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Midwest Teen Sex Show talks birds, bees and backdoors.
“Beatin’ It,” “Gym Class,” “The Green Tongue of HPV,” “The First Time”—these are just a few episode titles of Midwest Teen Sex Show, a low-tech Web series and blog that blends punchy sketch humor with straight facts about sex. In a recent episode illuminating the vagina, pubescent girls (played by twentysomething actors) get an earful from their wisecracking vajayjays, which toss out lines like, “Knowing your body doesn’t make you a slut. It makes you awesome. Now touch me!”
MTSS is the brainchild of 30-year-old Chicagoan Guy Clark, who laments the lack of user-friendly sex education in schools and elsewhere. “There’s a lot of information about sex online, but not in a good or entertaining way,” Clark says. “I like comedy and I like sex, so I decided to combine the two.”
Since MTSS launched in June 2007, its audience has grown to more than 250,000 viewers and extends well beyond the heartland. Clark tapped old friend and mother of three Nikol Hasler (“She was the girl in high school who constantly talked about sex”) to host the show and present the facts. Among the small, rotating cast, 25-year-old blond Britney Barber has played everything from a detective looking for the Big O to a Julia Child–esque cooking-show host constructing a “chocolate, peanut butter, wiener surprise” in an episode about anal sex.
“The show is first and foremost entertainment,” Clark says. “People have sex, but they don’t talk about it as much as they should. We get people laughing, thinking and wanting to learn more. It gets the discussion going, but it’s not meant to be a one-stop resource by any means.”
Despite its cheeky approach, the show has been embraced by the medical community. Clark has received mail from physicians who say they’re happy there’s a sex show reaching a younger population—usually a hard segment to connect with. Other prominent fans include sex educator and author Cory Silverberg, who supervised research for the ongoing documentary-style Canadian TV series SexTV, and prominent sex author Susie Bright, who blogged about the show early in its tenure. Even parents have been using the show, Clark says, “as a good doorway to start talking about sex with their kids. The humor defuses the awkwardness. People are afraid to talk about this stuff, and the show breaks the ice.”
Each MTSS episode, like a Sesame Street on hormones, focuses on simple, underlying themes: Use protection, don’t expect much the first time and the G-spot is an elusive creature. “We keep it basic because you can’t get into too much of the specifics in a three- to five-minute episode,” explains Clark, who’s quick to point out that MTSS provides sex information, not sex education. Clark says when he and the creators do have serious questions about the content of a script, they consult a medical professional before taping.
Despite his show’s growing audience after more than 20 episodes, Clark, who’s made MTSS his full-time job, is barely breaking even by selling ad space on the site. “We have the audience that [advertisers] want, but oftentimes, they see the title of the show and they don’t realize it’s not porn,” he explains. “We’re PG-13; there’s no sex, no nudity, no swearing in the show. We talk about things in a frank manner, but, honestly, there are worse things on CSI.”
