Sex Education of the Bodysnatchers

A clip from a 1970’s educational film strip on how to talk to your children when you catch them masturbating. The preload image alone in the embedded YouTube clip is a good idea of the horror to come.

Ricky — a dead-eyed youth with a face pocked by melanoma — stares without blinking at the ceiling while woodenly masturbating. As he does so, his door knob begins to turn slowly, ominously, like the door knob in a zombie movie. The door opens and his mother — a flabby, emotionless polyp of a woman — enters his room without knocking. Despite Ricky earlier appearance of soullessness and the fact that he is covered with a sheet and could easily have passed himself off as taking a nap, the boy wildly overreacts, flailing his limbs wildly around him, gasping and fumbling with himself. Smooth, Ricky. Now she’ll know you were jerking it.

And she does. But his mother is understanding. “Oh, I’m sorry, Ricky. I did see what you were doing. It’s all right.” she says calmly, her voice atonal and utterly drained of feeling. “It felt good, didn’t it?”

Ricky simply stares at her, a dollop of drool forming at the bottom of his lower lip. This is the first sign that debilitating psychological trauma is kicking in.

“I’m glad you’ve decided to do this in the privacy of your own room,” the mother continues, clearly referring to Ricky’s uncle Randall and the men’s restroom adventures of the same, “When you’re a little older, we’ll talk more about these feelings and what causes them and how we can control these feelings. I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy. I’ll be sure to knock next time.”

And then, as if in reverse motion, his mother calmly leaves the room, leaving Ricky shaking in the fetal position. Unfortunately, the clip ends there, leaving many pressing questions unanswered, not least of which is whether or not Ricky managed to finish up.

Caught in the Act [YouTube] : POETV