CONTENT NOTE
Maki Morita’s ‘Girlhoods’ makes mention of sexual assault against minors, sexual harassment against minors, underage drinking, and sex.
The credits roll on the finale of Sex Education, and I cry. Not because it’s over, but because I’ve just seen versions and possible versions of a past self traversing through girlhood. I too was fumbling with the strange plastic of razors and tampons and trying them on like department store perfumes, but the word ‘consent’ didn’t get much airtime in our lunchtime conversations. I was Aimee, terrified of the bus after a man rubbed up on her—and yet I wasn’t Aimee, soon learning to combat those predatory acts with a voice of her own, her friends softly encouraging her to get back on that bus. As an adult, I was hooked by the coming-of-age story through a nostalgic fixation and left with a lingering grief—grief for how those scenes from girlhood felt then and now, and the subtext I can now draw from them.
With time, girlhood was rewritten in my memory as an innocent thing that gets stashed away in pockets. Like the balding man who steals a fifteen-year-old’s kiss, or the suburban dad who grabs at a teen babysitter, only a blink older than his own children. When you’re untarnished by the niggling marks that those violences can bear, you gleam bright—and some hunt for a cut of that glimmer. Mum knew this but she never warned me. When I informed her that a nice man from the vintage market was waiting outside to take me on a beach trip, she guarded our door frame with every muscle she owned, unflinching. I’d never seen her so stern, and it was never mentioned again. So, when my body was still learning how to perceive itself comfortably, I began to learn about the body as spectacle, and how to recognise forms of desire.
Yet I was all too familiar with desire—it fuelled my relentless daydreams as I disassociated from the monotony of school assembly or the greasy cash register of a beachside McDonalds, imagining how I would meet my future soulmate. We would eye each other on the bus, or maybe we would bump into each other in the school hallway. Funnily enough, those daydreams bore an uncanny resemblance to the stories I gathered from screens.
Girlhood is often characterised by an unbridled curiosity for romance, and like many I practised it through television. In the 2000s there were glossy and aspirational teen dramas like The OC and Gossip Girl, featuring hot rich teenagers with endlessly entertaining love lives, who somehow managed to have smooth, unawkward sex. They glamourised an American Dream dripping with designer jewels and mansions and shimmering excess, coloured in with an unabashed hedonism. After school, my BFF and I would religiously turn on The OC to follow the lives of our on-screen boyfriends. It worked because her pick was Ryan and mine was Seth, so we didn’t have to fight over anything. We sent our pubescent lust through that window into a faraway place called Orange County and learnt what it might mean to feel something for another person. Despite the distance, it was a world that existed parallel to our own, described in a language we could replicate with ease. We devoured those formulaic boy-meets-girl fables, and determined we would soon meet a boy of our own and fall in love and lose our virginities, then enter some magical portal into womanhood that would appear at our feet.
The sprinkling of queerness in these stories hinted at an alternative sequence of events. But it only seemed to exist as an afterthought, cropping up in a cameo or a side story that would disappear just as swiftly as it emerged. For a brief spell I held what was in hindsight an attraction to Alex Kelly—The OC’s only bisexual character—but this was hastily examined and brushed away, just like her presence on-screen. There was more fun in choosing one of the tried and tested romantic archetypes presented, and revelling in the longing with your peers.
It was an era where you could carve out your romantic destiny by answering a question as simple as Team Jacob or Team Edward? Your ‘type’ was predicated on the fictional boy you sided with, ready to be superimposed onto an actual boy you knew—for the adoration of fangirls can become their whole world, and Hollywood knows this well. Fangirls cut out pieces of these narratives and collage them with their own, dizzy with an all-consuming and collective devotion to their one radiant idol. There’s a camaraderie in the yearning, where the love interest doesn’t present a real opportunity as such, but a shared invitation to imagine what that yearning could become. For regardless of Hollywood’s intentions, once that narrative is lifted off screen it holds the unique potential to be fashioned into whatever it needs to be. Translated into whatever it needs to mean, for every individual fangirl. Evidently there was a Team Bella too, a constituent that thrived in the recesses of Tumblr but didn’t align with the official marketing campaign.
