While we had to read these layers of depth into even the most beloved of teen movies, like Mean Girls or Heathers, Sex Education makes the inner lives of its Mean Girls explicit. All the markers of meanness are still there, but the program shows the humanity beneath the meanness and breaks down the performance of being a girl trying to get through adolescence, mean or not. What this reveals is the internal battle that happens within every Mean Girl. On the one hand, there’s all the privileges that youth and beauty affords them. On the other, there’s the pressure of both bending to a power
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