This is a show that presents itself as sex-affirming in a playfully taboo-breaking way. In some ways it is affirming, in the sense that there is some frank discussion and presentation of sexual topics. But just in this first episode (I haven’t watched any more of the show, but I assume it’s all like this?) it contains possibly every kind of male-specific humiliation, abuse, and dehumanization. Here an incomplete list:

-Mga: Maeve, the heroine, knees a boy in the groin for saying “nice rack,” and we hear a story that she bit another boy’s scrotum…”and now it’s all wonky, like a discount avocado” (this is supposed to be funny)

-Otis, the main male character, is revolted by his own penis. His life in this episode is a constant stream of humiliations from his mother, Jean, a sex therapist–she pesters him to masturbate, she flirts with his friends, is very promiscuous in a way that intrudes on his life (literally…moments after we meet him, her hookup from the last night barges into his room, thinking it’s the bathroom).

-Adam, the other main male character has repeated bouts of impotence, for which is girlfriend mocks him; at one point she forces her hand in his pants and grabs his penis to prove that he doesn’t have an erection. At one point he has severe priapism; Maeve, the main female character, is there to mock him during this ordeal.

(something to notice about the priapism scene…at first he seems to be in severe pain, but then he starts delivering lines and the pain mysteriously disappears. This is another kind of invisibility I might talk about at some point…physical pain disappearing almost immediately, and subsequent lack of long-term damage…this is the norm in mga scenes).

At the same time there’s all kinds of thoughtful diversity presented. You see carefully orchestrated shots and sequences that present a variety of dress styles, hair styles, skin colors; you see a sequence of kids making out, and some of those are same sex couples. Otis’ best friend is a gay black boy (Otis is white), and so forth.

I imagine that this aspect is heartbreaking and alienating for mga victims. Why do the writers who so thoughtfully show consideration to all of these other groups allow themselves such a hateful and essentially rapey attitude towards boys? After all, the same intellectual and emotional skills that you use to try to learn what makes any group of people feel safe, human and validated is the set of skills you’d need to understand the harm of mga (and all of the other humiliation and harm this episode gives to its boys). But it’s worse than that…the accomodations and considerations that are offered to lgbtq people and people of color here are…nuanced, caring, subtle. The show isn’t saying “hey it’s not ok to lynch and rape people just because they belong to a particular group;” we’re way, way past that in terms of the amount of humanity and inclusion we’re shooting for. But for the boys, sexual assault and general dehumanization is more than ok, it’s arguably the main point of the show. How can the same team of writers be so sensitive and thoughtful in some ways and so callous in others?

Around four minutes into the episode Jean says something like it’s very normal for a younger man to be attracted to an older woman, and when you stigmatize that choice, you feed into an unhealthy narrative on masculinity. Interesting, thoughtful, subtle. Eight minutes later we hear that Maeve bit a boy’s scrotum, which we are supposed to laugh about. A little less than five minutes after that, Maeve knees a boy in the groin. Much of the time in between has been a nonstop low grade stream of subtly (and not so subtly) demeaning talk about male genitals. Somehow I don’t think this show is committed to healthy narratives on masculinity.

So why do these writers even reference the idea of “healthy narratives on masculinity?” I think the point is that the narrative that says Jean doesn’t get to sleep with a younger man is “unhealthy” FOR HER. For these writers maybe, the health of a boy has nothing to do with his own sense of humanity, integrity, and safety; it has to do with whether or not the non-boys around that boy are validated and free, and apparently that includes lots of dehumanizing and hurting boys. Jean’s talk is a deeply cynical kind of gaslighting.

