The New York Times has an article up comparing the way sex is treated in two of the season’s biggest hits, Spring Awakening and Company. What a good idea, I thought. Not quite…

The article an awful conflation of being narrow-mindedly liberal (in the reading of Spring Awakening as outdated because there are hip parents in NY) and mind-numbingly conservative (in seeing Company as an indictment of promiscuity). Spring Awakening was startlingly relevant to me, in light of abstinence vows and lack of sexual education in schools, and I always read Company as being more about marriage as an institution not working, and a desire to get beyond that to something less formal and more integrated into the way people work. It’s bound up with the end of Side Show in my head, where the two sisters symbolically marry each other. (Which, I suppose, is metaphorically opposed to Company, since Violet and Daisy are symbolically two parts of the same person. But it works on a literal level, and still reads as a rejection of marriage in favor of something deeper.)

I saw Spring Awakening with my mother, just as the NYT described, and her reaction was “haven’t we seen this story before?” Well, yes, this specific instance is over a hundred years old, but the fact that it keeps popping up and drawing audiences suggests that it’s still relevant. The fact that we’re still learning the lessons of Spring Awakening a century later is disturbing, don’t you think? The 60’s were supposed to have fixed that, but we’ve clearly swung back the other way.

I wonder what this writer will think of His Dark Materials, movies which I think will ride the same sexual liberation train that Spring Awakening is part of. I’d like to think that, despite the NYT’s naivete, we’re moving toward some enlightened thinking on sex and relationships in this country (or at least the city where Spring Awakening seems like old hat), but I won’t hold my breath. After all, it’s been at least a century coming.