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Critic's Notebook: 'PEN15' and the Resurgence of the Horny Teen Nerd Girl

TV

8:15 AM PST 2/18/2019 by Robyn Bahr

A floral-clad hedgehog doll, held up by the fingers of a twelve-year-old girl, confronts her lover, a velvety koala bear in plaid. "I asked you to come meet me because I gotchu a milkshake and now it is WARM," Bethany indicts him in a deep Alabaman drawl. She throws the pink plastic beverage at him. "You suck that down now." They inch closer, coming face-to-face. "I can't do this anymore," Jonathan pleads. "I have a wife and kids at home!" The scene ends in a shooting fight between Jonathan and Frank, Bethany's hedgehog husband.

PEN15 preternaturally understands inelegant female pubescence. One minute you're playing sexually charged Calico Critters with your best friend, and the next, you're huffing computer cleaner and attempting your first hook-up with a boy. Sunrise, sunset.

Hulu's semi-autobiographical female friendship comedy, so far my favorite new show of 2019, hilariously exposes the psychological gore of middle school in all its sticky, liminal horrors. (I find myself alternating between cackling and screaming at the television each episode.) Set in the early 2000s, the series follows medium-level outcasts Maya (Maya Erskine) and Anna (Anna Konkle), a pair of beta seventh graders, as they awkwardly dabble in their intimate (and visceral) firsts: first orgasms, first boyfriends, first thongs. (The gimmick of adult women playing these girls eventually washes away, as each actress embodies her character with flawless petulance and vulnerability.)

Foul-mouthed Maya and Anna are part of a wave of horny dork girls returning to screens twenty years after Alyson Hannigan uttered, "One time! At band camp!" From Bob's Burgers' butts-loving break-out Tina Belcher (Dan Mintz) and Big Mouth's braces-clad baby kinkster Missy Foreman-Greenwald (Jenny Slate) to Sex Education's sci-fi obsessed voracious virgin Lily Iglehart (Tanya Reynolds) and Derry Girl's priest-lusting faux-prude Erin Quinn (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), these characters are lifting the veil on the inner lives of nerdy women: We were never the sexless killjoys pop culture imagined us to be. Even One Day at a Time's, scolding activist-brainiac teen Elena (Isabella Gomez) gets down with her cosplaying S.O. Syd (Sheridan Pierce) in the sitcom's most recent season. And this archetype will take a much darker turn next month when Hulu's The Act premieres, dramatizing the real-life tale of frail Gypsy Blanchard and the sadomasochistic Internet relationship that led to her mother's murder.

While watching the PEN15 girls play soap operatic miniatures, I began to feel slightly warm and itchy — I made my husband pause and rewind a couple times because I couldn't quite process what I was seeing. It truly felt like someone had peered into my past and started telling my secrets: The middle school weekends I spent constructing tangled melodramas for my dollhouse people to the point that I had to teach myself Excel to keep track of their sexual imbroglios. The time I bound my fully articulated Olympic Skater Barbie with hair bands, tied a ribbon over her mouth, and hung her from the rafters of my bunk beds as part of a larger kidnapping plot line. (Blame Lifetime.) I've always contended I played with dolls until I was too old, but my experience, as evidenced by PEN15, was not unique; toys are merely tools for children to explore new ideas — in these cases, a pubescent girl's fascination with sex and violence. (And if you still don't believe horny nerd girls are a thing, then you've never heard of Harry Potter erotica.)   

We never got our Revenge of the Nerds, our Porky's, our Weird Science — cultural juggernauts that revealed and humanized outrageous private proclivities.  (At best, we once got an SNL sketch.) The trope of the horndog nerd girl, of course, has existed for decades: Welcome to the Dollhouse's grasping Dawn Wiener (Heather Matarazzo); Election's jumped-up Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon); American Pie's squeaky Michelle Flaherty (Alyson Hannigan); Freaks and Geeks' experimental Millie Kentner (Sarah Hagan). These stories, while still charming and resonant today, were made by men and represent the male perspective. That's why, in Todd Solondz's film, a 13-year-old girl sees romance in the threat, "You better get ready, 'cause at three o' clock today, I'm gonna RAPE you!" And why a teenage victim like Flick remains a pop culture villain twenty years after the fact. (Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade, 2018's second-greatest horror film, is a compassionate and naturalistic portrait of an awkward and curious 13-year-old girl. But he interprets Kayla's sexuality solely through a utilitarian lens: She briefly considers giving a peer a blowjob as a means of getting attention, only.)

