallace 2013).

In the introduction to its May 1970 ‘Schoolkids’ issue (no. 28) – edited by teenagers – Oz’s guest editors asked: ‘Give us the freedom to smoke, to dress, to have sex, to run school affairs’ (4). This issue became famous because it led to a lawsuit culminating in 1971 in prison sentences of three to six months for its adult editors. Although they spent only a week behind bars following an appeal, the trial demonstrated an intergenerational gap (Mortimer 2008; Robertson 1999). According to Clark (2019), the police tried to prosecute the editors since they had provided sex education to children and promoted the concept of an ‘alternative society’.

Given the intense generational and cultural conflict described above, this article asks, how did Oz serve as anti-mainstream entertainment sex education agent, countering the films as representing the conservative paradigm; and what visual and verbal (/audial) messages were used by each of these media cultural expressions to convey their opposing ideas about sex?

Birds, bees and hippies: formal sex education on TV and counter(culture) entertainment sex education in Oz

Two central themes arise from the conservative approach reflected in the films and the alternative approach offered by Oz. The first presents the films’ biomedical-evolutionary stress on family life, with the women responsible for domestic roles and their bodies designed exclusively for reproduction and nursing, as opposed to the magazine’s emphasis on female sexual pleasure. The second presents the films’ preventive and moralist approach as opposed to Oz’s permissive approach.

Baby-making equipment vs. cuntpower

A key characteristic of the sex education films was a biomedical-evolutionary approach that presented sexual relations as a means for procreation, using visual images from the animal and plant worlds. At the same time, this approach was also extremely (White, middle-class, heterosexual) family-oriented, with a clear traditional division of gender roles.

For example, a film entitled Fertilisation (BBC1 for Schools and Colleges, 1970s), starts with cartoons of a mother, a father, a girl and a boy, and the narrator explaining that procreation ensures the survival of the human species, and that most of us expect to raise a family. Only after some 14 minutes of birds and bees does the film show human beings again, with animation designed to illustrate sexual attraction comically. However, the actual impression is rather frightening, as we see a man with a key lodged in his back like a mechanical doll chasing a terrified woman. This is followed by a series of photographs of beautiful women, with a female voice singing a romantic melody. Via an analogy with animals, the film teaches without words that appearance, smell and sound are means of sexual attraction among human beings, but unlike animals, the female is the one responsible for attracting the male.

Following several filmed examples of various animals mating, the narrator explains the human reproductive process. He uses illustrations, animation and microscopic shots of the male and female reproductive system, but just as occurs with the animals, he does so without reference to sexual arousal or emotions. Male erection is shown in a drawing where the penis is described as erect, without reference to how this occurred, or the need of vaginal lubrication for penetration.

Learning to Live (1964) also emphasises the biomedical-evolutionary aspects of sex, with a binary division of gender roles.³ The film begins with a couple at a dance party: she is described as a ‘lucky’ and ‘popular’ girl with ‘quite a figure’, who studies hairdressing. Her fiancé, also ‘lucky’, studies engineering. Beyond the implicit message about the importance of females’ look, it constructs both of them as lacking academic ambition.

In the next scene, children are playing at home, and the narrator explains that at an early age, there are no great sex differences. An animation of a boy and girl then appears, and the narrator describes the differences, with emphasis on traditional gender roles: the boy still doesn’t know that ‘these parts of his body may one day contribute greatly to his happiness as a man, or maybe the source of much unhappiness if he fails to grow up to his responsibilities […]’. The girl on the other hand is unaware that ‘inside, down there, is already the equipment which will provide her with […] her greatest joy in life: babies’.

The next scene describes puberty with a clear emphasis on traditional gender roles. For the girl, ‘the most striking change’ is her developing breasts, bound to become ‘part of her charm’, but also the source of ‘the perfect baby food – a physically enjoyable occasion for mother as well as baby … ’. The difficulties entailed in the feeding period, at least early on, are glossed over.

