BY DR TANYA HORECK, READER IN FILM, MEDIA AND CULTURE (ANGLIA RUSKIN UNIVERSITY) AND School of Sexuality Education ADVISOR.

**Warning: spoilers from the beginning about Season 2 of Sex Education

After a female teacher (Rakhee Thakrar) is slut shamed at school via a lipstick scrawl on a bathroom mirror (‘Miss Sands is a dirty talking slut’), a group of female students are rounded up as suspects and put in detention. The teacher in question asks them to write a report on what binds them together as women; as she tells them: ‘One, or all of you, wanted to tear a fellow female down, now you can spend some time reflecting on what you have in common instead’. This scene, from the penultimate episode of the second series of Netflix’s Sex Education, both recalls, and significantly reworks, the premise of John Hughes’ 1985 film, The Breakfast Club. Famously, that film begins with a group of teenagers in detention. Each of the all-white male and female teenagers assembled for the Saturday ‘breakfast club’ detention represent a clearly recognizable American high school stereotype; in the language of Hughes’ film, they constitute, respectively, a brain, an athlete, a basket case, a princess, and a criminal. The white male assistant principal, who is deeply disdainful of the young people in his keep, peevishly demands that they write a 1000-word essay in which they each ‘describe who they think they are’.

Sex Education is a series that knowingly riffs on the various motifs and tropes of the teen genre, and its nod to The Breakfast Club forms a significant part of its feminist subversion of the casual misogyny of earlier iterations of the teen-comedy drama. What the group of female teenagers in Sex Education eventually come to realise is that their experience of sexual assault and harassment in public spaces is what brings them together. This shared recognition is the culminating moment of a key story arc for the season – the sexual assault of the character Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood). In Episode 3, Aimee gets on a crowded bus and a male stranger masturbates onto her jeans. Over the course of the remaining five episodes, Sex Education explores how Aimee copes with the trauma of this assault which she is at first reluctant to even name as such, only going to the police station at the urging of her feminist friend Maeve (Emma Mackey). As the group of young women, of different races, classes, sexualities, sizes, shapes, backgrounds and experiences, sit in the school library during their detention and share their stories of sexual assault, Sex Education lays bare an all-pervasive gendered reality that a teen movie such as The Breakfast Club could not – or would not – acknowledge. As I watched the detention scene in Sex Education, I recalled Molly Ringwald’s widely circulated New Yorker opinion piece from April 2018, in which she revisits her role in The Breakfast Club and reflects on how the #metoo reckoning made her reconsider the more troubling aspects of that film’s handling of teen heterosexuality and male-female relations. Recounting how painful it is for her to watch The Breakfast Club now, Ringwald observes that her character, Claire, is, in fact, sexually abused in one scene and sexually harassed throughout the others by the male rebel of the film, John Bender (Judd Nelson). Claire’s sexual harassment occurs in public space for all to see and yet it remains strangely unseen – both by other characters within the film and by film-goers of the time. Bender’s sexual bullying of Claire is ultimately normalized as a natural part of heterosexual relations. Of Hughes’ teen films, Ringwald writes:

The films are still taught in schools because good teachers want their students to know that what they feel and say is important; that if they talk, adults and peers will listen. I think that it’s ultimately the greatest value of the films, and why I hope they will endure. The conversations about them will change, and they should. It’s up to the following generations to figure out how to continue those conversations and make them their own—to keep talking, in schools, in activism and art—and trust that we care. (2018)

It’s significant that Ringwald ends her piece with this reflection on the teachability of Hughes’ teen films and their value for future generations. Sex Education, I assert, is a powerful example of a TV series that takes up the threads of the conversation identified by Ringwald, and invents new ways of framing it for 21st century youth culture. As Laurie Nunn, the female writer and creator of Sex Education has said of her development of the series: ‘I realized very quickly that it was an amazing opportunity to have a frank but funny conversation with a younger audience…The conversations happening at the moment in that area are interesting, and moving so quickly, it felt like a timely thing to do’ (cited in Frost 2020).

