Taking the “Glee” Out of Sex

graphic by anastasia powell

“Glee” was really weird. Some claim that it was a high-minded satirical take on the idea of the musical dramedy, while others said it was unironically written in earnest. Either way, this show had unexpected long-term impacts on our generation, even beyond Santana making us all gay. Unsurprisingly for a show set in high school, sex was interwoven into many of the plots, from Quinn’s pregnancy to Finn imagining the time he ran over a mailman whenever he needed to keep himself from cumming. It was a super weird show. And from the very beginning of season one, there was truly bizarre rhetoric surrounding virginity. Being a member of the Celibacy Club was a status symbol, but actually being celibate was supremely uncool. This weirdness simmers until the first season’s fifteenth episode, “The Power of Madonna,” when the sexual tension explodes into four students and two teachers all attempting to either lose their virginity or take their partner’s in a montage set to “Like A Virgin” (like I said, weird). By the end of the episode, Santana has taken Finn’s virginity, but the other two couples have backed out at the last minute. 

A season later, it becomes a huge fucking deal that Finn lost his virginity to someone who wasn’t Rachel, his long-term partner since she thought they had been saving themselves for each other. Let’s unpack that. The idea of being angry with a partner for not being a virgin when you are together is maybe the most bizarre shit ever, and it implies that having sex has made them unclean or less attractive. We all get to decide what value we assign to our own virginities, but you do not get to be pissed about the way someone else chooses to handle theirs. In “Glee,” the main characters (including a teacher) were viciously obsessed with their virginities and the characters that weren’t were treated like sluts for comedic relief. Holly Holliday may be the only person at McKinley High School who has a healthy relationship with sex, and not even she could get the glee clubbers to stop preaching celibacy for five minutes so that she could teach them safe sex. Ryan Murphy’s supposed good intentions are clear; he wanted to show that it’s okay to not be ready for sex. But in the process, he made it very clear that anyone who was ready must be a rabies-infected whore with a freakish sex drive and low self-worth. 

In season three, there was another episode whose plot surrounded some of the main characters losing their virginities. The natural way to make this happen was to have McKinley’s high school musical be “West Side Story” and have the student director tell the students playing Tony and Maria that they had to have sex with their partners by opening night for the performance to be authentic (it must have been satire, right?). The episode’s conflict is the partners getting mad that their significant other only wanting to have sex with them so that they could have a truthful performance in their high school musical (reasonable!). The “awe” moment is when they decide to have sex, but not because of the musical, but because they love their partners. Once again, it’s shoved down the audience’s throat that it’s only normal and acceptable to have sex with someone if you love them and plan to spend the rest of your life with them. Exploration and pleasure have no home at William McKinley High School, just teen weddings and teachers twerking it out to “Blurred Lines.” Sex positivity is definitely what would’ve made the show fucked up, right? Thank god we stuck to storylines about puppet versions of the glee clubbers performing “What Does The Fox Say”!