According to Gregory (2015), despite their biological emphasis, these films repeatedly emphasised ‘the importance of family’. This importance is often stressed by the moralistic tone of the films. In this case, for example, against a background of a mother and father playing with their children, the narrator advises: ‘We must recognise that our society accepts the married state as right and regards sexual intercourse outside marriage as irresponsible, and possibly disastrous’. Physical and emotional enjoyment of sex is almost completely absent from the films, apart for some reference to the initial infatuation ‘geared to’ starting a family, and even in that context, gender roles restrict sexual pleasure to men alone. When the film finally gets on to intercourse, erection is described as a mechanical prerequisite, when the man is ‘sexually excited’, but again – there is no reference to the woman’s need to be prepared and excited as well.

Growing Up (1971) by liberal sexologist Martin Cole also emphasises human biology, but unlike the other films, it also discusses mutual love and enjoyment. However, while promising a novel approach to sex education, the film also opens with a biological and patriarchal explanation of sex differences that presents men as superior:

[…] women are made to have babies and care for them, so they have broad hips to allow the baby to be born easily. They also have breasts, which will produce milk for the newborn child. And they will have a maternal instinct which makes them want to care for their children. Men are different. They are made to follow a more energetic existence, to leave the home and to go to work. Therefore, they have a more muscular build. They are physically stronger. And instead of getting birth and caring for babies, they are often better at giving birth to new ideas. They are in fact usually more inventive and creative’.

According to Gregory (2015), the film ‘employs scientific terminology to depict the source of sex traits, and at the same time, naturalises gender distinctions and heterosexuality’. Despite acknowledging that roles are changing nowadays, it does so with a patriarchal tone, stating that women are more ambitious when it comes to their careers, whereas men help them with domestic and childrearing tasks.

In a more liberal vein, after explaining reproduction, the narrator states that young people usually have sex long before getting married, and that it is normal and important, but requires contraceptives. Later, and most controversially, the film sequentially presents a man and a woman masturbating, and explains the importance of masturbation, and goes on to present heterosexual intercourse in an explicit manner. While its approach represents less of a politically subversive agenda and more of a ‘naturalist’ one that largely follows a biomedical-evolutionary approach, it was too daring for its time and was not welcomed, leading even to Cole’s persecution through hate mail. Moreover, contrary to its stated objective, the film was viewed mostly by adults in screenings Cole himself held, since schools refused to show it to younger students. David Limond (2008) summarised his acceptance as ranging ‘from aghast outrage, through sympathy (though this could be tinged with criticism of his “excesses”) to amused ribaldry’.

Oz offered a radical alternative to the patriarchal-phallocentric worldview portrayed in the three examples above. It did so mainly, but not exclusively, through Greer. Unlike the message conveyed in the sex education films, in which the vagina and breasts are designed to produce and feed babies and to attract men, she stresses that they are primarily sources of sexual pleasure and avenues of feminist revolution. Greer coined the term ‘cuntpower’, reclaiming the sexist term ‘cunt’ as a clarion call (Le Masurier 2016) in her article ‘The Slag-Heap Erupts’, published in Issue 26 of Oz (Greer 1970a). This led to a more significant treatment of the concept in Issue 29 (Greer 1970b). The title of Issue 29 was carefully phrased as ‘Female Energy’, given the ongoing persecution of the magazine by Scotland Yard’s Obscenity Squad. Nevertheless, the inner front page bears the title ‘Cuntpower’. In her article, ‘The Politics of Female Sexuality’, Greer (1970b, 11) criticises the biomedical-evolutionary and phallocentric approach adopted by the sex education films, and comments ironically on the sensation they caused in British schools:

When little girls are eventually told about their organs, they are told only about reproduction, with grim, shiny diagrams which leave out the clitoris, present the vagina as a slack tube, and make no mention of lubrication, female erection, and above all, none of pleasure […]. It is not surprising that such a great number of women never find out what is in it. The tremblings which greeted the showing of sex films in school would become an earthquake if schools begin to teach the arts and reflexes of pleasure.

