Sex Education: High School Sex and Intimacy – Can They Co-exist?

 

Sex Education, Netflix, Isaac, disability and sex, psychoanalysis of Sex Education, psychology of Sex Education, Intimacy and Sexuality

The Reluctant Wife began watching Sex Education a while ago and I would notice it as I walked through the room, sometimes getting caught up in it.  At some point, it caught my attention enough that I joined her to watch the second season and found myself anticipating the third season.  I was drawn in by the characters – by their teenage angst – by the interesting intersections of identities – sexual and otherwise, but I found myself being turned off by the sex.  I’m not a prude.  I like sex.  And there’s a lot of it depicted in this series.

I think some of the reason to be turned off is the staging of the sex.  It is clear that the sex is highly staged.  These are young actors and they are being watched over (I assume) by people who are walking them through how to act like they are having sex with someone else – and being coached on how to pretend to have sex and not quite have sex at the same time.  This is challenging for actors at any stage in their careers, but it must be particularly challenging for actors who are going through their own version of what they are depicting to be engaging in faux sex with many onlookers and the unblinking eye of the camera. 

But I don’t think the staging of the sex – the sense that this is just play sex and not the real thing - is what is off-putting.  Ironically that is part of porn, and it does not seem to matter enough there to derail the experience of getting excited.  I think that I am put off by the realistic aspects of the depiction of high school sex. 

The sex in Sex Education is urgent – frequently to the point of being frantic.  Sex is depicted, I think realistically, as being the result of powerful urges that feel like they have to be satisfied NOW.  And those impulses in high school are both so intense and so relatively rarely indulged that when then there is an opportunity to have sex, it feels urgent to have it now.  And the places that people have sex conspire to intensify the urgency – let’s have sex before we get caught, even when kids are having sex in their own bedrooms with the tacit or even explicit approval of their parents.  Someone might come in at any moment!

I think adolescent sex is urgent for other reasons as well.  Primary among them is that adolescent sex is wrapped up in the discovery of one’s identity, perhaps the primary adolescent developmental challenge.  So sexuality becomes partly about identity - who am I as a sexual person?  And so it partly had a defensive quality, as if the participants are so focused not just on their own pleasure but on whether they are being liked by the other that they cannot quite be open to the other - to engage with them.

This series is very much about identity – it includes an ensemble cast that is diverse racially, socio-economically, sexual orientationally, and on the basis of ability.  There is a kaleidoscopic quality to the characters and to the ways in which they interact.  There are the cliques of high school – and those who cross boundaries, belonging to one clique but consorting with members of others.  Who each person is - but also who it is that they are becoming - is very important to the characters and to the show 

There is also the discovery of the ways in which a person who is imagined to be one way – because of whatever aspect of their identity – is discovered, in the sort of accidental encounters that occur when many people are crammed into a small building for the bulk of the day, to also be someone completely different.   On this level, this series, even to someone who grew up in a different era, feels organic and true. The moments of discovery occur not just between the players, but within the audience as we discover that the cool girl’s home is not the friction free environment that her cool presentation would suggest that it might be. 

There is a kind of Structural Racism present as the principal protagonists are white and the secondary characters tend to be from other ethnic groups.  The principal protagonists are also predominantly heterosexual, but other sexualities are abundantly present and embraced in realistic ways.

Otis and Maeve

I would like to focus on a scene in the third season that was, unlike so many others in this show, erotic and arousing.  It caught me by surprise and I think it did so for three reasons.  (If you haven’t watched season three and intend to, you might want to wait to continue until you have seen it).  The scene is the result of a love triangle between the main protagonist, Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield), his partner in crime, Maeve Wiley (Emma Mackey), and her disabled next door neighbor, Isaac Goodwin (George Robinson).  Otis, who is the son of the Sex Educator and Sex Therapist Jean Milburn (Jillian Anderson) of the title, opened a sex therapy clinic of his own with Maeve during the first season. 

Isaac

There is a simmering but unspoken romantic tension between Otis and Maeve that seemingly must remain unresolved in order to sustain the relationship (and, I suppose more importantly, the series).  When, at the end of season 2, when Isaac deletes Otis’ protestation of love  from Maeve’s voice mail (after listening to it), so that Maeve does not know that Isaac has a rival for her affections, we are set up to see Isaac as not just manipulative but evil.  Over the course of season three, as Maeve moves towards appreciating Isaac, he gets rehabilitated in our mind – but there is a lingering mistrust.  As Maeve increasingly comes to see Isaac as not just a neighbor, but a love object, and as he works to prove himself worthy of her love, he confesses his misdeed.  This complicates things for Maeve (and for us) but it also clears the decks, or should, of our mistrust in Isaac.

