Please don’t celebrate me

Sex Education shows that whether you’re exalting or vilifying ‘the Other’, it’s the same subjugation

Irecently encountered what might be the most racially objectifying scene ever. The Netflix series Sex Education presents itself as unassailably forwardthinking, which should be a cause for alarm right away.

I was intrigued by the fable-like milieu, the candy design, the evanescence of the lead character Otis (Asa Butterfield), not to mention his mother, played by Gillian Anderson. Yet all this dissolves in the face of a new kind of sexual morality displayed by the show. Despite professing to have an empathetic and all-accepting vision of teenage sexual discovery, you cannot help but squirm under what feels like a scoldy tone of “Be like I say, or else!”

The show purports to celebrate the endearing confusion of learning to be sexual in a world saturated with erotic imagery and easy sex; a world in which you are expected to have an easygoing, emotion-free, throwaway attitude to sex, no matter how young and inexperienced you might be. Never mind that you might feel pain, loneliness, confusion, anxiety and even horror.

The media reframes all of this natural sexual complexity into a moral framework — to “shut up about all of that pain and enjoy!”. The psychological particularity of each person’s sexuality is held to account by this framework and, if it is found wanting, it is dismissed.

Otis is hard put upon by his mother, a sexually voracious sex therapist under whose disapproving gaze he squirms with inadequacy. Otis understands that his mother cannot see the real him, and regards him as a sexually dysfunctional teenager straight out of her psychology textbooks (the poor 16-year-old cannot even get himself to masturbate).

The script seems to explore the sexual conundrums of each character, but you are suspended between that which it purports to do, and that which it is actually doing: holding them up to the overweening moral framework. The deep-seated psychological obstacles to an easeful sexuality are given a cursory nod, and then dispelled by directives that belong more to self-help manuals and social engineering than to therapy.

Then there’s Otis’s best friend Eric (Ncuti Gatwa), a 16-year-old on the brink of coming out to his parents, who have emigrated from West Africa to the United Kingdom. Of course, Eric’s family are devout Christians, are suffering from culture shock, and look upon this near-stranger Eric with bewildered affection.

It is an excruciatingly racist stereotype: the person of colour struggling to seat himself in a non-binary sexuality, while his “white” female friends can openly date each other, which allows them to explore their particular psychological sexual hang-ups — so constructing them as full human beings, while miring him as no more than a racial manifestation.

That might be acceptable to a sophisticated viewing, in which you reframe the series as exploring racist stereotyping — until the crucial scene in which Eric and his family reconcile to his homosexuality. The run-up to this scene is an incident in which Eric is beaten up by a gaybasher. This catapults his parents from bewilderment to acceptance.

But this is only possible because Eric joins them at church and enters a state of religious ecstasy, dancing and singing with his West African immigrant community in full traditional regalia. The gaze on Eric states that only by embracing his religious roots, family and African ancestry can he win his sexual freedom. Eric is not allowed to be a sexual agent unless he is also constrained as an instance of a race.

Crucially, it is that Eric is racially celebrated that confirms the portrayal as racist. In a way, this scene is valuable in that it shows how celebration is, in fact, the most painful way of subjugating those constructed as the Other. Through this scene, you can feel how those inside society have the power to objectify those outside by either vilifying or celebrating them: these are two sides of the same coin.

You can only conclude that the way the series engages in a dual discourse around sexual anxiety and a new sexual morality that requires we just “shut up about all of that pain and enjoy!”, and the way it falls foul of racism through celebrating the Other, are part of the same impulse towards social control over the rampant and indefinable human psyche.