Back in 2023, I was part of the music team for a production of the musical Spring Awakening. I was the assistant music director and the live percussionist, set up with a cajon and a bunch of foley instruments. The fun fact about this is that I don’t really consider myself a percussionist but it wasn’t the first time I’ve been a combo percussionist-foley artist for a show. Because we had me on stage doing sound effects, we didn’t use recordings for the gun shots or the whips or the hits. I smacked a thunder sheet of whacked metal on wood. In a way, I became the specter of violence and death sitting around the edge of this conservative community, raining down punishment on anyone who dared to step out of line. It was a lot of fun and I enjoyed the acting challenge of it.
Spring Awakening is a pop-rock musical by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater based on the play of the same name by long-dead German playwright Frank Wedekind. When I first started getting into musicals, it sprinted up the list of my favorites. Like an indecisive vers twink, its position is never consistent on my list. It stays up there, though.
Another thing that used to be up there before the era of people freaking out about fertility rates was teenage pregnancy. As we moved into the modern world where pedophilia has correctly been labeled a, let me check my notes, bad thing, we got together as a society and said, “Hey, maybe we should get these teen pregnancy rates down.” And then, well, we did.
Unfortunately, some people are fighting to make sure children continue to go through the heavy medical risks of pregnancy. One thing you’re taught to do when proposing productions in the theatre world is answer the question: why this show now? Spring Awakening shows us the cruelty of forced ignorance. So let’s talk about it.
First Song - Comprehensive Sex Education
Spring Awakening opens the song Mama Who Bore Me, sung by Wendla, a role originated on Broadway by Lea Michelle. Lea Michelle’s inability to read could potentially hold her back from knowing some things. Her character Wendla, though, is held back by her religious, prudish conservative of a mother. Her sister is about to have another baby, yet when she asks her mother about where babies come from, her mom doesn’t want to answer. When she does, she doesn’t go into the facts or details. To paraphrase her, “When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much…” They get married and then bang, kid. She doesn’t talk about the banging though.
In the world of the show, Wendla is a young teenage girl living in a patriarchal, oppressive society. In a typical production, though, she’ll be played by a young adult, likely someone in their latter teens to early or mid twenties. It’s almost guaranteed if you see Spring Awakening that none of the child characters will appear to be the 14-year-olds Wedekind originally wrote them to be. If you know anything about theatre, your instinct might be to shove that fact away. We’re trained to suspend our disbelief and accept the world of the play. Right? I’d reckon most people are familiar with that concept. But I would like to ask you not to do that sometimes and see what happens to a show. You may start noticing some different, interesting flavor profiles.
When it comes to Spring Awakening, the book, the libretto, spoken dialogue, is rather close to the Wedekind version. I actually read a translation of his play a few years before I read the entirety of the musical. The songs, though, are very modern. The language is rather contemporary, the sounds are all of the mid-2000s. It’s one of those shows where the songs take place in a sort separate space from the rest of the scene. We move in time with the characters, and we’re asked to accept that this is all one world. This has a fun affect, though, of playing around with the v-effect, the strangemaking of Brecht. When we watch or listen to the contemporary teenage angst of the musical numbers, we’re asked to relate them to contemporary teenagers and not simply those of 19th century Germany. By throwing us back and forth, we’re almost forced to ask ourselves about the sexual repression of our current society and how that harms our youth. I don’t like Brecht’s plays, but I find the theatrical ideas popularly attributed to him to be fascinating. A lot of my media analysis is done through a sort of lens of strangemaking and how its use might change how we can read a piece.
So through bouncing back and forth through time, we are in a way distanced from the events. From the time period. From the world. It makes you wonder if the musical adaptation is an exercise in historification, another Brechty distancing technique that he used in Mother Courage and is most famously seen in The Crucible.
When Wendla asks where babies come from, and she is denied a proper answer, on one hand, we see a child being kept in the dark in regards to their education. On another level, if you disengage with a pure suspension of disbelief, you’re likely witnessing a grown woman being lied to and kept ignorant of her body, of pregnancy, of men, and much more. Suddenly we have to ask: how does enforced ignorance affect and harm adults well after they’re no longer children?
The funniest one out of the way first: have you seen that EMT over on TikTok, the handsome stern daddy Badge502 who stitches all these videos saying, “No. Do not shove that inside you. Is there a flared base? Is it a sterile material? Will it break? Will it cause tearage?” The lack of education has sent thousands of people to funny but embarrassing, painful, and costly emergency room visits where, yes, sometimes people go septic and actually die.