In breaking the silence about female sexuality as reflected in the formal sex education films, Greer not only criticises it, but also acts to remove the shame surrounding it. Moreover, she offers guidance, in an almost didactic tone, on how to approach the vagina and break free from the oppressive views regarding it, such as Masters and Johnson’s ‘discovery of the clitoris’, which is to her ‘the elimination of the vagina’ (Greer 1970a, 19).

The focus of the second feminist wave on the female body was decisive, as later reflected in among other things Our Bodies, Ourselves (Boston Women’s Health Collective 1973). In contrast to the films’ exclusive reference to male sexual pleasure, Greer and her cuntpower went further, however, foreshadowing the sex-positive movement that entered feminist discourse in the next decade by centring on the idea ‘that sexual freedom is an essential component of women’s freedom’ (Tandon 2008, 67). She also foresaw a more contemporary approach, in which pleasure is seen as integral to educating young people for sexual health (e.g., Wood et al. 2019).

Issues 26 and 29 of Oz present various images of the female sex organs in artistic sketches, drawings, comics and caricatures both painted and photographed. These images are aligned with what might be called the ‘vagina decade’ of ‘cunt positivism art’ (Dekel 2013). In Oz, however, the texts, mainly by Greer, give these images an extra depth dimension, one of personal and revolutionary power, in contrast to the sex education films where the vagina and breasts are reduced to their biological functions.

Greer also rails against the phallocentric approach in popular consumer culture, which views breasts as ‘decoration’ – which had also characterised the sex education films. Although multiple issues of Oz presented breasts as a source of attraction and pleasure for the male gaze, ironically illustrating both the biomedical-evolutionary approach and contemporary sexism,⁴ Greer counters by reclaiming them for women. In Issue 2, for example, she protests – against the background of a close-up photo of a female torso with a bra in the form of the Union Jack – the fact that breasts do not attract the attention and respect they deserve in the UK, including criticism of the oppressive local bra industry:

Any lass with boobs knows that fashion has passed her by. Imagine the soft roundness of a breast oozing between those metal plates, or butting into the severity of a prickly lame mini-dress. The buttock went long ago, and the hip followed it, but surely we should make a stand about the bosom (Greer 1967, 10).

Greer condemns women’s magazines for being full of breast-enhancement ads, showing skinny models that do not represent the shape of most women. The breasts should be visible and caressed, she argues, and bras should not be about control and support, but comfort (Greer, ibid).

‘Learning to live’ and learning the art of ‘living in sin’

A second key characteristic of the sex education films is their preventative-moralist approach. As suggested by Gregory (2015), ‘More than educational aids, these programmes were vehicles of communication with explicit and implicit messages regarding sexual morality’. Many featured a doctor or advisor, usually a man speaking with an authoritative educational tone, trying to calm the viewers and attract their attention. Although a patriarchal hidden curriculum is present in all sex education films discussed here, in the preventive-moralist ones, the narrator is even more dominant, using an often reprimanding, masculine tone. According to these films, venereal disease and/or unwanted pregnancy were the result of promiscuity, and heterosexual marriage should be the young people’s ultimate ambition.

In Love Now, Pay Later (1973),⁵ for example, a young couple approaches the frame without their faces being seen. They are met by an invisible voiceover narrator, who addresses the young audience with a quote from the Beatles, ‘All you need is love’, directly followed by a rhetorical question from an authoritative perspective: ‘But what about the other side of love?’ He then adds that casual sex could result in a variety of diseases. In a subsequent scene, a typical expert argues that the rise in venereal disease in Britain is due primarily to changes in sexual behaviour in Western society, referred to by some as ‘the sexual revolution’. He then adds in a reprimanding tone that it is of course promiscuous to have sex with different people and spread venereal disease, and that if this is the meaning of the sexual revolution, the numbers are bound to rise.

