What Norwegian Television Taught Me That Czech Porn Never Could

Three things I knew about sex in elementary school. First: something was wrong with me, because I got a hard-on the moment the class overachiever Christina walked through the door. Second: actual sex meant inserting your penis into a girl’s ass, since that’s obviously where the hole is. Third: the second you did either of those things, you got AIDS. End of lesson.

This held until biology class dragged out an early-eighties educational film about armpit hair, pregnancy, and voice changes. Then BRAVO started running full-page photos of girls cool and brave enough to show pubic hair. Then my friend Marc slipped me a CD featuring Czech women fucking in grimy saunas. Jana and Luzie between them managed to convey the basic in-out of the thing, plus a catalog of confusing moaning—but beyond the mechanics, nothing.

Norwegian public television is trying to prevent exactly this kind of calcified ignorance. Their eight-part series Newton: Pubertet does something I genuinely didn’t believe broadcast television was capable of: talking to children about sex and bodies with complete directness and zero cringing. Host Line Jansrud explains, on camera and with English subtitles, what’s actually happening when your body starts doing things you didn’t ask it to—including, presumably, the whole Christina situation.

It sounds small. But the confusion that bad sex education produces doesn’t dissipate on its own—it calcifies. Wrong anatomy, shame grafted onto normal biology, years of quietly unlearning the ass-hole theory of reproduction somewhere around age fifteen. Get it right early, get it right plainly, and you spare a generation most of that.