The scene, then, which is, at least to me, the most erotic and sensual scene in the series is the love scene that takes place between Maeve and Isaac.  It is also the most emotionally complicated for the viewer, in a series that seems to work hard to create emotionally complicated scenes of for viewers.  But this one exposes, at least for this viewer, a prejudice based complication that I sensed was at work, but that I wasn’t really certain of.

Because Isaac has been a morally repugnant, then ambiguous, then at least somewhat redeemed figure, my reservation about Maeve’s interest in him was revealed, at least to me, to also be about a reservation based on his disability.  As they talk about the ways in which his paralysis interferes with but also doesn’t preclude his having a sexual relationship and, indeed, heightens some forms of sexual pleasure and as Maeve begins to explore how to provide some of that pleasure, we suddenly find ourselves in a new and fascinating sexual landscape.

Maeve and Isaac’s discussion of his sexuality is frank – but other discussions have been quite frank.  This is new because it is tender in a way that other discussions have not been.  These two people, in this moment, seem neither to be focused on their own pleasure – they are focused on the other’s pleasure – nor do they seem to be defending themselves against being shamed or exposed as part of their experience of being open to the other.   They seem to be joined by their curiosity – and the pleasure that curiosity brings.  I, as the viewer, become aware of my own curiosity and the way it is being satiated by this discussion – and it becomes clear that what is arousing about this interaction is not just that it is sexually intimate, but that it is emotionally intimate.

I also become aware, as I am drawn deeper and deeper into experiencing this interaction, that part of my resistance to seeing Maeve be drawn to Isaac is something like horror at the thought of having a sexual interaction with a person who is missing a part of what I take to be integral to being human.  My horror turns slowly to fascination as I become curious about how this complex, devious, but also gentle person can use himself to pleasure and receive pleasure from another.

Sexuality does not have to bring emotional intimacy.  Indeed, many of the relationships depicted in Sex Education seem to use sex to prevent emotional intimacy.  But when sex is used to enhance emotional, interpersonal intimacy, it becomes an entirely new thing.  Instead of just being a means of gratifying a drive (and for adolescents, the gratification of that drive is a particularly powerful feeling), when sexual interaction also allows for accessing the parts of ourselves that crave caring for others and the parts of ourselves that crave being cared for, and we are using multiple senses to express and experience this interaction, the nuanced interactional possibilities transcend simple gratification.  At this point, we are able to experience an internal integration – an intrapsychic harmony, and an interpersonal one – an expression of multiple types of love simultaneously. 

The intensity of this experience certainly registers as sexual arousal, and the interesting thing is that the arousal occurs not through identification with the corporeal other – I am still fundamentally different from Isaac – so I don’t project myself into the scene in the ways that I usually do when I become aroused by imagery – I don’t imagine myself as if it were me interacting with Maeve and feeling what it must be like to be Maeve.  Nor am I quite taking Isaac and Maeve as objects – but instead there is a kind of transcendent identification that allows for imagining not myself into Isaac as Isaac.  That is, what it would be like, in those parts of myself that are similar to Isaac, to be Isaac.  Watching this scene allows me to be taken out of myself and into the other in a way that mirrors the experience of caring for and loving another – but I am doing that towards Isaac and, to a lesser extent, Maeve, simultaneously.  There is more at play here than in the usual love scene.

If sex is a portal that includes the possibility of imagining another and how they must feel in this particular moment, Sex Education, in this scene, allows for multiple simultaneous opportunities, at least for this viewer, to enter into being empathically connected with another – and using sexual arousal as a vehicle for transforming horror into solidarity.  If only we could bottle this, what a wonderful thing it would be!

In so far as the intent of the writers, producers, actors and directors of this series are to create a new level of empathy towards others who are different from themselves, for this viewer, this particular scene accomplished that goal.  It also helped illustrate a point that was made on a recent NPR interview with the novelist Jonathan Franzen who objected to eliminating books with morally ambiguous characters, pointing out that 20th and 21st Century novels have been focused on exploring moral ambiguity.  I hope that my self exploration (above) and revelation of my own moral ambiguity has not offended you (he said, somewhat defensively...).

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