According to Lesley Hall (2005), sexual promiscuity was less common in those years than sexual ignorance. This film and others like it reflect what she describes as the social limitations designed to prevent sexual experimentation, whereas in practice, many young women and men remained virgins when they married, or married their first sexual partner. Timothy Boon (2005) argues that these television films followed in the moralistic footsteps of the short sex education films screened in cinemas in the interwar period. Like them, they emphasised obedience to medical authorities and stable marriage as a means to prevent sexually transmitted infections – the supposedly unavoidable outcome of ‘promiscuity’.

A 1973 BBC film titled simply Venereal Diseases addresses sexual ignorance as a cause of venereal disease, but also promiscuity.⁶ The latter is associated with negative stereotypes; for example, the male narrator attributes the recent increase in morbidity to changes in sexual habits, including extramarital and homosexual intercourse.⁷ The film’s bottom line, according to the authoritative narrator, is that in order to avoid infection, one must have sex at the right time with the right person. Given the film’s overall content, this seemingly enlightened message should be interpreted as conservative: arguably, the right time is after the wedding, and the right person is a single heterosexual partner.

Even in the comical sex education film made by students – 'Ave You Got a Male Assistant Please Miss (1973)⁸ – there is the use of an authoritative male narrator – this time in the context of unwanted pregnancy. At the beginning of the film, a young hippy couple typical of Oz’s readership is happily engaged in foreplay in bed, when the narrator’s voice interrupts their intimacy, presenting data on the number of unwanted pregnancies in the UK.

Another pregnancy prevention-oriented sex education film whose title addresses the viewers in a moralist tone is The Least You Can Do (1975).⁹ It begins with a biological explanation provided by a male narrator as in the previously described films, glossing over vaginal lubrication and celebrating the male erection. Afterwards, a female expert provides some very detailed information about the use of various contraceptives. At the end of this practical element, the male narrator offers a rebuke directed at the female audience: ‘There are many other things about sex you must think about, but at the very least you don’t have to get pregnant!’.

The most manipulative of the preventive-moralist films dealing with unwanted pregnancy – Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973)¹⁰ – also blames the female protagonist, and warns the female audience. Brenda, described by the narrator as 17 years old, successful and popular, fixes her hair right before going out to meet her boyfriend, Gary. They go out on a walk, kiss and cuddle on the grass. In the background happy music is heard, that turns romantic, and then ominous. In the next scene, Brenda stands outside a subway station, a worried look on her face, and the narrator wonders how she will tell her boyfriend ‘the news’. The clear message, which only become clearer as the film unfolds, is that her pregnancy is her exclusive responsibility, and that it foreshadows a gloomy future. When she tells Gary, he promises that they will elope. Later, however, the phone rings, and the person on the other line is Gary’s mother, who shouts at Brenda, calls her a slut, and warns her never to get in touch with him. Poor Brenda gives birth and hands the baby over for adoption, but since it was born with a ‘heart condition’, finding an adoptive family is difficult. According to Gregory (2015), the narrator admonishes Brenda for destroying not only her own but also the new-born’s life – a common contemporary view regarding the immorality of young middle-class women reflected in countless British feature films and novellas (Hall 2005).

Learning to Live also begins with a light and happy atmosphere, with music and dancing and a focus on the engaged couple. Like Brenda, the female protagonist is described as popular, pretty and lucky, but unlike her, she avoids pregnancy – something that needs to be learned, the narrator explains. Marital sex is constructed as appropriate, and extramarital sex as dangerous. In the end, the couple appear again, consulting a doctor. Although the emphasis is biological, the preventive aspect is also highlighted, with recurring warnings. At first, the narrator warns against sexual ignorance, and after recommending engaged couples to consult physicians and read books, he states that ‘these days, there’s no excuse for ignorance, there’s no excuse for jeopardising marriage by entering it blindfolded’. At the end of Learning to Live the narrator assures viewers that ‘wise behaviour’ is the key to the happy marriage ‘which deep down we all want – and we all need’, before warning once again how easy it is to forfeit it through ‘ignorance and irresponsibility, or stupidity’.

