How Sex Ed Got a Glow Up
A memory: I’m fourteen and Sex Ed just started. That means one hour of paralysing public embarrassment – enduring my barely pubescent classmates yelling their mangled gibber into a circle of plastic chairs. For now though, all remains quiet. They eyeball each other across the stuffy classroom, silence only broken by tapping pens and snapping shag bands. Suddenly, Sir arrives holding what looks like a handful of Peperami wrappers. A cheer rises up around the room.
“Yes class... today we’ll be putting on condoms.”
To be honest, these were pretty memorable times for us state school kids. It was the mid-2010s, an era of austerity and ambiguity, before the culture wars took off. Teaching apparently a lost cause, instead the chunky grey monitor would be wheeled in *squeak squeak squeak*, subjecting us to 45-minutes of the Sexual Alphabet DVD.
B is for Blowjob.
O for Orgasm.
At G, as if on cue, the homophobic boy starts making gagging noises. I stare down at my Dr Martens shuffling across the nylon carpet.
In that moment, I truly expected my generation – that’s Gen Z’s – perception of Sex Education to forever remain this way. A sort of scholastic social endurance, while all real learning was accomplished on the outside through trial and error. Yeah, social media was around, but it always did as much harm as good. For every kid that spent Thursday night
curating their sex-positive Tumblr feed, there were countless others who became victims of revenge porn or lost friends over nude pics. This was a time before common talk about boundaries, before #MeToo and the birth of Teen-woke-Vogue.
Then in 2019 came Netflix’s Sex Education, the provocative show that educated while it entertained. Part of a wave of conscientious teen sex TV (think also Big Mouth and Never Have I Ever), the series was celebrated for busting taboos and showing diverse sexual experiences. In essence, it allowed its teenage viewers to laugh down the sexual myths they’d been raised with. Have problems masturbating? That’s exactly what protagonist Otis Milburn struggles with. STDs? Fetishes? There’s storylines for those too.
Set to the backdrop of a typical British town, the comedy takes all the tropes of your usual high school zoo and flips things on their heads. Otis is an awkward sixteen-year-old sex therapist, exposing via his “services” that everyone struggles in some way. Stereotypes inevitably break down: school jock Jackson is inhibited by the constant pressure to perform, while macho bully Adam struggles with repressed sexuality. While it takes the genpop a while to warm up to Otis’s offer, once the floodgates open, we’re shown a deluge of dilemmas from all corners of this licentious school.
As the series progress, we get to know each character while they brave personal emotional journeys. In fact, one of Sex Education’s greatest strengths is that it's not always sunshine and flowers, but the “dark side” of relationships is covered too. These are situations that many teens go through, like abuse and family breakdown, but which they don’t necessarily know how to process at the time. Season one gives grace to an abortion scene faced by Maeve Wiley, Otis’s co-partner in the sex clinic. In season four, arguably the most LGBTQ+ inclusive of this already diverse cast, we hear more trans stories, helping to shine light on the devastatingly long waitlist times for gender-reassignment treatment in the UK and Western Europe.
It’s through this vulnerability, and the apparent disparity between lived and learned experience, that Sex Education calls attention to the terrible state of Sex Ed that many kids
grow up with. The premise that a gawky teen becomes teacher and therapist to this dysfunctional school makes mockery of curricula that barely teach about homosexuality, let alone the logistics of douching. And why are classes separated by gender when talking about tampons? From abortion to dysphoria, it’s exactly this lack of understanding about challenges teens themselves face which inspires Maeve to start the clinic in the first place.
That’s not to disregard formal schooling of course. For sure, I heard at least something useful while staring down at the brown carpet. Rather, it's to recognise that learning from peers is precisely what makes this show special. Like Moordale students, viewers trust each character because they see parts of themselves and others. So have these open conversations about intimacy rubbed off on teens the right way? “It answered my weird questions” says one girl in The Guardian - which sounds good enough to me. For a generation so exposed to rapid cultural change, perhaps a better understanding of sexual issues is exactly what young people need to feel more control over their identity and relationships. To older Gen-Zs like myself, it makes me thank my lucky stars for the cultural glow up. You can tell that to my suffering fourteen-year-old self.
