I Like to Watch by Emily Nussbaum

Author:Emily Nussbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2019-06-24T16:00:00+00:00

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Despite that meta wisecrack, that sex scene is genuinely steamy, and not just because it’s set in a shower: It’s the consummation of an attraction that has lasted four seasons. Telenovelas have a long tradition as transmitters of social messages; in Mexico, the government used hit shows as vehicles to advocate for family planning. Our own government would surely deplore the messages Jane sends: Like the Netflix series One Day at a Time, it puts Latino immigrants, including undocumented workers, at the center of the story. It also goes deep on women’s health, with plots that include Jane’s struggle to breastfeed and a crisp, unapologetic story about abortion. Once in a while, there’s a corny note of edutainment—a bisexual-boyfriend plot had this vibe—but it’s a rarity.

Still, there’s a tricky tension in the show between its family-time warmth and its fascination with sex itself, a subject that it has examined seriously, and increasingly graphically, in a way that many theoretically adult shows do not. Jane is respectful to the devout Alba (wonderfully portrayed by Ivonne Coll), who crumpled a flower and told Jane that that was her virtue, if she gave it away. But it’s also an advocate for moving past shame. In that same perfect episode, the one in which Jane and Rafael finally get it on, there’s a story in which Alba confesses the real reason that she ended things with her boyfriend, once he proposed: She’s frightened of sex, having not had it for thirty years. “You get used to things—or not having things,” she tells her granddaughter, in a moving, simple sequence. Jane argues that her abuela isn’t, as she sees herself, “broken”—but her solution is not to tell Alba to jump in bed with a man but to take her shopping for a vibrator and some lubricant. In that montage of three sexual awakenings, the septuagenarian gets one of them. Refreshingly, the moment is not played for laughs: In Jane’s world, sex, like love, is a bright color that everyone deserves to see.

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