How ‘Normal People’ made me confront how I felt about sex as a young woman
Like much of the country, I spent a few heavy days devouring the TV adaptation of Sally Rooney’s bestselling book Normal People to the backdrop of a soft, rainy lockdown. Of course, I was enamoured by it but it tapped into a part of my psyche that I had buried a while back, partly out of pain and partly out of shame. Sex.
For most women, our sexual history is something we guard closely. It’s something we share over wine with our friends, discuss in whispers with new lovers and awkwardly bumble around if pressed by awkward parents. For a long time I felt a discomfort when talking about sex, whether it be my own sexual history or
just the topic in general, I always find myself embarrassed and unable to really open up about it.
Watching Normal People made me face up to how I felt about sex as a young woman, and I think it’s wonderful that the producers have chosen to put a kind of sex on screen we’ve all experienced but rarely talked about.
Normal People has a lot of sex scenes, there is a lot of nudity and seemingly a lot of orgasms for all parties. The first sex we see is awkward, passionate and heated. Despite its youth, Normal People is careful to highlight consent as a key player in the pleasure of it all and Connell and Marianne regularly give consent verbally throughout the show. Connell in particular takes care in his advances and lets Marianne know gently that should she wish to remove her consent from sex then that “we can stop, it won’t be awkward”.
These kind of tender but vital conversations about consent instigated by a man are such rare appearances in young women’s sexual experiences. I myself have had so many sexual experiences where I have mentally removed consent either before or during but have never voiced it, feeling embarrassed and consigning myself to the fact it will “be over soon”.
The vulnerability between Connell and Marianne shown in their sex life is so much more than just lustful smut
I cheered for Marianne when she told her Swedish boyfriend that she was no longer consenting to their sadomasochist relationship. Not that there is an issue with sadomasochism, but watching Marianne’s dead eyes as she glanced at her bruised arm made me think of so many women I know who will accept violence in their sex lives in place of conversations about why men might want to hurt women, or more importantly why women want to be hurt by the man in their lives.
It is often the case we replicate our emotional issues in our sexual experiences, allowing our fears to be exploited in a world where male dominance is misconstrued sometimes very dangerously in sex.
The portrayal of these different types of sex in Normal People are what makes it so special. It is rare that we get to see sex between lovers, sex between friends, sex you’d rather be anywhere else than and sex that is done to heal your partner in that peeled back, raw emotional state you only find yourself in with the most special of people. The vulnerability between Connell and Marianne shown in their sex life is so much more than just lustful smut, it’s truly beautiful and is done so well by actors Daisy Edgar-Jones and Paul Mescal.
Even just the concept of showing naked bodies in such a sexual context, but not in the hyper-sexualised way we are so used to seeing, was for me, liberating.
To shut down Normal People’s many sex scenes is to do a great disservice to the sensational acting but more so to the wonderful writing of Rooney who taps into so many women and men allowing them to process feelings they may never have been strong enough to face on their own.