I've always theorized that Bob's Burgers' producers expected brash tomboy Louise Belcher (Kristen Schaal) to be the show's break-out character, and imagine they were probably pleasantly surprised when chubby, bespectacled Tina became the war cry for an entire generation of formerly boy-crazy weirdos. (Tina's "Erotic Friend Fiction" fixation is too, too real.) I had become so primed to Tina Fey-style dweeby prudishness that I expected Big Mouth's overalls-bedecked Missy to be another goodie two-shoes, a foil for Jessi's (Jessi Klein) sardonic rebel. But when the goofball turned out to be a stuffed-toy masturbator, a romance novel connoisseur and a mild power fiend (especially as evidenced in the wonderful Valentine's Day special Netflix released last week), I knew my people — the beautifully titillated misfit girls — were finally getting to share their stories. (After all, is a kinkster not just a nerd for sex?)

TV's newest entries into the pantheon of Horny Teen Girls reflect the recent rise of female auteurism on television, from Sex Education's Laurie Nunn to Derry Girl's Lisa McGee to the female-forward writing staffs on Bob's Burgers and Big Mouth. Even film has caught onto the trend — didn't Greta Gerwig become the Oscars' fifth woman nominated for Best Director by telling the tale of a sexually experimental theater nerd?  Later this year we'll see this type of character again when the Beanie Feldstein-starrer How to Build a Girl premieres. (Trust any story that originated from writer Caitlin Moran, the Queen of the Horny Nerd Girls.) These teen girls are no longer just comedy fodder, but mirrors/windows into real and relatable lived experiences, thanks to the female voices behind them. 

So here's to the teen girls who lustfully bite through their retainers and the 30-year-old women who still drool over Calico Critters at Target. We're finally seen.

'Drag Race' Winner Monét X Change On Being First-Ever Black 'All Stars' Winner: 'It's Beautiful To Me'

When Monét X Change entered the RuPaul’s Drag Race workroom for All Stars 4, she was confident she could win thanks to a pep talk from fellow NYC queen and season eight Drag Race winner Bob the Drag Queen.

“I wasn't intimidated by the competition because Bob really taught me a great deal about self-confidence,” X Change tells Billboard. “He taught me, ‘Girl, when you through that workroom, you won.’ That's the mentality that I had walking in.”

It turns out: he was right. Monét ending up winning All Stars 4, alongside Trinity the Tuck in the series’ first-ever double crowning. While the decision to have two winners has been met with controversy among fans, X Change is thrilled that her and Trinity both have the platform that comes with the title.

“Of course all the fans are up in arms, and they think the only way to have a resolution for the season is having one winner,” the star tells Billboard. “But I think that it is a great opportunity for both of us. It gives us both the resources to do what we want to do with the win, the title, and the crown -- whether that is just going to KFC and buying a house and having some kids if we want to.”

Billboard talked to Monét about what it means to be the first black All Stars winner, her new Beyoncé-inspired visual album and being invited onstage at Kacey Musgraves' L.A. concert to celebrate her victory: “It's beautiful to have straight allies who are loud and proud about supporting gay and queer people and really loving us for who we are.”

Billboard: You are one of the first two queens to be crowned winner of the same season. What does that mean to you?

Monét X Change: I think that it's great. At the end of the day, Trinity and I both got the same thing from this, from All Stars, and I think it just gives us both the resources to do whatever we want to do with the crown and the title and the resources that come with that. So, I think it's great. I mean, ego would have you be like, "No, I wanna be the only one. I want it to just be me." But, I'm choosing to look at it outside of ego, and just be grateful that I am having the chance of being the first chocolate All Stars winner.

