When it comes to representation, Sex Education never really stops at one of anyone. There’s far more than one Black character. More than one transgender character. More than one physically disabled character. More than one mentally ill character. So it makes sense that the Netflix high-school comedy wasn’t satisfied to explore asexuality merely once or twice, in small moments. It revisits the orientation, which is defined by the absence of sexual attraction, in its fourth and final installment, with a prominent character whose arc lasts the entire season — and in the process complicates the question of what we want and expect when it comes to representation, in general, and asexuality specifically.
The season-four premiere introduces us to O (Thaddea Graham), a returning student at Cavendish College, where protagonist Otis (Asa Butterfield) and many of his classmates enroll after Moordale Secondary is sold to developers. Otis is shocked to learn there’s a rival peer sex therapist already on campus (with a professional and charming internet-influencer presence, no less). Naturally, he immediately tries to write off her, an Asian girl, as less qualified for the pseudo-job than he, a white boy, is, but Sex Education sticks with O through an arc that takes her from a standard-issue Otis nemesis to fully realized human being. There’s a wee hint early in the season that O is asexual, but it’s not until later on that we get confirmation, amid a heated debate between her and Otis ahead of the student vote for school counselor.
It’s not exactly O’s own choice to come out. She feels Otis forced her hand by harping on her ghosting of previous partners as a disqualifying factor for the job, leading her to explain that she backed away from intimacy with others as she was coming to terms with her identity. To the extent there even is a villain in this season of Sex Education, there’s a strong case to be made that it’s Otis himself, with his arrogant scheming and constant fight-picking. But O’s characterization, combined with her being an antagonist to Otis, can be read as a fulfillment of the trope that queer people and people of color are disproportionately the bad guys. More specifically, her battle with Otis positions her as cold and calculating, a common stereotype of ace or assumed-ace characters (think Dexter Morgan).
Asexual activist and model Yasmin Benoit, who was a script consultant on O’s story line, says that stereotype is something she tried hard to avoid. “There’s this idea that sexual attraction or romantic attraction or some combination is supposed to be the epitome of human connection, and if you don’t have that, there’s something unnatural about you,†she says. “And people incorrectly tie it in with your empathy and your ability to connect with people on different levels.â€
Ultimately, Benoit still likes the character she helped develop, but feels Sex Education fell into some of the traps she was intent on steering the writers around. “The heartless asexual villain was something I was literally in the writers’ room saying we’ve got to be careful because we don’t want this to happen,†she says.
Stereotypes like that can be hard to shake when there’s a dearth of ace characters onscreen to begin with. In the 2022–23 television season, GLAAD counted eight such characters across broadcast, cable, and streaming — an increase from just two the year before. Historically, most ace characters have been white, cisgender, and alloromantic (experiencing romantic attraction). The most prominent ones have been male too, like Heartstopper’s Isaac and BoJack Horseman’s Todd (for my money, one of the best examples of ace representation to date, though I know his childlike presentation was an issue for some). For its part, Sex Education previously centered a well-done one-off episode on Florence, a Moordale student who realizes she’s ace and, in a fleeting moment, revealed that Steve, a recurring character in the first three seasons, thinks he’s demisexual, an identity on the ace spectrum in which someone experiences sexual attraction only after forming a close emotional relationship.
O bucks at least a couple of the old ace character trends: We don’t know her romantic orientation, but we do know she’s the kind of ace girl of color who Benoit, a Black woman, says she has always yearned to see onscreen. O’s backstory, as she shares with Otis while they’re conveniently stuck in a school elevator alone together in the penultimate episode, entails feeling mocked and alienated for her race and her accent when she moved to the Moordale area as a primary-school kid. Her background doesn’t excuse her bad behavior in childhood, humiliating a young Ruby Matthews (Mimi Keene) for wetting the bed at summer camp. But her actions didn’t come from nowhere: She was a young ace kid forced to play the typically raunchy party game Never Have I Ever and struggling to come up with a response that would win her some friends, rather than isolate her further. Benoit says a moment involving more explicit targeting of O for her presumed sexuality was cut from the final story.
“It kind of looks like she just shouted at Ruby out of nowhere, like she just threw her friend under the bus and humiliated her in front of everyone for no reason, because they cut out the ace-phobic bullying,†Benoit says. “It was supposed to be a case of she’s being called things like ‘frigid,’ she’s scared, she’s panicking, and she just turns to her friend and goes, oh, well she wet the bed.â€
Eventually, after Ruby resurfaces the video of the taunting, O apologizes for her childhood transgressions to the student body over the radio and then to Ruby in person. Better late than never. Ruby forgives O and endorses her for school counselor. Bullying isn’t acceptable behavior, but a lot of kids grow out of it and work to become better people, so why couldn’t O? All signs suggest she’s a great therapist — at least as far as teenagers with no formal training go. She proves to be as insightful and empathetic as Otis, if not more so, in her interactions with classmates and her brief radio-show co-host gig with Otis’s mom, Jean (Gillian Anderson). Despite all that, O’s checkered past makes her a polarizing and messy character.
On the other hand: Why can’t ace characters be polarizing and messy? O is a refutation of the concept of an “unassailable ace,†coined by the blogger Sciatrix in 2010, referring to the false notion that someone is sufficiently asexual only if they are not disabled or autistic or elderly or transgender; they have no history of trauma; and nothing else to supposedly explain away why they don’t experience sexual attraction. O is not the picture of ace perfection and a model member of the community. So what? The whole point is that none of us are. While ace people shouldn’t have their representation be limited to serial killers and Sheldon Cooper and random House patients, neither should we want our representation limited to people who are 100 percent good and pure. How boring would that have been, had O’s character existed in a vacuum outside the gritty, petty drama that accompanies growing up? It’s what Sex Education has made its mark portraying in painfully funny detail. There’s certainly more the show could’ve done to slip in nods to O’s sexuality and also her humanity, but considering the jam-packed season, the broad strokes are covered.
Back in 2016, when BoJack’s Todd first discovered his aceness, I wrote that the show’s creator and writers seemed to know they needed to start from scratch with asexual representation. They forged ahead with a delightful, heartwarming seasons-long plot that validated ace viewers and educated non-ace ones. Seven years later, while there’s still plenty of room for storytelling growth, I think ace and non-ace viewers alike have earned the pleasure of being challenged by shows like Sex Education and three-dimensional characters like O. After all, what is a high-schooler if not imperfect?