As Boys Grow (1957)

Description

Welcome to the gym, gentlemen. Today’s workout is… SEX EDUCATION.

Before the sexual revolution kicked down the door in the 1960s, American sex-education films were generally a cautious business. There were plenty of diagrams, plenty of solemn narration, and enough animated reproductive plumbing to stock a hardware store. Boys and girls were usually kept in separate educational universes.

Then along comes As Boys Grow.

Produced in the relatively liberal San Francisco Bay Area, this 1957 educational film takes a remarkably direct approach to teenage boys and their questions about sex. The setting isn’t the family living room or some terrifying classroom populated by stern authority figures. It’s the gym, where Coach Gene Douglas, a cheerful, fatherly authority figure, gathers his track-team boys and decides that somebody ought to give them the straight story.

And the boys actually talk.

They ask questions. They admit what they have heard. They compare notes. They confess ignorance. One casually announces that he had a wet dream, prompting the inevitable question: What’s a wet dream? Rather than shutting down the conversation, Coach Douglas treats the questions seriously and provides straightforward answers.

For 1957, this is surprisingly frank stuff.

The film discusses sexual organs, puberty, erections, sexual excitement, masturbation, nocturnal emissions, sperm, reproduction, and pregnancy. It even directly challenges the old warnings that masturbation will damage a boy’s mind or “manhood,” with Coach Douglas explaining that for boys their age it is a normal part of growing up.

That makes As Boys Grow considerably more interesting than another mid-century film consisting primarily of arrows pointing toward cartoon reproductive organs.

The film’s real achievement is its normalization of conversation. The boys aren’t treated as dirty-minded troublemakers for being curious. Their questions aren’t met with panic. Their coach creates an atmosphere in which even the embarrassing questions can be asked and answered without ridicule.

And there is an intriguing social dimension underneath all that wholesome 1950s coaching.

The film suggests that boys may need someone outside the family to talk to about sex. One boy notes that his father “never says much about anything” relating to sex. The gym therefore becomes a kind of safe territory for conversations that apparently aren’t happening at home.

In a period when American culture generally preferred its adolescents to remain blissfully uninformed, that’s a surprisingly radical proposition: sometimes kids need adults who will actually answer the question.

And then comes the finale.

Having survived puberty, reproductive biology, and the mysteries of nocturnal emissions, two of the boys ask two girls out for a swimming date. At the lakeside, one boy pushes a girl into the water. The second girl retaliates by pushing him in. She then stands triumphantly on the dock for a moment before jumping in herself.

Roll credits.

For modern viewers, As Boys Grow is a marvelous cultural time capsule: earnest, unexpectedly candid, cheerfully clinical, and occasionally hilarious without ever intending to be. It captures a moment when American sex education was beginning to move beyond diagrams and euphemisms, while still wearing its 1950s cardigan and whistle.

Come for the reproductive diagrams. Stay for Coach Douglas. Leave wondering why the gym was apparently America’s premier sex-education facility.

Film Details

• Title: As Boys Grow
• Year: 1957
• Genre: Educational / Sex Education
• Subject: Puberty, sexuality, reproduction, adolescent development
• Audience: Teenage boys
• Featured Authority: Coach Gene Douglas
• Production: San Francisco Bay Area
• Language: English
• Format: Short Educational Film