‘Frank but funny’ is indeed central to the show’s approach to sex education, even when dealing with serious issues such as sexual assault. At the police station with Maeve, a nervous Aimee considers leaving, rationalizing that the ‘jizz’ on her jeans is basically equivalent to someone sneezing on her because ‘cum is kind of like a penis having a sneeze’; this observation is quickly followed by another: ‘ugh, that means that when you swallow someone’s cum it’s like eating their snot’. Later, while waiting in the police interrogation room, Aimee tells Maeve she hopes she does get her jeans back because they are the ‘perfect bootleg’ and ‘you don’t find that very often’, right before she farts (‘I’m sorry, I’m really nervous’). There is something liberating about these frank and funny moments, which take place in the context of a storyline that insists upon the need to take sexual assault seriously. There is also something very satisfying about Maeve’s calm, assured, and unwavering insistence to police officers that her friend Aimee was sexually assaulted on the bus and that what she was wearing, and whether or not she smiled, is of no consequence. The show supports this feminist knowledge and worldview, and demands that the rest of us do too.

What makes Sex Education such a culturally resistant, politically productive series, is that it refuses to tell stories that dwell on pain, darkness, and suffering. It exists in the space of what-should-be, where the possibilities for personal happiness, equality, and social justice are found in acts of connection, empathy, and solidarity. In short, Sex Education creates the world its young characters deserve. In this respect, it reminds me of Dan Levy’s Schitt’s Creek (2015-2020), another recent Netflix series that is determined to tell ‘queer stories that don’t end in tragedy’ (Velazquez 2019) and that is rooted in a utopic world where its characters can thrive accordingly.

It is also worth comparing Sex Education to 13 Reasons Why (2017-) – another popular Netflix teen series that attempts to ‘start a conversation’. Both series address a youth audience and attempt to tackle issues of consent, sexuality, and rape culture in the #metoo era. But the differences in how they do so are instructive. In the 13th and final episode of 13 Reasons Why, one of the young female characters, Jessica Davis (Alisha Boe), tells the court of her experience of sexual assault and how it has impacted upon her life. This testimony gives way to a montage, in which an array of female characters from the series, one after the other, speak directly to camera about their sexual assaults. Referencing the #metoo movement that first emerged online in 2017, the scene attempts to collectivize sexual assault and show how it effects girls and women of all ages, races, and classes. Though powerful, the montage and its evocation of shared female experience does not really match up with the rest of the series’ narrative content, which is somehow never really about female friendship at all. In its concern with covering a range of Serious Social Issues, 13 Reasons Why presents a turgid and bleak view of teenagers’ lives. There is an overwhelming, depressing sense of determinism, and of characters without agency, that pervades the series. Even though 13 Reasons Why includes overt images of political organizing, with, for example, a storyline in Season 3 about female students staging a protest against the patriarchal sports culture at Liberty High, it comes nowhere near the irreverent power of the female bonding to be found in Aimee and Maeve’s chats about the similarities between snot and cum, or in the detention conversation in which the group of girls deliberate over why some men are ‘so obsessed with getting their dicks out’.

In their important book, Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture, Kaitlynn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalyn Keller argue for the importance of exploring the productive, creative, and ‘innovative ways in which girls and women use participatory digital media as activist tools to dialogue, network, and organize resist and challenge contemporary sexism, misogyny and rape culture’ (2019, 2). Sex Education takes place against the backdrop of the networked media culture explored in Digital Feminist Activism, and examines issues that are intensely relevant for how young people navigate the now tightly bound relationship between online and offline spaces. As noted by Mendes, Ringrose, Kellner and other feminist scholars (Rentschler and Thrift 2015), humour is a useful political tool for shedding ‘light on the absurdity of victim-blaming narratives’ (Mendes et. al 2019, 17) and is often deployed in feminist hashtags as a ‘weapon of cultural critique’ (Rentschler and Thrift cited in Mendes et. al 2019, 17). Sex Education similarly uses humour in a way that ‘nurtures a politics of joy and resilience in the face of sexism, rape culture, and its apologists’ (Mendes et. al 2019, 17-18).

