The Birds and the Bees is a poetry video which explores and exploits the unpleasant discomfort of Boomer-era sex education.
The poem “Work Without Hope” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge from 1825 is the origin of the modern phrase “the birds and the bees” and is shown in its entirety at the beginning of this video.
From there, the rest of the video is comprised of same-length clips systematically extracted from three separate sex-ed videos: “Molly Grows Up” from 1953, the sequel “As Boys Grow” from 1957, and the particularly cringy “The ABC of Sex Education for Trainables” from 1975. The clips taken from each of the three videos are presented chronologically from each of the originals.
Music for this piece is cheekily comprised of a field recording of a tree absolutely full of bees and the occasional bird, and a super-slowed down version of Charlie Parker’s “Birdland”.
None of the materials presented here are used with permission.