What Norwegian Television Got Right
I had three solid theories about sex in elementary school. Something was wrong with me because I got hard whenever Christina—straight-A Christina—walked past my desk. Sex meant putting your dick in the girl’s ass, because that’s where the hole was. Once you did that, you got AIDS, and you were ruined. That was the entire understanding.
Like everyone, I eventually figured some of that out. School biology showed us grainy 1980s films about body hair and pregnancy and voice changes—all clinical, all excruciating. BRAVO magazine had photos of girls who looked cool and brave showing their breasts and pubic hair, which was something. My friend Marc handed me a CD of Czech women in dirty saunas doing it, which was also something. But beyond the basic mechanics and all the confusing moaning, I didn’t understand what was actually happening or why anyone wanted it.
Norwegian television apparently decided to address this from the start. They made an eight-part series called Newton: Pubertet
—Newton: Puberty—with a moderator named Line Jansrud who explains to kids, in English subtitles, what the whole birds-and-bees thing is really about. Not clinical. Not crude. Just straight, without embarrassment.
Most people learn the way I did: pieces from unreliable sources, a lot of confusion, an underlying sense that nobody was going to just tell you what was happening in your own body. You picked it up from movies, from friends, from whatever magazine some older kid left in the garage. You carried around the wrong ideas for years before spending longer to correct them.
This show does something different. Not preachy, not here’s what you should do,
just here’s what’s happening, here’s why, here’s how it actually works.
For a kid, that might matter—the difference between a decade of half-truths and actually understanding yourself a little earlier.
I don’t know if it works. I’m not Norwegian, and my own childhood sex education is long over. But watching an adult explain puberty without performing shame—no giggling, no weirdness, no agenda—it made me think about all the stupid shit I believed because nobody just told me the truth. And how many kids are still in that same fog, learning from the wrong people, picking up pieces and pretending they understand.