As the girls describe how sexual assault, or the threat of sexual assault, has curtailed their movement through the public spaces of the bus, the train station, the street, the swimming pool, and the trailer park, their pain and discomfort is presented through the lens of their wit and resilience. The show’s approach to exploring how female bodies are treated as ‘public property’ is exemplified in the cold open to Episode 7, which flashes back to a younger Maeve, in shorts, walking through the trailer park where she lives as a group of boys jeer and cat call. When an older woman tells young Maeve she should be ‘careful dressing like that’, Maeve retorts: ‘And you should be careful perpetuating old-fashioned patriarchal ideology’. As older Maeve tells her friends during the detention bonding session: ‘So I went home and cut them [the shorts] even shorter. Because fuck them’. Sex Education acknowledges the statistic that ‘two thirds of girls experience unwanted sexual attention or contact in public spaces before the age of 21’, but it never traps its female characters inside of that statistic: it allows them to own their own stories.

Back to the detention room. When Miss Sands tells the young women that they are free to go, (they were never responsible for the slut shaming in the first place – a lone white male student is to blame), she asks what they managed to come up with regarding what they had in common. ‘Other than non-consensual penises Miss, not much’, one of the girls matter-of-factly tells her as the group walk off together down the hallway. Visually, this is followed by an image of all six girls walking down the steps of the high school together, as Aimee states: ‘I don’t feel sad, I just feel angry’.

This anger is given expression through a later scene in which the young women smash up abandoned cars and other detritus in a junk yard as a form of group therapy. The other girls cheer as Aimee smashes a car window with a baseball bat and shouts: ‘I’m angry that a horrible man ruined my best jeans and nobody did anything and now, I can’t get on the fucking bus!’ In the episode’s final scene, the young women help Aimee find the strength to get back on the bus: the final shot is of the young women sat close together as they fill up the back seat.

The political purchase of such an image is not to be under-estimated. As feminist activists, scholars, and educators have long argued, to challenge sexual assault it is essential to learn about the dynamics of rape culture. What is also essential is that we learn about the creative and resilient practices of young women as they push back against a culture that does not want them to take up space. In giving us joyful images of female solidarity and inventive resilience in the midst of societal circumscription, Sex Education creates the space to take the cultural conversation about rape and resistance forward in a way that centres female agency.

Illustrations by Evie Evie Karkera, unless otherwise credited.

Our book ‘Sex Ed: An Inclusive Teenage Guide to Sex and Relationships’  is out now.

Works Cited

Frost, Caroline. 2020. ‘Sex Education creator Laurie Nunn on transforming the awkward teen experience into a TV masterpiece’. Royal Television Society, January, https://rts.org.uk/article/sex-education-creator-laurie-nunn-transforming-awkward-teenage-experience-tv-masterpiece

Horeck, Tanya. 2019. ‘Streaming Sexual Violence: Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why’. Participations. 16.2, https://www.participations.org/Volume%2016/Issue%202/9.pdf

Mendes, Kaitlynn, Jessica Ringrose and Jessalyn Keller. 2019. Digital Feminist Activism: Girls and Women Fight Back Against Rape Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ringwald, Molly, 2018. ‘What about “The Breakfast Club”? Revisiting the movies of my youth in the age of #MeToo’. The New Yorker, April 6, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/personal-history/what-about-the-breakfast-club-molly-ringwald-metoo-john-hughes-pretty-in-pink

Velazquez, Alex. 2019. ‘How “Schitt’s Creek Is Helping Usher in the Era of the Gay Rom-Com’. Shondaland, April 10, https://www.shondaland.com/watch/a27100922/schitts-creek-era-gay-romcom/