Now to explain my title. I see all of this as a kind of meta-invisibility. The kind of invisibility I talked about in Orange Is the New Black and Skins is more literal, like working the camera angles so you don’t think about a male victim, changing the narrative in the story so you’re encouraged to quickly focus on other things (and this can be found here as well…for example the character who gets kneed in the groin never appears again), here I’m highlighting a conceptual invisibility. Both in the script (Jean’s talk about “damaging male stereotypes”) and in more subtle ways (careful camera shots showing well-composed diversity and so forth), we see an incredible sensitivity, thoughtfulness, and use of conceptual tools, that seem at these times to be about fostering a greater kind of humanity. We should care about ALL people, we should let all people be seen, we should embrace humanity with love and thought. Somehow, for the people who made this show (and, I imagine they assume, for it’s audience), males simply aren’t part of that picture.

Perhaps it’s more complicated than that…if the show defines “gay,” “of color” etc. as part of the humanity to be fostered, than a male who is gay or of color could be treated as inherently human or worthy of dignity. Mga is a problem for this grey area, because it is a kind of violation very specific to maleness. If we condemn mga, if we examine it as a kind of sexual assault roughly equivalent or sometimes equivalent to rape, we are affording a default assumption of humanity, worth AND VULNERABILITY to everyone with external genitalia, not just gay males, trans females, males of color. We’re acknowledging that you can dehumanize a straight white male, for example, in a way that is specific to his identity and biology, in a way that is wrong.

I think this is somewhat invisible to the people involved in this show. I don’t understand their ideology or their intellectual framework and tools well enough to know why. If they WERE aware of this, if they could see the contradictions involved in calling out negative male stereotypes and everything else in their show, I think we would hear arguments about that in one way or another. I also think they would work harder to avoid the crazy hypocrisies, like Maeve kneeing the boy in the groin for saying “nice rack” but later mocking Adam’s priapism.

There’s another crazy hypocrisy which turns out to be weirdly revealing. In a later episode, we hear Maeve’s version of the scrotum biting story; she says that boy made it up, and whines about how the rumor hurt her. During the course of episode one she gives us every reason to believe she is the sort of person who would hurt a boy this way on a whim…are we supposed to sympathize with her about the consequences of this highly plausible lie? Or are we even to believe her version? Being a horrible person and then whining about the consequences is how villains behave; heroes who are presented with their own hypocrisy make amends. But I think to some extent the writers just can’t hear themselves. The Maeve they’ve written is perfectly believable as a person who would sexually assault boys and then play victim when she’s called on it.

I find this terribly depressing, but I’m not sure I can explain exactly why. The people involved in this show have these intellectual tools, vocabulary, and inclination to change the way people behave for the better, SPECIFICALLY with an idea of greater kindness and so forth, ESPECIALLY in matters that dehumanize people…the series will probably never make anything close to a rape joke, for example. They are the exact people who should already be waging a war against mga, yet it seems that mga is part of the fabric of their identities, or at least of their narrative.

It’s hard to tell to what extent the writers, actors, producers and so forth are conscious of any of this. I can’t believe that it’s zero, but if they have a mentality where boys are the enemy, I can imagine that it’s very difficult for them to see and hear themselves. I tend to think that we believe good things are good for the people we like and care about, and that harm is bad for them. If our loved ones grow because of harm brought to them by bad people, the bad people are not to be credited for that growth; our loved ones perservered and thrived despite mistreatment. But for those we don’t like, harm does them good and teaches them lessons, and if they allow harm to hurt them, that just proves that they were the worthless people we already thought they were. At some point I’ll write an article about this…all of the stories where a male victim of mga “learns his lesson,” apologizes to the perpetrator etc. I’m describing that here because I can imagine this whole thing being somewhat invisible to the people involved in Sex Education if, deep down, they see boys (or straight boys or whatever) as an enemy.

In this article I focused on painting a picture of “meta-invisibility,” where the Sex Education scrutinizes and critiques all kinds of nuances of human categories and interactions, while at the same time relentlessly hurting boys. Mga is invisible to the entire ideology, not just to the particular camera angle. This idea seems complicated enough to deserve it’s own article. But this series, even this episode, has A LOT going on. An upcoming article will be about other aspects of the episode that feel calculated to set up hurting, hating, and ignoring boys.