A Sex Therapist Reveals How Well Sex Education Portrays Sex Therapy
By: Dr. Denise Renye
As a sex therapist, I don’t often see true-to-life representations of myself on TV or in movies. That is, until Sex Education came out on Netflix in 2019. If you’re unfamiliar with the show, it follows socially awkward high school student Otis Milburn whose mother, Jean, is a sex therapist. The premise is because of his upbringing, he is an expert on sex. Despite his own sexual problems – like the inability to masturbate – he starts an underground sex therapy clinic to support his classmates with their sexual problems.
We all know TV and movies don’t always get it right in terms of their portrayals so how does Sex Education stack up in regards to sex therapy? Is it more fiction than fact? Surprisingly, no. Is it unrealistic that Otis would know so much about sex therapy without going through proper training and certification? Absolutely. As a Bay Area sex therapist and sexologist, I had a rigorous training process – more than 300 hours of additional training and an additional extra hundreds of hours of supervision on top of my licensure. The things I learned cannot be gleaned by osmosis so in that way, Sex Education is a complete work of fiction.
Setting aside how Otis became so knowledgeable about sex, the topics the show covers, and how it supports characters in improving their sex lives, is spot on. In the first season, the show chips away at the shame and stigma around self-pleasure with a masturbation montage involving the character Aimee.
There’s no shame in masturbating, as I wrote about for Good Therapy. There’s nothing wrong with masturbating and instead, a lot that’s right. It can improve self-esteem, knowledge of your own body, result in more self-love, and doesn’t have any of the risks or added dynamics associated with partnered sex like STIs (if having hetero sex) or the emotional navigation of another person’s feelings. In my work as a sex therapist located near San Francisco, I frequently bring up self-pleasure in sessions. Exploring your body solo can be the key to your own relationship with pleasure. We also talk about the harmful messages people received about masturbating, which are typically numerous, depending on familial, religious, and cultural messaging
Sex Education also addresses erectile dysfunction (ED), which I prefer to call erectile variation, and rightly points out it can be a psychological issue. If a person with a penis is stressed, anxious, depressed, having relationship problems, concerned about performance, feeling guilty, or has low self-esteem, they may be unable to get or maintain an erection. The brain impacts the body and vice versa. You cannot separate the two no matter how much some try. And many try, very hard (excuse the choice of words). I work closely with medical doctors to whom I refer in order to rule out medical issues underpinning variations in people’s sexuality and experience.
In this way, Jean’s advice to the character Michael Groff is spot on when she tells him he may not be able to sustain an erection with new sexual partners because he still has feelings for his wife, whom he was separated from at the time. As a Bay Area sex therapist, I often work with my clients to explore the deeper issues in their sex lives because I understand it’s rarely a simple fix.
Similarly, I appreciated Sex Education’s breadth in covering sexual topics such as in the form of kinks and fetishes. As a refresher, a fetish is a behavior that someone cannot get sexually aroused without. On the show, Lily Iglehart has an alien fetish and it becomes a source of tension with her girlfriend, Ola, who asks if they can have sex sometimes without alien roleplay. For Ola, alien roleplaying is a kink because it’s outside the bounds of “traditional,” or “vanilla” sex. She’s turned on by it, but doesn’t need to roleplay in order to get off the way Lily does.
There’s nothing abnormal or dysfunctional about fetishes and kinks if there is consent among all participants. In fact, fetishes and kink can help people express themselves creatively, enable healing from trauma, and allow them to integrate parts of themselves they’ve kept at bay, which we saw on the show. What we didn’t see on the show was good modeling around boundaries. Jean and Otis often gave useful, true-to-life sex therapy advice but neither were great about communication and boundaries in their personal lives.
Jean shared way too much information with her son and pried into his sexual life, which is not something I would recommend. And in the last season of Sex Education, Jean ended up hosting a radio show in ways that directly created discomfort for Otis. All in all though, I enjoyed the show and found it to be a refreshing take on sexuality and all its myriad aspects. So yes, Sex Education showcases some accurate aspects of what it’s really like to be a sex therapist.
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