When streaming players boast about their huge numbers of channels, I’m generally even less impressed than I am by the “wealth” of offerings on the grossly overpriced wasteland that is cable TV. I have absolutely no use for thousands of impossibly granular channels like The Christian Comedy Channel, Firewood Hoarders, NRA Women, and Cruise Addicts. Those are all real. But in their favor, I don’t have to pay $75 a month to not watch them.

But sometimes, that nanoscopic specificity does pay weirdness dividends. The Shout Factory channel proffered by the music/video label of the same name holds some treasures, as do the handful of channels that compile old cartoons that have passed into the public domain. And not so long ago, I ran across a channel, called Stop It Or You’ll Go Blind!, devoted exclusively to old sex ed films, with some “educational” exploitation thrown in. (Why is “Sex Ed-sploitation” not a term? It’s a thing, it needs a word…)
 

 

 
Unsurprisingly, a lot of these are a riot. There’s “Miracles in Birth,” a graphic depiction of live births shot in grainy black and white so blown-out it looks less like a miracle and more like outtakes from Begotten. There’s “Dance Little Children,” a creepy VD scare flick directed by Carnival of Souls auteur Herk Harvey, which teaches us all a valuable lesson about not letting slimy rich dudes boink us on the first date. The 1938 Sex Madness, Dwain Esper’s follow-up to Reefer Madness is streaming, as is the bizarre Test Tube Babies, a tale of swinging and sterility. And the ‘60s classic “Perversion for Profit” is there, the notorious and INSANE 30 minute anti-indecency screed in which L.A. newsreader/talk show host (and, later, NewsMax columnist *shudder*) George Putnam blames pornographers for everything from juvenile crime to child molestation. The brilliant thing about “P4P” is that if anyone actually held on to even half of the smut rags displayed for *ahem* viewer edification, they could be an eBay millionaire today.
 

 
The one huge drag about the channel, though, is that while there’s over 12 hours of material, and presumably more to come, one can’t simply watch individual shorts—they’re all compiled into programs, without even time indexing to indicate where different titles start. It’s a bit frustrating, and I found an exact replica of one of Stop It’s… programs on Internet Archive, so I have to wonder how much of this stuff they’re just cribbing from online sources. It almost makes even the paltry 99¢ cost to sign up suddenly seem like money thrown away if these are ALL easily viewable elsewhere for free, but I’ll live with a fee that small for being able to stream them to my TV with a device I already have.

Here are a couple of my favorite offerings— 1962’s “Human Growth,” which has some fantastic mid-century limited motion animation, and 1966’s “Parent to Child About Sex,” wherein Americas boringest whites awkwardly read cue cards and make sex sound like the least fun thing ever. Fans of the experimental/cut-up group Negativland may recognize, at about 05:15, the mother/daughter birds and the bees talk that that band so memorably tweaked on the intro to their album Sex Dirt.