Ultimately, this piece supports James Hampshire’s argument that sex education changed dramatically during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Martin Cole’s film was an exaggerated example of the new direction which sex education gradually moved towards. Then the argument will go onto exploring ATV’s coverage of the Jennifer Muscutt controversy and whether this reflected people’s reactions to the changes in sex education. Within this section, the essay will discuss how people reacted to these changes. This paper begins by comparing how sex education changed between the 1960s and 1970s, and it does this by focusing on 1960s sex education films and coverage, and the film Growing Up.

By using Siân Nicholas’ method of examining how mass media’s connected and interacted, this essay will explore a number of different mediums such as film, documentaries and news broadcasts, in order to deduce what debates surrounding sex education in 1970s Britain were. This essay will focus on the debates surrounding Growing Up and more specifically, it shall look at how the media portrayed Jennifer Muscutt. She was later reinstated due to the fact that when the film was made in 1969, Mrs Muscutt had recently left a career in public relations and was not a teacher. During these debates, the woman who took part in the masturbation sequence, Jennifer Muscutt, was dismissed from her position as a teacher by the Birmingham Education Authority. The explicitness of this film sent shockwaves across Britain and divided public opinion on the whether the themes explored in this film should be shown to school children. In 1971, Dr Martin Cole released the sex education film Growing Up, which was the first non-pornographic film to be released in Britain that featured actual sexual intercourse and scenes of men and women masturbating.

Vimeo erotic full exsposure masturbate