Sentimental TV is having a moment, which is great for someone like me who's more interested in whether JLo's involved than who directed it, and no one's capitalized on this better than Netflix. In 2018 alone, the streaming service gave us the tenderly earnest Set It Up, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and Queer Eye. And now they're giving us one of the best scripted shows on television: Sex Education, a show that details the trials and tribulations of awkward, would-be-loner Otis Milburn who, along with the help of his only friend Eric Effiong and actual loner Maeve Wiley, starts an underground sex therapy ring at his high school. The premise is certainly unusual, but what makes the show brilliant, what elevates it beyond normal sappy fare or over-tread teenage cable drama is that the characters—and male characters specifically—talk about sex in healthy, nuanced ways.
Without this, Sex Education would be a show that you’ve seen before. It’s got more than a few clichés: a therapist parent without boundaries, a school bully who's the principal's son, a mega-jock who secretly sleeps with a "weird" girl. On the surface, Otis (Asa Butterfield) appears to be the biggest cliché of them all. He’s a gangly, socially-panicked, musically obsessed, well-off white kid whose biggest problem might be his parents' painful divorce... if it weren’t for the fact that he is completely unable to masturbate. Even getting boners freaks him out (a fact his sex-therapist mother desperately needs to unpack). The boy is a bumbling mess of anxiety and hormones and we’ve all been there. But what makes Otis, and the show in turn, worth watching is his empathy; he guides men, women, and couples through their sex quandaries with kindness, if not expertise. He gets couples to talk about what they initially liked about one other. He watches lesbian porn in order to get to know two of his “clients” better. He encourages the school bully Adam to embrace having a big dick, rather than feeling like he’s expected to perform.
Unlike Otis, Eric knows what he wants, he just can’t get it. Otis has an abundance of women around him with at least quasi-sexual interest in him; ironic for a guy who couldn’t be more frightened of his own penis. Eric, after giving two and a half hand jobs over the summer, is ready for “the best two years of [his] life,” but unfortunately, he’s one of only two out guys in his year, and the other one—his only crush—is a popular kid who couldn’t be less interested. On its surface, the show seems to point to Otis's mother, Jean, (Gillian Anderson) as the source of Otis’ insight into sexual intimacy, but I would argue that any ability he has to talk candidly about sex or to help others with their issues stems from his relationship with Eric. Eric is relentlessly brave where Otis is constantly frightened. As the gay son of conservative, religious, African immigrants, Eric's had no choice but to be brave. This is why he’s able to walk Otis through awkward calls with his crush, why he’s unafraid to teach the popular girls how to deepthroat bananas without gagging, and why he tries out for swing band (which has a few hot guys it in it) even though he’s not good enough yet. Guided by his horniness and limited by his circumstances of living in small town England, Eric knows what it is to want and to risk, and essentially, what it means to be truly vulnerable.
These two anchor the show’s male cast, and the way they talk about sex—both with each other, and with other people—is nothing short of revolutionary. In one of the show's first scenes, Eric teases Otis about not being able to masturbate, but it's not cruel or meant to emasculate him. They can joke about it because they also talk about it. Their conversations about sex are never about bragging rights, cruelty towards someone else, or shaming others. It’s always personal for them.
In the past twenty years, we've seen dozens of women-centric casts doing this kind of thing: Girls Trip, Insecure, Broad City, Grace & Frankie, Clueless; I’m pretty sure that was the entire point of Sex and the City. Yes, we’ve seen this type of candor with men talking about sex before (most commonly in the form of raunchy teen comedies like Superbad, American Pie, and Can’t Hardly Wait), but what we haven’t seen from male characters is an earnest desire to do right by others, for the sake of others. Not just because they don’t want to mess things up with their crush, but because they want sex to be good for their crush, too. Imagine!
Offscreen too, women tend to be great at talking about sex with one other, at helping each other figure out how to navigate the inherent trickiness that comes with getting naked with another human. Men aren’t so much. When men talk about sex, especially the way it's portrayed in TV and movies, it’s often aggressive or disrespectful—it’s "locker room talk." Men, and the men who write about men, seem to think that talking about sex crudely is a great way to demonstrate their masculinity or superiority over other men. Even when this device is used to explicitly paint a male character as a creep, it’s still the scene we ultimately watch as an audience. Otis and Eric demonstrate the good that can come from men having more vulnerable discussions with each other about the less sexy parts of sex.
The guys who are unsuccessful on the show have one thing in common: they're deeply isolated and closed-off emotionally. They aren't honest about or don't communicate their sexual desires. Take Adam, the school bully, for example. He can’t seem to stop taking his aggression out on Eric. He can’t cum when he sleeps with his smokin’ hot girlfriend. He can’t even stay out of detention. His father, the school principal, shares a similar fate. Neither has any ability to connect honestly with other people (about sex or anything else), and they become not just lonely and miserable themselves, but cruel and harsh towards others. Sex Education makes clear that the consequence of being unwilling to share your feelings is ultimately isolation. The show, whether purposefully or not, equates healthy talk about sex with healthy relationships.
Jakob (Mikael Persbrandt), Jean's hunky Swedish handyman, resides on the opposite end of the show's spectrum compared to the father and son duo. In his first scene, after accidentally walking into a therapy session, Jakob talks about his scrotum. Throughout the show, he maintains his (very hot) sexual openness, explaining to Jean that he wants to sleep with her, but also that he wants more. He isn’t desperate or overly-persistent about it; he just lays out what he wants, and if she’s down, great! If not, he’ll have his daughter come fix her faucets from now and keep his sexy distance. How often have we seen romantic, sexual guys who respect what both they and the other person want, while still being written as masculine, fully-formed characters? Almost never. We get the sense that this is the wholly-realized version of what Otis and Eric might become one day—adult men who have healthy connections with potential sex partners, who are confident in both themselves and their sexual desires, without being creepy, needy, or manipulative.
In the show, Adam’s sexual repression manifests as hatred and violence towards Eric, meanwhile his father’s manifests as similar cruelty towards almost everyone, but especially Maeve, who he seems to relish having power over. All of this might feel a little cliché if it didn’t hit so close to home. In a world where many men still feel entitled to sex, and irreversibly snubbed when they don't get it, there's great value in stories where rejection is commonplace, and men help each other work through their sexual shortcomings and misadventures.
With Sex Education, Netflix made a show about nice guys who aren’t Nice Guys. Otis and Eric are just flawed, horny men making an effort to communicate and empathize with the people around them. They both are and are not getting the sexual experiences they desire, and if they don’t, they talk to their friends and laugh (and panic) about it, which is something we don’t often see on TV. More of this, please, Hollywood, and fewer weird roadtrips to lose your virginity plots.
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