‘I hope someone castrates you, you perverted bastard’: Martin Cole's sex education film, Growing Up

Abstract

This paper concerns the response to the sex education film Growing Up, made in 1971 by Dr Martin Cole, which used a combination of animation and live action to offer a frank and uncompromising account of sexual reproduction. As part of this, both male and female masturbation and an unsimulated act of male–female coitus featured in the film. Cole was widely denounced both by religious conservatives including the members of the Nationwide Festival of Light and by others involved in sex education. The former objected to what they took to be his promotion of precocious and promiscuous sex, and the latter charged him with setting back the cause of ‘responsible’ sex education by years or decades. However, evidence from various schools in which Growing Up was seen suggests that it was apparently well received by pupils. But an ad hoc alliance of religious conservatives and ‘responsible’ sex educators ensured that Growing Up was not widely distributed, and a tactic agreement of sorts has arisen that such explicit sexual imagery will not be featured in school sex education materials in the United Kingdom. Sources include selected media reports/discussions, parliamentary debates, letters sent to Cole, teachers' comments and an interview conducted in 2007.

Acknowledgement

The author is grateful to Dr Martin Cole for agreeing to be interviewed and for archival material.

Notes

^1. The ISER ceased operating in 2004. Growing Up is now available to buy on DVD from the British Film Institute (Available at www.bfi.org).

^2. For brevity I have not included press commentary as a separate section and cite only more or less ‘neutral’ reports (and quotes from press sources). The best published description of the film is in Hill (1971); for a selection of the more restrained press editorials/commentaries see The Times Educational Supplement (1971), The Economist (1971), Izbicki (1971) and Miles (1971). Much press commentary was hostile, although Playboy (ever the champion of ‘sexual liberation’) reported favourably (Playboy 1971).

^3. Cole was hardly the sole cause of the RS coming into being, as various people who were later RS activists, including the novelist and journalist Pamela Hansford Johnson (1912–1981), had already called for a campaign of social action against what they saw as moral decay (Hansford Johnson 1967), but he was certainly a factor.

^4. Founded in 1964, originally as the Clean Up TV Campaign, the National Viewers and Listeners Association is now Media Watch UK, while the NFoL has since changed its name to Christian Action, Research and Education. On the origins of the Clean Up TV Campaign see The Times (1964). Other NFoL organizers/patrons included Anglican bishop Trevor Huddleston (1913–1998) and the irascible commentator, controversialist and catholic convert Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990).

^5. The archive is largely unsorted and unsystematic, making it difficult to be certain even how many letters have been preserved, never mind the exact pro/anti balance.

^6. Cole refuses to disclose the identity of the adolescent boy seen masturbating or any of the other actors in the film. But the masturbating woman, Jennifer Muscutt, was a probationary teacher in Birmingham. When this fact emerged, she was suspended. She was subsequently reinstated, on the grounds that she had not been employed as a teacher when the film was made, only when it was shown. (See The Technical Journal 1971; Osman 1971b.)

^7. Bibby spelled out his philosophy of sex education in 1946 when he described himself charting a course between the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘the shoddy back-street bookshop which flaunts sex’ and ‘the public library that ignores it’ (Bibby 1946a, 164). Bibby's politics were originally quite clearly Marxist (Bibby 1938) and, although being a political radical does not necessarily entail advocacy of social/sexual radicalism, it is hard to escape the conclusion that he had drifted to the right by 1971. See Bibby (1946b, 1947, 1948, 1949a, 1949b, 1950) and compare Bibby (1972).

^8. Made in the 1970s, there were six films in the Australian series (and a 1981 sequel). Although innocuous compared with Cole's film, with nothing comparable with his explicit depiction of sexual activity, they too provoked considerable controversy (Siedlecky 2006).

^9. I base my comments in this section on a viewing of a tape of the programme kindly provided by Dr Cole. In the nature of such things, my impressions are of course subjective.

^10. I have suggested elsewhere that Growing Up was rarely/never shown in schools (Limond 2008), and Cole did give the impression at the time that he had acquiesced in the face of official legal threats (Muther Grumble 1972), but it was given a limited release through an educational film distributor.

^11. The NFoL was an explicitly religious organization in a way the RS (now called Family and Youth Concern) was not, although the RS does seem to have drawn many members from amongst ‘traditional’ religious conservatives. However, at least one early member, David Holbrook, took a more Lawrentian view of the significance of sex. Both for the RS and ‘off his own bat’, he campaigned vigorously against Cole and ‘permissiveness’ generally, railing against a litany of the ‘corruptions’ of the age, from Danish sex fairs to Oh! Calcutta! and the hippy entrepreneurs behind the scatological magazine Oz, drawing on diverse authors including Martin Buber (1878–1965), Victor Frankl (1905–1997) and Rollo May (1909–1994) to appeal for erotic authenticity, personal integrity and the realization of the transcendent potential of sex in loving relationships. (See Holbrook 1972a, 1972b, 1972c, 1972d.)

^12. A series of three books with which Hemming was associated, first produced in France and published in English in 1975, flirted with using explicit sexual images. These were ‘adapted’ from French by Hemming and Zena Maxwell. (See Cohen 1975a, 1975b, 1975c; see also Hemming 1976.)