Issue 4 of Oz (1967) epitomises the gap between the magazine and the sex education films in regard to marriage, by presenting marriage and additional patriarchal middle-class institutions as oppressive and misleading. For Oz casual, premarital sex should be taken for granted, and unlike the films’ intimidating tone, venereal disease is also hardly mentioned in the magazine as the consequence of sexual freedom. In his autobiography, editor-in-chief Richard Neville (2009) mentioned that at the time contracting a sexually transmitted infection was almost a ‘status symbol’. Greer, on the other hand, in an article titled ‘In Bed with the English’ (Oz 1, 1967), described lack of awareness by English men regarding contraceptives and venereal disease. Overall, the few mentions of venereal disease in the magazine are not accompanied by visual material.

Rejection of marriage is apparent, for example, in an anonymous article describing the first hippy wedding, which ends with the sentence, ‘It is better to burn than to marry’ (Oz 4, 1961, 11) – a quote from British comic magazine Punch, paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 7:9: ‘it is better to marry than to burn’. The text follows a page with photos of three married couples within oval frames, the topmost being the hippy couple. The bride dances in a white gown, a bouquet of flowers in her hand and a wreath on her head. The groom, also in white, dances next to her with a tambourine; on her other side is a longhaired Irish flautist. The author doubts the hippy marriage prospects, believing that any marriage is a ‘masochistic ritual, an unhappy, anachronistic hoax’, and adding that most marriages ‘are disastrous’ (Anonymous 1967, 11). Instead, he argues for the need to learn to live together responsibly and maturely, and even suggests alternative forms of cohabitation, such as a commune.

In the same issue, marriage is again likened to death, in a comic strip based on the game Snakes and Ladders. To make ‘progress’, one must move through examples of male sexual frustration and female loss of sexuality: he flirts, he buys a book on sexual positions (which the woman throws in the garbage), he notices women not wearing a bra. She, on the other hand, neglects her body and joins the church choir. The game ends on an equal footing: two coffins. The deep cultural separation of marriage and sex (Cook 2014) is therefore presented in the comic strip as due to the woman’s behaviour blowing out the sexual fire, rather than the result of her social construction as an asexual domestic angel.

The comic strip is preceded by an article titled ‘The Guide to Living in Sin’. Unlike it, the guide challenges the institution of marriage from a gender equality perspective, offering recommendations on how to overcome social conservatism. These include how to register a ‘bastard’ child to school in a way that bypasses the official forms, how to divorce easily, and how to rent a flat without being married. According to Neville (2009, 26), ‘In those days the idea of an abortion was considered so shameful that the word could not even be mentioned in public’. The guide also demonstrates the bureaucratic complexities of being the unmarried mother of a ‘bastard’, implying that it would be a mistake not to have an abortion only because it is illegal. It even presents a campaign for the legalisation of abortions, an issue already approached by Neville in the very first issue of Sydney Oz (April 1963).¹¹

Another taboo in British conservative society at the time concerned non-heterosexual relationships. Same-sex relationships are never directly addressed by the sex education films, which offer heterosexuality as the exclusive model for intimacy. Oz, on the other hand, adopted a different approach. While the new law restricted male homosexual encounters to private places and non-heterosexual relationships were still seen as ‘offensive’ to public morality and ‘polluting’ of British society, Oz and other countercultural magazines gave them lively and positive publicity – at the risk of being persecuted by the Obscene Publications Squad (Cusack 2017; Wolffe 2014). Not only were sexual minorities far from being accepted as ‘normal’ (Neville 2009), precisely because of the backdrop of the sexual revolution, they tended to suffer more from insults. There was even advocacy for conversion therapy, promoted, among others, by the supposed champions of sexual progress Masters and Johnson (Cook 2014; Smith, Bartlett, and King 2004). Just like the post-war domestic ideal, so did hatred of the Other intensify. As the state constituted the white heterosexual family, the definition of outsiders expanded still further, to include homosexuals, single mothers, Black people, and even young people in general (Ward 2004).

