Sex Education has plenty of lessons about diversity and normal life
Netflix original series Sex Eduction returns for a second season today. The show, which stars Asa Butterfield (Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children) as awkward teenager Otis, whose mother, Jean – played by a brilliant Gillian Anderson – is a sex therapist, garnered critical acclaim and tens of millions of streams.
The show’s premise sees Otis and his unlikely friend and love interest Maeve (Emma Mackey) set up a sex advice business at their high school, attended by a supporting cast of delightful and unusual characters.
The students have lots to learn about sex but for the audience, the show’s lessons go beyond that. Here are three.
High school hierarchies are not absolutes
One of my pet peeves about high school-set films and TV shows – even the great ones, The Breakfast Club and Mean Girls and Clueless – is they tend to portray the make-up of friendship groups and their social hierarchy as fixed.
Maybe it is a NZ-US difference but my experience of secondary school was not like that.
Sure, you had your main friends and there was a loose hierarchical structure but it was all a lot more fluid than those films made it out to be.
Sex Education gets that. The students have their own friends, and main characters Otis and Eric are the dorks, the ‘‘Untouchables’’ are the popular ones, and so on. But, as a party in the first season showed, the boundaries between associates and groups can be weak and blurry. It is not as cut and dried as John Hughes suggested.
The geeks are not going to rise up and take over the school and the popular students are not going to become its laughingstock, as in your traditional (and fantastical) teen narrative.
The students exist in the same world and they intersect and collide in ways that are more nuanced, and more realistic, than most high school films and TV shows portray.
The world is diverse and that is normal
In this woke world, and after shows like Girls were criticised for lack of diversity, creators often scramble to include people of colour and other minorities.
That can be jarring and at worst – as in the case of last year’s Batwoman – can replace creativity or innovation.
But Sex Education is one that manages, on the whole, to include minority characters without patting itself on the back. Take Otis’ best mate, Eric (Ncuti Gatwa). He is black and gay, which seems like a bit of a pile-on in a show of largely straight white characters, but Sex Education does not make a big deal out of it.
Sure, part of Eric’s back story is that he comes from a religious Ghanaian family but that is not really an obstacle for him. Even his strict father is trying to accept Eric for who he is.
Or head boy Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling). While the pitch ‘‘mega-popular black athlete has mixed-race lesbian mums’’ makes me die a little inside, the fact Jackson is simply allowed to have his race and his family without anyone commenting on or analysing it is refreshing. Likewise Ola (Patricia Allison), whose father is a white Swede. Her deceased mother was clearly black but it does not have to be discussed.
There are examples of this all over Sex Education. It is a show where people just are and neither it nor the other characters are fussed about it.
It is OK for teenagers to have sex
Given the title, it will come as no surprise that the teen characters in Sex Education have sex.
Or they try and fail to have sex. Or they decide not to have sex. Or they watch porn. Or they masturbate. Or – in the case of Otis – try and fail to masturbate.
What they don’t do is pay for having sex.
This is a big deal for film and TV, which has a long history of punishing sexually active teens, girls in particular. It is not that there are no consequences for sex in Sex Education. It is just that those consequences are not portrayed as punitive.
In the first season, Maeve falls unintentionally pregnant and has an abortion, which forms one of the main plot strands in an early episode. The abortion is certainly not glossed over, and the episode takes the clear view that few if any women approach having an abortion without a measure of grief. But it is not
Sex Education manages, on the whole, to include minority characters without patting itself on the back.
treated as a punishment for sex, merely one among many possible consequences of it.
Even the protesters outside the clinic, a couple who have pledged to be celibate until marriage, are treated with sympathy. After Otis accidentally befriends them and gives them relationship advice, he asks if they will still shout at his friend when she comes out. ‘‘We probably will,’’ they say.
Teens have sex, or don’t have sex, or agree with abortion, or don’t. Within the parameters of this show, that is all fine.
Sex Education is more than the sum of its great performances, hilarious script and compelling storylines. It is one of the most quietly radical shows on television.