In adolescence your selfhood is amorphous, always forming and reforming, turning into and becoming. The teens on screen are not only who you aspire to love but who you aspire to be—you try characters on and see what sticks. It’s not difficult to find Marissa Coopers and Serena Van der Woodsens in Sydney’s Eastern Suburbs, and for a beat I tried being a troubled but ultimately kind blonde too, but that didn’t make sense for an Asian kid with academically-driven parents, so nobody recognised my efforts. When we finished The OC we flicked to another definitive teen drama of the noughties: Skins. My best friend discovered herself in Michelle, because she was also a pretty brunette and self-proclaimed expert in teen debauchery who would wake up one morning with a Tony by her side. Maybe I’ll be Cassie, I thought, with her brand of vintage coquette mirrored in the pages of frankie Magazine. I auditioned for Effy, smearing on eyeliner every day as my armour against high school. Our mission was to be raucous teenagers just like them, flinging our bodies to the sky without a second thought. We wanted to feel everything, because we thought we were yet to feel anything… or at least anything real.
How crushing it is, when moments resembling that supposed ‘realness’ feel like wriggling underwater rather than soaring elation. Like when a boy shoves your head down in a conveniently dark cinema in search of quick pleasure, or begs come on, come on please under the yellowing lamplights of your local playground. Or when a rite of passage starts with a drunken taxi ride and spirals into a long-forgotten ending because you were barely coherent enough to speak. But those scenes seemed like what normal teenagers should be doing, so I received the blessing of my peers and proceeded to tally up maturity points—always becoming, always growing into my imagined self. I insisted on chasing after those Prince Charming fantasies, rather than submitting to the freedom of queer possibility. Fault lines began to show, but I couldn’t find the right words to describe their shape or colour or feeling to anyone including myself.
A decade later those words were still falling into place, a process unexpectedly accelerated by yet another teen drama: Sex Education. Here, the characters were no longer targets of my blushing desire or prototypes to mirror. They were flashes of former selves and people I knew, in a stilted déjà vu delivered by a streaming service. Having graduated from the shaky arc of teendom I became an audience to it, watching its episodes unfold before my eyes in HD dramatisation. From the heat of a burning crush to the awkward tumble of first-time sexual encounters, and deeper still to the unwelcome advances and jagged words that would form long-lasting bruises, the latest show on everyone’s lips brought past sensations to the surface and rendered them in vivid detail.
Ironically, the most relatable character was the blonde bombshell in every series who forever escaped my reach. It was in Aimee Gibbs that I found rage and comfort, as her sexual agency was taken away and broken in a confused shatter. It was sobering to witness her wide-eyed ingenuousness rapidly deplete as she scrambled to regain a sense of normality. But it was liberating, too, to watch her pick up those pieces and reconfigure desire as she worked to take back her sexuality.
By the time Sex Education reached Season 4, it seemed to cover an ever-widening terrain of teen identities, while allowing little room for their complexities. I wished for more time to sit with each character and their myriad experiences. Nevertheless, seeing Aimee’s trajectory through came with its own catharsis. By portraying the reverberations that incident had over time, Sex Education universalised a particular feeling—an icy feeling that eats away inside you that you can’t seem to shake, which might even throw your televised fantasies of teen romance into question. As one of millions tuning in, I participated in documenting this undercurrent of girlhood in our popular narratives.
I grieved for a past self who didn’t witness this while moulding my own adolescence. Who would I have been, if these were the characters I formed myself and my desires through? I wondered. Those years are fleeting, and the shows that capture them come and go while archiving what it means to be a teenager in that moment, however idealised. But regardless of its zeitgeist and the generational hype it speaks to, perhaps the teen drama can allow anyone to come-of-age in some small way, again and again.