Forget the D*cks, ‘Euphoria’ Has a Bigger Issue with Underage Female Sexuality

A few days before Euphoria‘s premiere on HBO, it was reported that Episode 2 of the series, “Stuntin’ Like My Daddy,” featured a scene with almost 20 exposed penises. The story tore through the media because it was also reported that the sequence originally featured way more. (Apparently 80 schlongs failed to make the final cut.) In the interest of journalism, I took to my advance screener of the episode, and carefully counted each exposed dong. There were 17 in total.

While it’s still shocking to see male genitals on American television, the scene in question didn’t seem all that controversial to me. The penises show up in the context of a locker room scene. The show’s narrator Rue (Zendaya) is explaining how Nate (Jacob Elordi) hates seeing his football teammates exposing themselves. It’s a study in Nate’s own unease with male bodies. In fact, Nate is a kid who has been warped by his father’s own secret sexual desires. Discovering his father’s secret porn stash at a young age, he knows that his father is carrying on homosexual affairs where he is the dominant player. His desire for his father’s love and pride have also molded Nate into an angry, aggressive young man with violent fantasies and demanding standards.

The scandalous scene in question doesn’t sexualize the young men’s penises, but rather presents them as specters of masculinity haunting Nate. It’s about Nate’s psychology, and it’s about accurately depicting the non-sexual nudity of a locker room. They’re just bodies. Their meaning is what you ascribe to them.

With that in mind, I would argue that Euphoria‘s most scandalous nudity isn’t that locker room scene, but how it hyper-sexualizes the bodies of its underage female characters.

I want to pause and say that the actresses in Euphoria are all of age. Sydney Sweeney (Cassie) is 21, Barbie Ferreira (Kat) is 22, and Alexa Demie (Maddy) is 24. Hunter Schafer, who plays Jules, is the youngest of these actresses and she is 20 years old. So the actors themselves are adults capable of deciding for themselves what they do and don’t want to do with their bodies onscreen. Great. More power to them.

However, the sleaze factor comes in when you realize that the characters all of these women are playing are underage in Euphoria. Meaning the narrative itself is choosing to look at these girls as sexual beings and objects of lust. In fact, the storytelling itself revolves around how compromising photos, pornographic videos, and their own sexual history is being used to define them.

For Cassie, her romance with McKay (Algee Smith) is already under pressure thanks to nude photos of her being circled around (we think without her knowledge). Kat panics when she realizes her first time having sex was being filmed without her consent and then shared online. After squashing the gossip, Kat is then transfixed by the positive response the video is getting on a porn site. Maddy uses public sex as a means to get back at Nate, and through Nate’s eyes, we see Maddy not as a three-dimensional person, but a perfect little plaything that needs to be possessed and protected. Jules’s story is maybe the most fascinating, as she’s the new girl in town and she’s pursuing secret hookups with older men. She’s also transgender, and the camera makes sure we see her in tight panties that cling to a bulge in episode one.

It is, in fact, how the camera looks at these characters that should be concerning. These young women have yet to be really explored beyond how sexually desirable their bodies are to the other characters on screen. The camera zooms in on their breasts and gyrating torsos. We’ve gotten to witness explicit footage of them having sex. This is what the camera is choosing to tell us in Euphoria: underage girls are sexual objects first and foremost.

The good news is the plot seems to be aware of this tragic trap since so many of these stories are about how young women can explore their sexuality within a culture designed to ensnare them with it. As narrator, Rue is able to speak out against the hypocrisies governing female sexuality and even condemns the boys for treating nudes as currency. However, it is still a little disconcerting that Euphoria is doubling down on this by objectifying these underage girls so frequently. It’s almost as though the show doesn’t quite know if it should be sympathizing with these young women or reveling in their desirability.

Euphoria‘s strengths remind me a lot of another teen drama high on shock factor: Skins. However, by episode 2 of Skins, we were already examining one teen girl’s relationship to her body that had nothing to do with sex. Cassie’s story is all about her battle with an eating disorder. As such, we see her body as something she is psychologically battling against, and not something to lust after. To be fair to Euphoria, we’re only two episodes into the season, and the story may evolve in a way that reframes some of the more confounding shots. It’s also perhaps worth noting that Augustine Frizzell directed the pilot, whereas the slightly more brazen second episode was directed by showrunner Sam Levinson (who wrote all the episodes).

Nudity is just nudity, and sexuality is a part of growing up. What’s worth discussing is Euphoria‘s own confusion on how to tell a story about nascent female sexuality without further objectifying these young female bodies.

Where to stream Euphoria