Sex Education.
Watching Sex Education, I wondered how my own relationship to sex would’ve been different if this show came out when I was in high school. Back then, the representations of teenagers having sex were mostly damning. What’s foremost in my mind is The Secret Life of the American Teenager, and all I really remember about it is that the main character got pregnant in high school and there was a lot of yelling and a lot of shame and maybe she married the guy to try to make things better? I don’t know. There was 16 & Pregnant, also scary to me, and I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, which wasn’t exclusively about teenagers, but as one, the idea stuck with me. Even though I wasn’t having sex, I was afraid all of the time that if I did, a baby would immediately follow. Maybe I wouldn’t even know until I was giving birth in a public restroom. As I was reminded often, All it takes is one time.
There was a lot of shame around sex back then, and even with a mom who’s a doctor and who was open to talking to me about anything, who was honestly very progressive for the time, my own thinking about sex was pretty black and white—white being staying a virgin as long as possible and black being anything that veered too far from white.
It probably didn’t help that I was very Christian back then. I had a thick purity ring that said True Love Waits, and I wore it on my wedding finger, to the great confusion of everyone around me, especially the eleven-year-olds at the summer camp where I worked, who kept asking me if I was married.
“No,” I’d say. “I’m not married.”
“Then why are you wearing a wedding ring?”
How do you—at seventeen—explain to a group of wide-eyed eleven-year-olds that you are wearing this ring because you are determined to not have sex until it’s with your very far in the future husband?
Being religious probably didn’t help my shame around sex, but there was also my own sex education. In our Wellness class my freshman year, we were shown pictures of untreated STIs and told that this was what awaited us on the other side of our virginities unless we abstained from sex until marriage. We were asked to sign abstinence pledges, which we read out loud to each other. We signed our own and then signed our classmates’ as witnesses.
Maybe our teachers were just trying to protect us the best ways they knew how, but it left a lot of blind spots. I love how in Sex Education, when their new principal teaches abstinence instead of safe sex, when the students are made to sit in a classroom and endure what I did back in 2008—pictures of STIs and stories of teenage pregnancy that ruined lives—these kids narrow their eyes and talk back. One student asks why they’re not covering gay sex, and another says that fear is not an effective approach to sex education. Throughout the seasons, these teenagers aren’t hiding the sex that they’re having. If they have sex without protection, they take Plan B, they get STI tests, they tell someone. If they don’t know what to do, they talk about it, and as the seasons go on, the show gets more and more inclusive in what it covers, and I, at nearly 30, want to pull out my notebook, write some things down.
The show can be a little earnest sometimes in its advice, a little too direct to sound like the way real people talk to each other, but even this I appreciate because it’s almost a nod to all of us who never got the education we needed. The show seems to break the fourth wall—even if the characters are not looking in the camera, they seem to speak directly to all of the people at home who could use this advice. They even give out book recommendations, like Emily Nagoski’s Come As You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life, a book I’ve read and loved.
I love Sex Education for its transparency, for the conversations the characters have, and for its ever-growing inclusiveness. I’m in the fourth season, and now the kids are in a school where pretty much everyone is queer and a number of the main characters are trans, and it’s a good feeling to see a show where people take turns in the spotlight, where we’re not always orienting ourselves around the same kind of person again and again and again.
Oddly, I find Adam—a guy who slowly realizes he’s bi and then, as shy as he is, tries to dive in—especially endearing. I watched the first season forever ago so maybe part of my attachment to him is that I can’t really remember how he was as a bully. I’m seeing him now, trying to communicate how he feels even though it’s sticky in his mouth. And even though he’s a White British guy and I am not, I kind of see myself in him a bit. I am slowly understanding what it means to be in-between straight and gay, if being bi is even that. I’m learning what it means to be queer and to love my boyfriend an enormous amount, how my love for him is not antithetical to my bisexuality but is in fact a part of it. Even via White British boys (I’m thinking too of Heartstopper), it’s good to see bisexuality represented in a way that does not make you messy or two-faced or unable to commit. I want to see more everyday bisexual people on TV, awkward people, who can’t really look you in the eyes when they tell you how they feel.
I love Sex Education for its characters, especially Eric. How, as the Black best friend, he still gets his own messy plot lines and his own choices to make, how he gets to grow and change, make mistakes and heal from them. I love that he gets to ask his White best friend, “When is the last time we talked about what’s going on in my life?” and that when he goes to Nigeria, the focus isn’t on the homophobia, but on the queer people who are finding community and love despite it.
This show does so many things well, and if I could time travel back to my own high school experience, maybe I would try to bring it with me. I’d pull it up in my Wellness class. (Did we have the technology? Maybe I’d bring that back too.) Turn on the show, slip off my purity ring as I watched. I’d sit back and try to learn how to be a bit more honest with myself, with other people.
Image: Netflix