As a voluntary entertainment medium, Oz was able to freely address the contents of Cole’s vilified film described above, and even more radical issues such as non-heterosexual sex. Images of homosexual and lesbian love and erotism appeared on the front and back covers and inner pages of Oz, as well as in the double spread – spectacular and highly diverse in terms of media and styles, including photography, photomontage, and illustrations in art-nouveau, hyperrealist and other styles. They also featured black-skinned and interracial couples (e.g., on the covers of issues 17, 23, and 28). Although one issue was dedicated to homosexuality, and although the subject was also discussed in other issues, most of the images were of lesbian couples, whether due to Greer’s preoccupation with ‘the joys of lesbianism’ (Renton 2002, 12), or due to the almost exclusively straight male-dominated design of the magazine. In retrospect, it might be argued that presenting LGBT images at a time when many saw them as ‘an affront to public morality’ (Cusack 2017, 243) performed an important educational role, enabled through counterculture entertainment while silenced in more formal education settings.

The drawing spread over the front and back covers of Issue 28 attracted particular attention in the 1971 Oz obscenity trial. It featured two black-and-white photographs treated to seem like a painting in blue hues of young nude Black women, pleasuring themselves and each other manually, orally and anally, with some looking directly at the viewer. According to Robertson (1999, 22), although the Lord Chief Justice considered many of the images in this same issue ‘harmless’, he commended the cover photos for their artistic quality, but added that a deeper look revealed that the women were engaged in ‘lesbian sexual activity’, thereby constituting ‘an example of material which might deprave or corrupt’.

The cover of ‘Homosexual Oz’ (Issue 23) featured a close-up photo of a young Black man with an Afro haircut and a White young man with long, smooth hair – seen from the buttocks up, in a sensual embrace. Inside the magazine, the photo is more risqué – their backsides are close together and they are kissing passionately. The issue’s pages are replete with humouristic drawings of male sexual organs and phallic images of pyramids, towers and the like. According to Neville (2009, 160–61), the issue was printed during the rise of gay liberation, shortly after the 1969 Stonewall Riots in the USA. The subjects were friends of Jim Anderson – one of the four editors – who took the opportunity to also out himself.

One of the articles in Issue 23, whose author remained anonymous, criticised the cultural nexus between sex and reproduction, so prominent in the sex education films discussed. He suggested that this approach not only lacked relevance to homosexuals but was also detrimental to heterosexual relations, claiming that men viewed women as ‘complicated masturbating machines’, without attending to their desires and to the need to ‘turn them on’, to be their friend, and to develop a deep emotional bond (Anonymous 1969, 14).

In a more humorous tone, Oz also offered examples of the reversal of traditional gender roles that were so characteristic of the films. Issue 2, for example, featured a comic strip that seems at first glance to be as overly romantic in the spirit of that time, with close-ups of passionate kisses and descriptions of sensual bliss. In the end, however, it is the man who expects the woman to confess her love, and her answer offers an additional twist: all she wants, to his great disappointment, is ‘a good screw’ (Oz 2, 1967, 18).

