“Normal People” and the Secret of Good Sex

My immediate thought after streaming the first two episodes of the Hulu series Normal People was, “God, I hope my high school students are watching this.” That may sound strange considering those episodes concern two high schoolers in the throes of a passionate after-school liaison, full of bare breasts, casually flung f-bombs, and frank talk of penetration. While I doubt any of this explicit content is much of a departure from my students’ regularly scheduled programming, Normal People has one ingredient that I worry is being wholly neglected in their media diet: intimacy.

Last year, Sam Levinson’s HBO series Euphoria offered us a kaleidoscopic vision of modern teenage sexuality, inundated with pornography and refracted into varying modes of performance, objectification, and humiliation. Violence against the body and against individual self-esteem seemed par for the course for any sexual encounter. More sympathetic depictions exist, as well, such as Netflix’s Big Mouth, which couches somewhat straightforward sex education lessons into an animated, comedic smorgasbord of adolescent grotesqueries. But Normal People has something else entirely. It’s actually sexy.

We feel the characters’ desires, but also their hesitations, their insecurities, and the rapturous delight when those self-inflicted impediments fall away. Sally Rooney, executive…