Have you met Baby Olivia?
And strange sex ed videos from the past (WITH VIDEO)!
Hey horny readers! Today, I’m discussing a new “sex ed” video and also sharing some of the greatest hits of the past. Yes—I edited you a video. Yes—I’m a dork. Yes—there are cringey sex ed clips that will hopefully make you laugh.
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Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
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Have you met Baby Olivia? If you have kids that live in certain U.S. states, they might be forced to. Here’s the deal:
There’s a new “sex ed” video called Baby Olivia, which was created to show audiences the “spectacular life of a baby growing within the womb.” Baby Olivia was made with realistic animation. She blinks, she yawns, she looks like a real baby—except she’s a fetus. The video is produced by an organization called Live Action, which “exists today to shift public opinion on the killing of preborn children and defend the rights of these most vulnerable among us.” I won’t link to it here (it’s easy to find), but I watched it and had some notes.
First off, choosing the name Olivia is brilliant. It’s been the number one most popular name for American girls for the past three years and in the top ten for a while. So the kids watching this probably know an Olivia. They will care about Olivia. And I guess that’s the goal.
The film’s website claims that it’s been deemed medically accurate, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a professional organization for OBGYNs, described the video as anti-abortion information. Other doctors have called it misleading. This is mostly because pregnancy is counted from the date of the last menstrual period, not the day of fertilization, so the calendar in this video is about two weeks off. This is significant because there are states that have a six week abortion bans and this video makes a fetus look way more developed at that point. Some other things that doctors have pointed out: At six weeks, the embryo isn’t yet a fetus. And the video describes the animated figure’s motion and actions with words like “playing,” “exploring,” “sighing,” and making “speaking movements,” assigning grown human traits and properties to a fetus, which is intentionally misleading.
Here’s the thing—there have been over 100,000 sex ed films produced! It’s actually one of the most common ways to teach sex ed. Every film has a producer. Most of the sex ed films that have been produced over time were also created by organizations outside the educational system with varying results.
HERE IT IS, A COMPILATION OF SEX ED’S GREATEST HITS:
Of course, there are many more than this, but as you can see, they all have an agenda. Human Growth, the first sex ed film to be widely shown in classrooms, was produced by a professor at the University of Oregon and it’s noble agenda was to be the first scientifically accurate sex ed movie. Disney teamed with Kotex to produce The Story of Menstruation, which was hilariously dark and begged the question, “what if a Disney princess had passing suicidal thoughts?” But it probably increased sales for Kotex. The Christian-backed sex ed films in the 90s were fear-based about sex before marriage to feed into an abstinence-only curriculum. Many of these videos had hidden agendas, but a fetal development video from an antiabortion group has a pretty fucking strong bias!
So if there are so many sex ed films, why is Baby Olivia getting so much attention?
Last Thursday, lawmakers in the Tennessee Senate passed the “Baby Olivia Act,” which would make this video required viewing. Tennessee follows North Dakota, which passed a similar bill last year, and Iowa, Kentucky and Missouri have also weighed similar measures. Here’s what’s interesting (and depressing): Only 18 states require sex ed to be medically accurate. Tennessee, Iowa, Missouri happen to be three of them! So if Baby Olivia becomes required viewing, it also is being deemed medically accurate.
Statistics have always shown that medically inaccurate sex ed produces poor results, like abstinence-only sex ed leading to higher teen pregnancy rates. And look at me—I watched Philadelphia in sex ed to learn that if you have sex, you’ll get AIDS and if you get skinny in Hollywood, you’ll win prizes. I learned that you could get herpes from a toilet seat. Now I’m just a filmmaking, showboating fool who won’t sit on a fucking toilet.
Here are some recent newsletters you might like:
You can access all past newsletters here!