‘Sex Education’ on Netflix: What It’s Really Like Having A Sex Therapist For A Mum

Netflix’s new series ‘Sex Education’ follows a teenage boy (Asa Butterfield) and his sex therapist mother (Gillian Anderson), who together set up an ad-hoc sex therapy clinic at school for him to dish out advice to his peers. But is this really the type of relationship you have as the child of a sex therapist? 

Louis and his sister Alderney, 20, say they knew about their mum being a sex therapist from an early age, even if they didn’t fully understand what it meant. Despite one-off memories of awkward conversations the siblings agree that their upbringing wasn’t perhaps as unconventional as people might expect.

“It wasn’t like some mass orgy at home,” laughs Alderney. “People at school used to think all we must talk about over dinner was sex, sex, sex, and have condoms everywhere, but it really wasn’t like that.”

In fact there was only the one embarrassing condom incident that Alderney can recall: when her mum put a massive box of them in the bathroom cabinet, and kept on reminding her children to use them. Months later, the mother-of-three went back to check if they had been touched and found the box sealed.

“This freaked her out more because she thought people were being unsafe,” explains Louis. “But when I looked later someone had cut a hole in the bottom of the box and it was virtually empty.”

Both siblings deny the hole was their handiwork, but laugh at the memory of their mum trying to get involved in their sex lives and having it backfire so spectacularly on her.