![]() ![]() Big Mouth keenly highlights how such hand-waving inoculates boys from admitting responsibility or accepting consequences, allowing them to respond as Andrew does: “I do feel out of control all the time, and I think I’m going to use that as an excuse for my actions.” Lizer indoctrinates the students into an all-too familiar narrative: boys are animals powerless to control their sexual urges, and it’s the responsibility of girls to protect themselves from the beastly behavior of boys. Lizer, the odious, patronizing dean of student life, calls a school assembly to discuss toxic masculinity. Jay’s father, a sleazy lawyer who specializes in discount divorces for reprehensible men, argues that the accident was the fault of the girls, who distracted Jay because they dress “like whores.” What follows are twenty-some exemplary minutes of television, which manage to yoke knotty ideas about toxic masculinity and slut-shaming together with the glorious phrase, “Eat your own ass!” ![]() Cut to the principal’s office, where Andrew and Jay’s parents have been summoned for a meeting. Shop class takes a gruesome turn when perpetually sex-crazed Jay, driven to manic distraction by his abstinence from masturbation, saws off Andrew’s fingertip while spaced out in a characteristically weird fantasy involving his female classmates animorphing into sexualized turkeys. And frankly, I’m ready to rejoin the middle school community and pretend that none of this ever happened.” Sounds familiar, right? Andrew’s side-stepping of consequences and refusal to soul-search come straight out of the non-apology playbook for disgraced but unrepentant men. These past two weeks have been a difficult but very necessary learning experience for me. After two weeks of well-deserved exclusion, Andrew makes a grandiose entrance to shop class with an announcement: “I have a brief statement. The season three premiere, “Girls Are Angry Too,” picks up two weeks after the season two finale, which saw a jealous Andrew, heartbroken over his break-up with Missy and enraged by what he perceives as her budding romance with wheelchair-bound Lars, drag Lars out of his wheelchair in a misguided attempt to prove that Lars can walk. Big Mouth is Proof Being a Teen in 2019 Would Suck. ![]() Yet in a crowded field of television shows wrestling with the #MeToo movement, Big Mouth doesn’t stop there-it also considers the male side of the equation, investigating how men can feel at a loss to understand the conflicting desires of women. In its home run of a third season, Big Mouth lasers in on the #MeToo movement, delivering stories at once thoughtful and uproarious about issues familiar to anyone who’s ever been a middle-school girl, including toxic masculinity, rape culture, and internalized misogyny. Yet there’s nothing preachy about Big Mouth-instead, it’s an after school special for the twenty-first century, sucking the moralizing out of the formula to instead combine insightful commentary about formative, zeitgeist-y challenges with side-splitting humor. In Netflix’s Big Mouth, after school specials have finally found a worthy successor. Groundbreaking as they were in tackling thorny subjects like eating disorders and substance abuse, they earned a reputation as preachy, prescriptive, and sometimes hokey. Remember after school specials? Informative and educational, they ruled the after school television block for a quarter of a century, aiding thousands of young people in fine-tuning their developing sense of morality. ![]()
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