The Birds, The Bees, and What's That Feeling Between My Knees?
Art by Gabriela Portugal
One night in eighth grade, I woke up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, pulled down my “days of the week” underwear, and saw the most horrid thing: I was bleeding. From there. Not wanting to wake my mom up, I thought back to the weirdly detailed images in the American Girl Care and Keeping of You book of the girl putting in a tampon. Too scary and too soon, I thought. So I took one of my sister’s pads, learned what wings were, and went back to bed pretty uncomfortable. Flash forward only five years later to me in my dorm room, watching a cartoon tampon sing to the Big Mouth character Jessi about periods and absolutely loving it.
It’s hard to believe that puberty is such a short time in our lives as a whole, but it’s a time when it feels like everything is changing and there’s nothing you can do about it. At the time, it’s all so serious. Having your first kiss, getting your braces adjusted on a monthly basis, your insides caving in on themselves only to completely rewire with different hormones...the usual. For a long time, it was so easy to look back on my own puberty and just cringe real hard. But when I saw the Netflix show Big Mouth, it became easier to just look back at it and laugh. And laugh really hard, too.
Big Mouth, along with Hulu’s Pen15, headline a whole new genre of TV: puberty-focused television. Big Mouth is an animated show created by comedian Nick Kroll and his childhood best friend Andrew Goldberg. It chronicles the sexual/hormonal awakenings of an ensemble of middle schoolers while also dealing with storylines about more emotional parts of puberty: depression, divorcing parents, and shitty friend drama. Pen15 was created by Maya Erskine, and she stars in the show with Anna Konkle. The catch? They’re their 30-year-old selves playing out their middle school experience in the year 2000, making for a more hilarious yet self-aware, without grossly sexualizing the depiction of actual children. Linda Shewokis ‘22 says, “For Pen15, I love that the creators are able to create comedy without sacrificing the heart. Middle school is an extremely sensitive time for young girls where a lot of things in life just plain suck. Sometimes it wasn’t even funny when Maya and Anna were dealing with a lot of real and serious topics and situations. It was a real look as what it is like to grow up and it hit home for me.” These shows have gained their popularity by using comedy, crassness, and the true sensitive spirit of the middle schooler to ultimately spread a message ending the stigma of “going through changes.”
While the shows depict and delve into the struggles of middle schoolers, that age group is not their intended audience. These shows provide the opportunity for our generation and older generations to look back at puberty and laugh instead of cringe, knowing everything (mostly) turned out okay. In addition to providing laughs, they very much provide a healthy and educational viewpoint on different aspects of sex, mental health, and growing up.
In middle and high school, I barely had any sex education. Luckily the Internet existed, but that was scary sometimes, and I felt like everything I was learning about sex was some half-true story from friends in the grades above me. Watching both these shows definitely helped me normalize things like female masturbation, and even the depression I went through in middle school that I had subconsciously invalidated because I knew I was young. Grace Gamester ‘23 says, “I’m a strong proponent of sex education and I think Big Mouth tries to do some sex education along with their comedy, which is pretty effective. Even though young kids shouldn’t be watching the show, teens certainly are, and those in places with poor sex education can learn a little bit from the shows.” Big Mouth even features an episode in season 2 about Planned Parenthood, providing real information about the services that they provide.
Maia Tivony ‘22 says, “I remember feeling so silly for having learned more about women’s reproductive rights and contraceptives through Big Mouth than I did in my high school health class, but honestly, I’m not ashamed. I remember the information because of the way it was presented!”
With the ongoing rise and triumph of streaming services over network TV, shows like Big Mouth and Pen15 have the right platform to be able to thrive. While both Hulu and Netflix started as a platform that you could just watch your old favorite shows on, they now have loads of original content coming from their own production companies, and both these shows are children of that. Ten years ago, shows like this wouldn’t have been able to exist considering the censorship and guidelines of network television. These shows are great because they exist in all their graphic glory, but they are only able to do that because of the streaming services they are on. Big Mouth, with its animation format, goes as far as to show the character’s genitals, singing tampons, and a multitude of naked bodies as part of an epic musical number about body positivity. I am very appreciative that these platforms have given the “okay” to creators to talk about these topics that are too taboo for network TV, and streaming services tend to reach a wider audience nowadays.
Puberty happened. It’s over. Even as we grow and learn through college and adult life, it’s important to remember that not everything that sucks is going to suck forever. But what shows like Big Mouth and Pen15 show us is that as much as it won’t suck forever, it can really really suck at the moment, and it’s okay to feel all those feelings in all their royal sucky glory.