| Summary: | To the disapproval of some interview partners, specific sex education content, such as talks and films, often took place in gender-separate classes.[85] The female German-language teacher, having undergone sex education classes in a midsized town in southern Poland during the early 1970s, understood that mixed classes were inappropriate, as boys that age were "silly", but wondered why girls could not watch films about male sexual development. This narrative, which did not provide any further reflection on the sexual violence and toxic masculinity represented in Bernardo Bertolucci's film, illuminates the complexities of mapping sex education sources, and what individuals considered their sex education sources, beyond officially produced sex education material and the at times indistinct line between formal and informal sex education.[79] Explicitly developed sex education films could, however, also be powerful resources. In an interview conducted in 2018, Elzbieta, a female laboratory technician born in 1961 and living in the large industrial city of Lód'z in central Poland, narrated her experience of sex education: "When I was fourteen or fifteen the famous book Sztuka kochania [Art of love] was published. A military officer born in the early 1930s complained that his biology teachers spoke "a lot about all sorts of living organisms, but on the development of humans they talked little and with embarrassment."[83] In our material, sex education was largely absent from schools, even in the narratives of the younger generation coming to age in Lód'z, a large industrial city in central Poland where experimental school sex education programs initiated in the early 1960s preceded nationwide institutionalization by over a decade.
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