Conclusion

The text of one of the articles in the notorious Schoolkids Issue (28, 1971) of Oz appears next to a provocative comic strip showing a kind of gorgon-medusa with breasts and hair made of phalluses, saying: ‘Teacher loves to run his fingers through my hair.’ In the text, an anonymous girl describes the sexual habits of her peers retrospectively. ‘We first became aware of sex during one biology lesson at the age of 11 or 12. From then on, we were all dying to see a prick, but we all swore that we would keep our virginity until we got married (some have – others not!)’ (p. 42). She then relates how a few ‘started going out with boys’, how they ‘worried like mad about the petting sessions’, and would spend Monday mornings telling their friends everything about their weekend dates. To conclude, she writes:

Some decided to wait for the right man while others spent their weekends fucking in convenient places. To many, it seems unbelievable that it is possible to go out with someone for more than six months and not have sex. A few became pregnant and managed to deal with it without parents or teachers being aware of it. […]

Her bottom line is: ‘SMILE – if you had sex last night’ (ibid.).

Following Greer’s above-quoted criticism of the sex education films, this rebellious text subverted both of the two approaches, or agendas, they promoted – the biomedical-evolutionary and the preventative-moralist, as well as the reproduction of traditional gender roles. It rings truer, and louder, for being expressed from the point of view of a teenage girl, too old to not be aware of sex and sexuality, too young to explore the happy marriage ‘we all want and need’.

Thus, the image-text sex education provided by Oz was the polar opposite of that in the films, whose values were not so different to those promoted by Whitehouse and her supporters. At time when ‘at least 80% of the world’s national education systems [....] completely ignored sex’, (Zimmerman 2015, 87), or addressed it in the repressive way reflected in the films, Oz promoted controversial ideas in a way that we still can learn from. These included being critical of marriage, discussing taboo issues such as abortion, normalising sexual minorities, legitimising assertive female sexuality, and stressing pleasure. It was not however free of the sexism that even today remains to be corrected, but it promoted egalitarian, open, and inclusive sex discourse in a loud, provocative and colourful way that was in advance of its time and remains highly relevant today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Oz (Sydney 1963–1969; London 1967–1973) published 90 issues, 48 of them in London. Four years after its founding in Australia, two of the founders, Richard Neville and cartoonist Martin Sharp, moved to the UK, and since then its British version became better known. Issues of London Oz issues are accessible in the online archives of the University of Wollongong, Australia at https://archivesonline.uow.edu.au/nodes/view/3495/

2. M. Cole, Growing Up, Global Films, in association with the Institute for Sex Education and Research, 1971.

3. Learning to Live, Eothen Films, Britain. Sponsored by the London Foundation for Marriage and funded by the London Rubber Company, 1964 https://archive.org/details/LearningToLive

4. In his autobiography, Neville (2009) addresses the sexism of that time, and in the Introduction, he states that he regrets nothing he has done during that period, but that he is still shocked by his own sexism.

5. Love Now, Pay Later, Granada TV, 1973. https://vimeo.com/ondemand/lovenowpaylater

6. Venereal Diseases is part of a three-film series called Twentieth Century Focus, on dangers: smoking, drugs and VD.

7. Iyer and Aggleton (2015, 7) quote from a 1963 article from Health Education Journal saying that self-discipline in sexual matters is a necessity just like moderation in eating or in alcohol consumption. A committee established by the British Medical Association in 1959 to study VD concluded that reasons for their significant spread were the influx of Black immigrants, homosexuality and growing promiscuity among young people. Accordingly, a key motivation for sex education in schools was to warn young people against the health consequences of ‘promiscuity’ (Hampshire 2005, 95).

8. ‘Ave You Got a Male Assistant Please Miss?, Oxford Polytechnic, 1973. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWEyjBT2I-I

9. The Least You Can Do, Granada TV, 1975. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rEi3pqeXK0

10. Baddeley, W. H., Don’t be Like Brenda. Hugh Baddeley Productions, 1973.

11. According to Neville (2009, 26–27), this issue featured an anonymous interview with a gynaecologist who performed illegal abortions, as well as with women who have had abortions, which enraged several readers, and led to a boycott by some advertisers and threats by the property owners to stop renting out the Oz offices.