What does that mean to you -- being the first black All Stars winner?

It's amazing and it's beautiful to me. I think that it just reflects more of what the drag community looks like. Drag is made up of people of so many different colors -- black, purple, yellow, green, pink, beige, fluorescent beige. Everyone is represented. Everyone's in drag. The fact that I'm the first chocolate All Star is beautiful to me and hopefully as we see more All Stars, we will start to represent more of what the drag community looks like at large.

What do you intend to do as the winner of All Stars?

My goal is to make drag like a regular thing for people in the straight world. Why aren't drag queens at the Grammys? We should be at these places and I want to look up in five years and it become a place that drag queens are on these red carpets with celebrities, cause we're doing the same hard and devoted work, and we should be treated as such. We have to be bold and be proud of what drag is cause honestly, I think the world needs more fucking drag. It truly does.

On the show, you spoke about young gay kids who might be sneaking around their house to tune into Drag Race to see themselves in you. Growing up, what kind of representation do you remember seeing?

Queer as Folk was the first time that I can remember looking at the TV and seeing gay men. I remember having to sneak around cause Queer as Folk would come on every Sunday night, I think at 10 o'clock, and my bedtime was 10 o'clock. I would have to be in my room, have the door halfway cracked so I could hear if anyone was coming, and have the TV volume on one, so that no one could hear fucking Brian Kinney moaning 'cause he's getting a blow job in the bathroom. So that was my experience of trying to figure out what this gay thing was.

Some kids are doing that with Drag Race and it sucks and it's really unfortunate, but it's kind of a rite of passage. We've all been there, every gay man has been there sneaking shit. It sucks right now, but you're gonna learn from it and then soon you're gonna be pumping down your block, or your neighborhood, or wherever you are, living your dreams. But sneak around if you have to for now.

Naomi Smalls took a lot of heat for sending Manila Luzon home, but you had chosen her for elimination as well. I know there was tension, as she had chosen to eliminate you at one point as well. What is your relationship like?

I've not spoken to Manila. I forgive, I don't forget. I am not mad at Manila at all. We are all aware that this is a TV show and it is what it is. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don't. Fans need to realize that no one is sitting at home mad, bitter, angry, or confused. No one. Well maybe Gia, but no one else. [Laughs]

You just released a visual EP, Unapologetically. How would you describe your sound?

I think that my sound is really representative of the lower-voiced singers out there. Like the real baritones, you know what I'm saying? I wanted to make an album that sounds like the other songs in my shuffle queue, which were the people like Beyoncé and people like H.E.R. Like SZA and Sylvester. I wanted to make music that makes me happy.

Kacey Musgraves brought you and Trinity on stage at her L.A. concert after you won. What was that like?

That was so cool. Kacey Musgraves. I didn't know how much of an LGBTQIA+LMNOP advocate she was, and she is so sweet. She is so kind. And, she welcomed us to be at her concert. It was like, so unexpected. It's beautiful to have straight allies who are loud and proud about supporting gay and queer people and really loving us for who we are. Especially drag queens. People love to shove drag queens in the corner, 'cause we might be a little weird and crazy, but Kacey Musgraves is like, "No, fuck that, come on my stage." And it was beautiful.

Maybe she’ll take you on tour with your new EP?

Oh, hello. Child, let me open up for Kacey Musgraves. It's a wrap. I would be up for that.

Ask Anna: 15 things I've learned as a relationship columnist

Ask Anna is a sex column. Because of the nature of the topic, some columns contain language some readers may find graphic.

In honor of Saint Valentine, I thought I would do things a little different this week. Instead of the usual Q&A format, I’ve put together a collection of 15 pieces of advice that I’ve gleaned from writing this relationship column for 10-plus years. Some of this may seem obvious. Some less so. Most speak to questions I get over and over again, in some form or another. All aim to help us grapple with the thrilling, confusing, essential, weird, and ordinary thing we call love. Without further ado ...

