Sexual Life of Us, The (ATOM Study Guide)

The Sexual Life of Us is a two-part documentary that explores how our sexual behaviour has changed over the last eighty years in Australia. Each episode runs for 52 minutes: Part 1 –'From Grandma to the Pill' and Part 2 – 'The New Order'.

Sex is one of the most fundamental aspects of our lives. Our sexual experiences have the capacity to be powerful and profound. And for each one of us, the story of our sex life will be very different.

It will be influenced by the decade in which we were born, our social standing, and very strongly by the social and political movements of the day.

You would expect the sexual awakening of your grandmother to be quite different to that of your grandchild. But there are some aspects of our sex lives that are common across generations and gender, while others have changed quite dramatically.

In this series, the social and sexual changes of the past century are revealed through in-depth interviews with over twenty people aged from 18 to 104. Within this group, we present a variety of sexual preferences and boundaries. There is a stark contrast between the way an eighty-four year old remembers behaving with his early girlfriends and how the young women of twenty and twenty-one today behave with their lovers.

We explore the history of our sexual lives and the social forces that have shaped them, from finding a sexual partner to our lifelong search for satisfaction.

The programs reveal that as our society keeps evolving, sexual etiquette and practice reinvents itself in unexpected ways.

Curriculum Guidelines

The Sexual Life of Us is suitable for middle, senior and tertiary students in the following subject areas:

• Studies of Society and Environment
• Health and Personal Development
• Values Education
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Sex Education
• English
• Media Studies

While there is some nudity, strong language and sex scenes in these programs (not unexpected given the subject matter) these are contextualized within an entertaining, sometimes humorous, social history of how our attitudes and sexual behaviours have changed over the past eighty years.