As Boys Grow (1957)
A high school gym coach fields teenage boys' questions about puberty, erections, and masturbation in frank, reassuring terms, presenting sexual development as a normal, even pleasurable, part of growing up rather than a source of shame.
Produced by Medical Arts Productions in the comparatively liberal environment of San Francisco, As Boys Grow stood out among 1950s sex-education shorts for treating male sexuality without stigma — the coach’s blunt reassurance that masturbation doesn’t harm “your mind or your manhood” was unusually frank for boys’ education at the time.
Background
As Boys Grow was produced by Medical Arts Productions in cooperation with the Boys Club of San Francisco and directed by George Watson. It centers on a high school gym coach, identified in some sources as Coach Gene Douglas, who overhears his roughly fourteen-year-old track team trading rumors and half-truths about sex, and responds by holding frank, reassuring question-and-answer sessions covering puberty, erections, and masturbation. Produced in the comparatively liberal environment of San Francisco rather than through a national distributor, it stands apart from most 1950s sex-education shorts aimed at boys, which tended toward euphemism and warnings about physical or moral harm.
What to watch for
The coach’s directness, telling the boys plainly that masturbation will not harm “your mind or your manhood,” was unusual for the genre and is the clearest reason the film still gets singled out in surveys of 1950s sex education. Rather than treating sexual development as something shameful to be managed, the film frames it as a normal, even pleasant, part of growing up, a tone closer to later sex-education approaches than to its contemporaries. The locker-room setting and the coach’s casual authority are themselves worth noting, since they let the film address boys directly as peers being coached rather than as students being lectured at.