1. Give less advice. (Yes, I recognize the irony.) When someone tells you a problem, it’s very, very tempting to want to help them “solve” it. But most people are looking for your empathy, not your advice. We want compassion and to be heard and for someone to reach across that great void of loneliness that is the human condition and take their hand and say, “I’m so sorry that happened to you. I can see your heart is breaking.” There are times, of course, when someone will explicitly ask, “What would you do if you were me?” and in those cases, it’s fine to chime in. But in general, work on being a better listener, not a life-fixer.

2. Every day you have a new chance to try again.

3. Be your own hero. We all need friends and partners and champions who will show up for us when life becomes unbearable. But sometimes they can’t always be there. Only you can. The darkest, most hellish battles we face alone. Show up for yourself. No one is coming to rescue you. Be the hero you already are.

4. Be more conscious. Each day you make thousands of decisions. You’re tired, I know. It’s easy to just go along and accept things as they are, to live on auto-pilot, not questioning much. Accepting the status quo. Then years later you wake up and wonder what happened to your life and why you’re so unhappy. The anecdote to this is consciousness. Pay more attention to your choices. Even a tiny bit, each day. Ask yourself: Do I really want to do this activity? Does this work reflect the kind of person I want to be? Is this how I want to treat my spouse, my kids, my friend? What would I do differently if I thought a little more about my actions? Don’t be that person complaining that it’s dark all the time and doesn’t realize their eyes are closed.

5. Therapy will likely help. Look into it.

6. You are enough. You’re smart enough and capable enough and hot enough and worthy of the highest love. The stories we tell ourselves influence our decisions, thoughts, and behaviors. We ARE what we tell ourselves. Tell yourself something better.

7. No relationship is static. If you’re not tending to your relationships, they will wither and die. Love is a daily commitment.

8.You don’t have to unequivocally love your flaws, imperfections, or deficiencies. But you DO have to accept who you are and where you are in this moment. To not — or worse, to hate on yourself — is a form of self-annihilation that has far-reaching consequences. No one can change what they don’t accept, to paraphrase Nathaniel Branden (“The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem”). Hate is not a motivator; it’s sabotage.

9. “You haven’t failed until you’ve stopped trying.” — author unknown

10. Advice columnists don’t always take their own advice. We’re just as uncertain as anyone else. That said, it can be very instructive to ask yourself, about whatever you’re grappling with, “What advice would I give a friend who had this problem?” It’s sometimes easier to get unstuck when we step outside of ourselves.

11. Most of the things we think of as “sex problems” are actually communication problems. You don’t need to know 48 ways to give a blow job. You do need to know how to ask for what you want, how to listen, how to say no, and how to accept someone else’s no. These things take much more time, effort, and resources, and are far more worthwhile than mastering the Reverse Wheelbarrow position. (No disrespect to the Wheelbarrow.)

12. Try, try, try not to assume anything about anyone. Some of our greatest fights and miscommunications involve incorrectly guessing what the other person is feeling or thinking or why they are behaving the way they do. If you want to know something, ASK them outright.

13. You’re doing better than you think. Fixating on everything you do not have is like trying to eat a cloud. It will not sustain you. Spend five minutes each day thinking about the abundance in your life. Do you have hot food and hot water and shelter from the cold? Do you have time to do something you enjoy? Do you have love in your life? Can you hear music and see art and move your body? Can you recall something in your past that you’re proud of? Have you been through a terrible ordeal and survived? Be grateful. For all of it.

14. The bad news is that only you can cultivate your own happiness. The good news is that no one can take it away from you.

15. Do one nice thing for yourself and one nice thing for someone else each day. A compliment. A dance break. Reading a poem. Admiring a sunset. Watching a YouTube video in which a man makes a knife out of jello. Petting a dog. Holding the door for a stranger. Donating to an artist’s Patreon. Saying please and thank you. If nothing else goes right, you’ll still have those small things. You will always have those small things.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Be good to yourselves.

Anna Pulley is a RedEye contributor. Want to ask Anna an anonymous question about love, sex or dating? Send it below, or email redeyedating@gmail.com.

Check out more sex and dating advice from Anna here.