Sex, Explained
“性”をダイジェスト
Storyline
The whole story, ending included.
Five short episodes on fantasies, attraction, birth control, fertility and childbirth; the primer to send someone before a harder conversation.
Sex, Explained is a five-part spin-off of Vox's Explained series, released on Netflix on 2 January 2020 and narrated by Janelle Monáe. Each episode, between 17 and 26 minutes long, starts from a plain question and works through it with animation, statistics and interviews with researchers, ordinary people and the occasional celebrity.
'Sexual Fantasies' finds that, however private they feel, most fantasies fall into three familiar groups: sex with more than one partner, novelty, and power or control. The comedian Margaret Cho explains why she practises BDSM, and the psychologist Lisa Diamond tells viewers that a fantasy which troubles them says little about who they are. 'Attraction' asks how people come to want whom they want, across straight, gay and gender-fluid lives, and leans towards environment, beginning in the womb, citing identical twins with different sexual orientations. 'Birth Control' tells the history of contraception, including dangerous side effects, experiments carried out without consent and forced or coerced sterilisation, and asks men whether they would take a pill or an injection themselves. 'Fertility' looks at infertility in men as well as women, falling sperm counts, the risks carried by older sperm, the first birth from IVF, and what infertility means for same-sex couples and single parents; the fertility doctor Sherman Silber describes freezing ovarian tissue. The series ends on 'Childbirth'. Around 800 women die in childbirth every day worldwide, and up to 30 percent describe their births as traumatic. The anthropologist Holly Dunsworth explains why human labour is harder than other primates', and the episode follows a cascade of medical interventions to rising caesarean rates, then to the shame some women feel for choosing an epidural or needing surgery.
Starring
Janelle MonáeNarrator
The singer and actress whose playful narration carries all five episodes, from fantasies to childbirth.
Lisa DiamondHerself
A psychologist who appears in several episodes and reassures viewers that unsettling fantasies say little about who they are.
Margaret ChoHerself
The comedian, who explains in the fantasies episode why she practises BDSM and finds it a healthy outlet.
Sherman SilberHimself
A fertility doctor who describes treatments such as freezing ovarian tissue and injecting a single sperm into an egg.
Holly DunsworthHerself
An anthropologist who explains in the final episode why human birth is harder than that of other primates.
Why it matters
Sex, Explained is built for adults who never got the full lesson; Salon's reviewer opened by noting that only 13 American states require sex education to be medically accurate. Its first two episodes do the reassuring work, telling viewers that their fantasies are common and that their attractions were shaped long before they chose anything. The last three turn to reproduction, and the tone darkens: contraception tested on people who never agreed to it, sterilisation forced on women, infertility research that has looked much harder at women than at men, and childbirth that many women remember as trauma. Some critics wondered why a series about sex spends most of its time on pregnancy and birth. One answer is that for women sex and its consequences have rarely been separable, and that many of the decisions made about those consequences were made without asking them.