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Asa Butterfield and Connor Swindells in Sex Education
Asa Butterfield and Connor Swindells in Sex Education. Photograph: Jon Hall/Netflix
Asa Butterfield and Connor Swindells in Sex Education. Photograph: Jon Hall/Netflix

Sex Education: in praise of the raunchy yet heartfelt Netflix comedy

This article is more than 5 years old

The critically acclaimed series combines teen comedy tropes with remarkable honesty, offering a fully fleshed portrait of how high schoolers deal with sex and consent today

Netflix’s acclaimed new comedy Sex Education centers on the experiences of Otis, a 16-year-old virgin, played by Asa Butterfield, and his mom, Jean, a sex therapist, played by Gillian Anderson. Though Otis grows up in an ostensibly sex-positive home, he is incredibly uncomfortable about sex. He dislikes masturbating and is intensely afraid of being sexual with another person. “Let’s take things slow,” he tells a classmate, and they proceed to hold hands for 45 minutes.

In the show, Otis’s ambivalence about sex is shown to come, at least partially, from the awkwardness of living with a sex therapist mother who decorates their home with explicit art, as well as some large dildos (her home is also the place where she counsels couples and where she regularly holds workshops). Despite the fact that Jean is a therapist, she has significant problems with boundary issues, holding the men she sleeps with at arm’s length while fixating on her son’s personal life.

The playful twist in Sex Education comes when Otis offers advice to a popular peer who is insecure about his penis size. When Maeve, the class rebel, sees how effective Otis’s advice was, she suggests teaming up: she’ll secure clients and handle the business side of things, while Otis will provide therapy to kids struggling with all sorts of concerns about their burgeoning sexuality, from body insecurity to fears about the actual process of having sex.

While critics have marveled at the show’s combination of raunch and warmth, this fusion harks back to a tradition of similarly fused teen comedies from American Pie to Netflix’s Big Mouth. So many finger-wagging pundits have warned that the rise of affirmative consent culture in high schools and college campuses would kill the fun spontaneity of sexuality. And yet, in reality, we see the opposite, with shows like Sex Education and Big Mouth eagerly illustrating how much better sex can be when we learn to communicate with our partners.

And communicate they do: throughout Sex Education, we see Otis counsel teens worried about their bodies, their desires, and their relationships. While Otis’s advice doesn’t always hit the mark (he struggles to provide feedback to a lesbian couple since the dynamics of such a relationship are more “out of his wheelhouse” than penis problems) it does allow students the space to be honest about their fears and work through some of their anxieties. Sometimes Sex Education leans a little too hard into its “everyone struggles and deserves empathy” schtick: the viewer is asked to sympathize with bullies as much as the bullied, and I was particularly surprised that Jean’s mining of her son’s sexual issues was presented as a mild overreach of parenting, rather than a truly shocking abuse of power.

Overall, though, the show consistently hits the right notes: earnest but not preachy, moving without ever being manipulative. In one storyline, an image of a student’s unwaxed vulva is shared without her consent by an anonymous and angry villain who wants an apology for some perceived wrongdoing. The other students make fun of the image, while the victim of the act is terrified that her identity will be exposed. When the headmaster scolds the students on how it’s a crime to share such pictures, a wave of students come to the defense of the targeted one. “It’s my vagina,” one after another says, first girls, and then even the most popular boy in school. As each stands up, the shame of the original image fades into the background. Finally, the targeted girl stands too: “It’s MY vagina,” she says proudly.

Asa Butterfield and Emma Mackey in Sex Education. Photograph: Jon Hall/Netflix

I never thought I’d tear up when watching a school assembly scene, but there you have it. Sex Education is a defiantly hopeful show, one that insists that the young people who are struggling to navigate their hormones and an often unjust world are fully capable of true emotional growth. In particular, the show’s depiction of two of Otis’s closest friends is simply exceptional. Otis’s best friend, Eric, played by Ncuti Gatwa, is hilarious, smart, and exuberant and pushes back against viewer expectations of the trope of the gay best friend whose own needs are sidelined for the straight central protagonist. In particular, Eric’s relationship with his father, who clearly loves his son, but is also frightened for him growing up in a homophobic world, is incredibly touching. Likewise, Maeve, in a full-blooded performance by Emma Mackey, is one part Daria Morgendorffer and one part Lisa Simpson, a truly bright and engaged student who simply doesn’t have any parental support. Mackey’s Maeve is a full person, not just an object of desire, and it’s terrific to see how her relationship with Otis grows as they gain more trust and respect for each other.

Ultimately, Sex Education is much less interested in the mechanics of sex than in what encourages real intimacy. This doesn’t mean that the show isn’t chock full of lewd masturbation jokes and scandalous drawings, but the heart of the series is first and foremost about relationships: between parents and kids, best friends, older and younger generations, as well as young people falling in and out of love. In its most daring move, Sex Education insists that it’s not only listening that aids in communication: it’s our own willingness to grow and change too.

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