"Be prepared to die!" - 90's sex ed

Takeaways from a time of misconceptions and fear-mongering

Feb 26, 2025

Hi horny readers! Thank you so, so much for reading the ADULT SEX ED newsletter.

New here? Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a filmmaker, comedy writer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter in 2023. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Ready to plug the holes in your education? Okay, let’s go!

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This newsletter is a quickie! It’s important to understand where our misconceptions stem from, so I was looking through old sex ed videos (there have been over 100,000 of them produced in the United States alone!). The history of sex ed in America is one of expansion and contraction.

The origins of sex ed are rooted in the anti-masturbation stalwarts of the 1800s, like Reverend Sylvester Graham (who invented the graham cracker) and John Harvey Kellogg (who invented cornflakes). They were two different men with similar methods and we should all finish into a bowl of cereal in their honor! Last year I wrote THIS POST about Kellogg, one of the first problematic American health gurus. These precursors to RFK Jr. traveled around the country on anti-masturbation tours, the original No-Nut-November promoters before there were podcasts.

The first real iteration of sex ed was in Chicago in 1913, when a woman named Ella Flagg Young became the first female superintendent of schools. An expansion in thought was quickly followed by a contraction. She was fired and sex ed was no more…until 1918 when over 300,000 American servicemen contracted STIs during WWI and Congress decided to implement sex education in the military.

In the 1940s, Human Growth was the first widely-shown sex ed film in American classrooms. The film was scientifically accurate, although it didn’t explain things like penetration. Students walked away with an understanding of reproduction, but maybe not the mechanics. The films that were produced for the classrooms in the 40s and 50s continued down that path—tame, but with a commitment to scientific accuracy.

Then, in the 60s and 70s, the sex ed films took a turn. The films shown during the sexual revolution would be considered pornographic today. They were pro-masturbation even, a far departure from the origins of sex ed. So, naturally a contraction followed.

In the 80s and 90s, the Reagan and Bush administrations funded abstinence-only sex education. The AIDS crisis only furthered that—in high school I watched Philadelphia to learn that if you have sex, you’ll get AIDS and if you get skinny in Hollywood, you’ll win prizes. It’s a fantastic movie, but a strange way to “learn” sex ed.

The videos that were shown in classrooms during that time period were often funded and produced by Christian special interest groups. They were scientifically inaccurate, filled with comically extreme scare tactics, and terrible graphics. In the 4 minute video below, the teacher, who looks like a Christian nationalist version of Anna Wintour, compares having sex with a condom as playing Russian roulette with your life. Because if you have sex, you’ll probably get AIDS! She also falsely claims that you’re likely to get it from French kissing. In the most egregious moment (at 3:23), a student asks about having sex before marriage and she tells him to “BE PREPARED TO DIE!”

Watch the video below for a blast from the not-too-distant-past, a potential source of misconceptions for ‘80s and ‘90s kids. As sex education is undergoing another contraction now, is this what we’re going back to?