Utopian Tropes and Troubled Teens

Introduction to Stone, R. & Shaw, D. (eds) (2024) Sex Education: Different Ways, New Rules. Bloomsbury. This introduction will describe the context of the show and track the storylines and main character arcs throughout the first four seasons. It will outline and examine the exceptional range of identities that are explored in the show as they are expressed in terms of sexuality and gender as well as the show’s rare sensitivity to matters of age, race, social exclusion and disparate, even antagonistic youth cultures. It will focus too on concerns about authenticity in the language, actions and interactions of the characters, while also considering the complex matrix of aesthetics and settings, which create a collage of modern-day Britain as a kind of mid-Atlantic post-Hughesian teen dream that is tangibly utopian but also uncannily ideal. Indeed, the borderline surrealism of the show is emphasised herein, with identification of those anachronisms such as dated household appliances and automobiles contrasting with the retro fashions and melange of musical styles on the soundtrack. The introduction will emphasise the peculiarity of Sex Education, which posits an American-style high school in rural South Wales, thus becomes its own metaphor for the self-determination of its teenage characters, whose friendships are at least equal to their sexual experiences in the formation of their adult selves. Whereas for some critics this otherworldliness of the series results in its dissolution and lack of portent, this introduction will contend that the fantastical nature of the series is essential to the effective realisation of a worldview that is hormonally febrile and precociously anxious about growing up.
The introduction will also describe the main characters, noting innovations and problems, while also examining the critical and popular response to the series. It will identify some of the problems with the series, which include the problems of an unmoored unreality that dogs its utopian construct and the foreshortening of some of the secondary characters, which includes a tendency to identify and define these by their categorisable sexualities, resulting in a tick-box collection of personages that robs depth too from antagonists such as Hope Haddon (Jemima Kirke) the headmistress in S3. The introduction celebrates the many aspects of Sex Education that are groundbreaking, which include sexuality in relation to complex disabled characters, the treatment of mental health problems in teenagers, the many dimensions of queerness, and the overall sex-positive treatment of masturbation and other proclivities as well as the respect afforded asexuality (which was, in comparison, always missing from Sense8). But it also brings to the fore some of the less commented and problematic aspects of the series, including the cruelty that is exercised by several characters, the trivialisation of highly emotive themes such as IVF and, to a surprisingly large extent, the accumulative undermining of sex counselling by professionals such as Jean and her husband Remi (James Purefoy) and by extension their son Otis in favour of simple (and arguably simplistic) expressions of friendship and peer solidarity. The introduction will conclude with a guide to the reading of the volume and highlight the key aspects of the chapters from each contributor.