The latest TV and movies for you to stream in May 2021.
Name: Sexify
Where: Netflix
What: Series, season one, 8 episodes, 50mins
When: Now
Genre: Sitcom
Why you should watch: This femme-focused sitcom features unique sexual frankness, feminist motifs, and a healthy dose of education wrapped up in a fun, quirky storyline.
Polish sitcom Sexify, which just launched on Netflix, is an unfiltered look at sex, intimacy, and pleasure centered around a team of young women building an app to maximize the female orgasm.
It’s clear that Netflix is trying to break ground: Sexify’s trailer alone includes more on-screen vibrators than every episode of network television ever aired, combined. And while it has some obvious shortcomings (like many feminist-coded shows before it, its version of groundbreaking representation ostensibly only involves white women), it could potentially introduce a whole new generation of girls to sexual self-advocacy. It’s a potent reminder that sex on TV has come a long way since the early days of broadcast television.
In fact, television’s entire sexual revolution has been relatively recent. While the cause for publicly broadcast horniness advanced incrementally throughout the 20th century, one of the most notable jumps forward came in 1998, when HBO revolutionized the idea of sex on TV through the release of the explosive hit show Sex and the City.
HBO’s very existence had already provided an alternative to sex-negative network TV, but SATC’s remarkable success normalized frank discussions of sex and sexuality in North American culture in a way that set the stage for almost everything that came after it.
Before the groundbreaking, provocative dramedy, relationships on mainstream television had been puritanical, chaste; sex was implied at best and ignored at worst. Broadcast standards kept nudity to a minimum and any kind of sex—especially when it involved queer relationships and female pleasure— was highly controversial.
But today, the sex scenes and relationship foibles shown in Sex and the City seem practically parochial—when they’re not outright offensive and outdated. The advent of private streaming services has changed the game for sex on home screens, and now that television broadcast standards hold little to no leverage over what Netflix, Crave, Prime and the rest can display in their original content, we’re seeing sex discussed more frankly, honestly and explicitly than ever.
That doesn’t mean that sex isn’t still controversial. One of the most provocative and heavily criticized cultural TV moments in recent history was the release of Netflix’s Big Mouth (2017– ) a raunchy, purposefully gross, offensively in-your-face animated series about middle-schoolers going through puberty. The series’ penchant for showing animated teenage genitals has garnered a tsunami of criticism, and been called everything from perverted to pedophilic— and not entirely without cause.
I liked the show, and while I may be exposing both my age and my late sexual development here, it offered a type of no-holds-barred sexual education that genuinely helped me understand my teenage body in a way that school couldn’t.
Netflix’s Sex Education was a— slightly—less controversial addition to the onscreen sexual revolution of the late 2010s. It’s one of the best shows of the past 20 years, in part because it’s perhaps the best example of what onscreen sex can accomplish. The quality of the show was so high that it made heavily researched, widely inclusive sexual education a must-watch for every teenager with a Netflix account.
Sex Education covered topics like vaginismus, queer sex, erectile dysfunction, body-positive sex and more—topics that are too hot-button for most of the sex-ed curricula in North America. But unlike freshman-year classes, teenagers actually wanted to pay attention.
This is the value of good sex on TV—when done right, it has the ability to normalize and de-mystify sex in a way that’s accessible, grounded and cool. Classroom sex-ed is often too clinical to be applicable to the average teenager, and while porn is far more accessible, it’s often violent, misogynist and one-sided.
This new wave of realistic, unfiltered, onscreen sex draws on the allure of one and the efficacy of the other to hit the metaphorical G-spot of representation. And with shows like Sexify hitting the mainstream and centering women, masturbation and sexual exploration in their narratives, empowerment through sex education is more accessible than ever.
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