Co-eds are unbuckling their slacks in the stacks. Two dudes are frantically groping each other against a tree. Cries of ecstasy echo through the hallways while even a chihuahua thrusts his hind legs onto a football.
The opening sequence of the fourth and final season of Sex Education, now streaming on Netflix, may seem downright mild to fans of the delightfully explicit series, which has been nothing short of revolutionary in its frank depiction of teenage sexuality. This is a show that has featured intergalactic, intraspecies cosplay, among other eye-popping moments. Its legendary bedroom antics have resulted in broken limbs, radical awakenings, and at least one death-by-falling-microwave. And it has accomplished all this amid a politically motivated crackdown on the mere mention of sex in American schools.
Beginning with its 2019 premiere, creator Laurie Nunn’s series has upended decades of precedent for how sex between young people has been represented on television, especially for American audiences. (The series itself is notably British, though its high school bears a strong resemblance to the Hollywood template). And Sex Education’s groundbreaking approach to sex goes far beyond the many ways it has shown that getting it on can be an awkward but meaningful opportunity for personal growth.
The heightened and chaotic energy with which sex consumes the adolescent imagination is the overt subject of Sex Education, rather than a simmering undercurrent. Gender identity and sexual preference are posited as worlds of radical possibility, inviting fiercely individualized exploration. The overarching moral of the series — figuring out who you are and what you want, and learning to never compromise yourself for anyone else’s sake — marks a near total turnaround from the teen soaps that still inspire nostalgia among today’s young adults.
There was a time when the erotic impulses animating teenage life appeared onscreen like the placid weather of Orange County or coastal Massachusetts, diffused everywhere in the atmosphere, but obvious only in the case of a Significant Meteorological Event. Think of Marissa Cooper and Ryan Atwood going all the way in a Very Special Episode of The O.C. that was legitimately titled “The End of Innocence.” Or Dawson’s Creek’s Joey Potter and Pacey Witter finally getting horizontal — fireside, no less — on a senior class trip after years of will-they-won’t-they buildup.
In fictional TV high schools of the ’90s and ’00s, virginity was often posited as something to be lost, usually by a smart and beautiful girl to a more experienced (and therefore “bad”) boy, like Ryan, who was adopted from the wrong side of the tracks, or Pacey, who had already slept with his English teacher. Primetime dramas like these, cut in the mold of Beverly Hills: 90210, generally refined sexual desire into fuel to propel their soapy plots forward. Prom night — when sex would either be “special” or a humiliating disaster — was often the culmination of these narratives. The potential fallout of acting on sexual desire too soon, or under the wrong circumstances, loomed large overhead in the form of dire and irrevocable social punishment: pregnancy, heartbreak, or social rejection.
The young characters of yesteryear were also hopelessly prescribed by convention, telegraphing to generations of TV-watching teenagers that binary gender categories, heterosexuality, whiteness, and the strict mores that attended them were laws of nature, rather than forms of social indoctrination by way of mass media. With their close-knit, clique-centered casts, teen soaps offered a strikingly limited vision of who young people could aspire to become: a Kelly or a Brenda, a Ryan or a Seth. They rendered invisible or tokenized anyone who wasn’t straight, white, cis, and generally affluent.
With its sprawling ensemble cast, Sex Education has actively worked to dismantle those restrictive and damaging tropes. For starters, it treats teenage horniness as an essential fact of nature rather than a naughty urge to be dealt with furtively, away from supervising eyes. By making the leading adult character a sex therapist (Jean Milburn, played by Gillian Anderson), the show inverts the dynamic often shown between parents and children, memorably featuring a scene of Jean embarrassing her son Otis (Asa Butterfield) with breakfast-table talk about pleasure and masturbation.
When Otis goes into the family business and starts a sex clinic at school (including this season at college, where he faces off with a rival played by Thaddea Graham), the series pursues a near-procedural treatment of teenage bedroom dilemmas as though they were trials on Law & Order: the case of the faked orgasms, too-vigorous fondling, or lovers who are just meant to be friends. Following this playful formula in its early seasons, Sex Education paid careful, devoted attention to the tensions and conflicts that young people encounter while first exploring their bodies.
Now in its fourth season, the series has settled into a subtler rhythm, modeling best practices in sex and relationships rather than having Otis spell them out for his peers. Even as they’re pawing at new crushes, characters ask for consent. Desire and identity continue to be presented as varied, unbounded by arbitrary rules, and often fluid. And Sex Education persists in its honest and layered depiction of gender diversity, showing the complex mix of emotions stirred up by the process of transitioning.
All of these commitments are demonstrated in a season-four scene featuring Cal, played by Dua Saleh, hooking up with a new classmate in a bathroom stall. (Although these teens are never not horny, Cal is especially so, having started taking testosterone.) Cal’s new interest, Aisha (Alexandra James), is femme-presenting, while their ex, Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling), is a certified swimming bro, marking a shift in their attraction that goes unremarked upon. And though they are already going at it, Aisha asks if it’s okay before she reaches into Cal’s pants. When it turns out that Cal is getting an unwanted period, they experience a vivid bout of gender dysphoria, an intensely personal feeling rarely represented in any form of media.
With such scenes and countless more, the series follows through on its title, serving as a vital means of sex education for anyone in need of broadening their horizons, and perhaps most significantly for young viewers.
That has become ever more important as access to accurate and inclusive information about sex and sexuality in American schools is actively under threat. As of this year, only 28 states and the District of Columbia mandate some form of sex education, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization committed to advancing sexual and reproductive health and rights. Only 17 of those states require that sex education actually be medically accurate, while 35 states and D.C. allow parents to remove their child from sex education classes altogether. An alarming 29 states require that abstinence be stressed. And of course, the onslaught of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation targeting the mere mention of sexual orientation and gender identity in schools is only making it more challenging for today’s queer youth to access accurate and helpful information.
It may be the case, as statistics suggest, that young people today are approaching sex and sexuality with more mindfulness and caution than previous generations did. The COVID-19 pandemic profoundly impacted social and sexual behavior, as well, reshaping our potential to form such connections for people of all ages. In the aftermath of those practical limitations, and amid growing anti-LGBTQ+ attacks on the discussion of sex and sexuality in American classrooms, a series like Sex Education is a vibrant reminder of the infinite possibilities inherent to the physics of bodies in space (yes, even outer space, if that’s your thing).
Over the course of its four-season run, Sex Education has set the template for messy, honest, and inclusive narratives about young people who are horny and eager to act on it. Instead of teen movies like Porky or American Pie, in which clueless and handsy bros grope their way toward coming of age, we now have movies like Bottoms, in which being queer is so normal that it can also be lame, and nerdy girls are hot for cheerleaders. Shows like The Sex Lives of College Girls have also clearly built on the foundation the Netflix series laid, presenting sex as part of the fabric of young adult life.
In the end, Sex Education helped quash stale conventions so that more stories can dig into the truth: Your body can be whatever you want it to be, and the rules of desire aren’t written by anyone but you. That’s a lesson worth studying.
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