Oddly enough, one place you can see those harms is in the content put out by Girl, Defined. You might be thinking, “Ew, why would you subject us to thinking about them,” and fair enough. Based on the reporting I’ve seen on them from Rachel Oats, who’s been specifically keeping up with Bethany Beal’s journey over the years, the two sisters have slowly been coming to grips with the damage purity culture has done to them and continues to do to others. Obviously, as homophobic, transphobic, sex-scared conservative Christians, they haven’t really unpacked all of it. But Bethany, at least, has talked about how the shame pushed by purity culture did effect her marriage. The stigma and lack of education around intercourse can make it difficult for couples to talk about intercourse, to tell each other what they do and don’t like. It’s clear that the lack of sex education leads to, in part, a lack of female pleasure.
It can also lead to the Girl Defined content I’ve read: they think porn addiction is real. It isn’t. Behavioral addictions, by and large, don’t exist. At the very least, any future diagnosis of such things, like China’s idiotic idea of video game addiction, should be subcategories of impulse control disorders. You can make a metaphorical association with substance abuse, but without the substance or the ability for withdrawals, they aren’t addictions. Sorry. Beyond that, part of the problem with so-called behavioral addictions is that people like the sisters at Girl Defined do not talk about them as addictions. According to them, any consumption of erotic content, even irregular, qualifies as addiction. In my video on Genshin Impact, I went over how a Chinese newspaper framed a child being upset over his father destroying all of his games was obviously a sign of addiction. This gives away the game: they don’t actually believe these “behavioral addictions” actually qualify as addictions. What they’re attempting to do is lay the groundwork for government control and restriction. Isn’t it fun how conservatives like to lie and pretend they’re for small government when they’re the party that wants the government in your bedroom and monitoring your internet usage?
What happens when we paint any and all consumption of erotic art as addiction? We do what purity culture does best: we mine wells of shame within people. Post nut clarity strikes you, and when all that societal shame strikes out, you might start thinking you’re diseased for consuming one of the oldest genres of art to ever exist. The erotic will always exist. Painting its consumption as addictive loss of control also manages to do something else: it equates the artists behind pornographic material with drug dealers. If you say adult film actors are the same as those behind the opioid epidemic and the spread of fenty, you build a permission structure for artists to be imprisoned and killed. Conservatives who push for absitinence only education are the same ones behind the infamous Project 2025, a policy document put together by the hate group the Heritage Foundation. It calls for the criminalization of erotica and the imprisonment of anyone who creates or distributes it.
An NPR article discussing the well-documented failures of the abstinence only education model discuss how the conservative group Concerned Women for America is one of the pushers of this incompetent attempt at anti-education. Any return viewers of my channel might remember CWA as one of the groups behind Project 2025. Project 2025 famously attempts to redefine pornography to include content clearly not meant for erotic consumption.
That brings us back to Spring Awakening. After Moritz finds himself haunted by wet dreams, he turns to his wiser, irreverent friend Melchior. Melchior writes up an essay complete with anatomical drawings to answer Mortiz’s questions. After Mortiz commits suicide, the school looks for someone to blame so no one looks too closely at their own cruelty. After discovering this essay, they claim that sexual education is what destroyed Moritz. It’s classified as morally destructive, unhealthy pornography.
In the show, sexuality becomes a scapegoat for the conservative adults trying to brush off the harms that they themselves commit. “If only you were ignorant and innocent,” they say, “you would have been safe.”
Despite the adults, education system, and purity culture they live, the characters in Spring Awakening are consumed in sex. There’s the Bitch of Living, Touch Me, sadomasochism, and pregnancy. The musical, and the original play for that matter, point out something that’s been obvious for well over a century: abstinence only education doesn’t work. It leads to ignorance and harm. You know what it doesn’t lead to? Increased levels of abstinence.
A report for the Harvard School of Public Health states, “there is substantial reliable evidence that abstinence-only programs fail to persuade young people to abstain from sex until marriage.” So if we aren’t decreasing the rates of sexual activity, what is the purpose of people pushing this enforced ignorance?
One goal is the subjugation of women. At the Harvard report points out, abstinence-only education often enforces sexist gender roles when it comes to sexuality, painting men as beasts at the mercy of their desires and women as the chaste, strong gatekeepers who obviously dislike sex and whose sexuality is abnormal and wrong. One way you see this in the musical is from Melchior’s dislike of imagining intercourse from the point of view of a woman. Even this relatively educated man who enjoys sex assumes that the woman’s role is obviously the penetrated role and that this equates to submission. Submission can be a horrifying thing.
The main goal, though, is that they want conservative Christian nationalism to control the rest of us. Or to reframe it, it’s a heavy embrace of ascetics. The idea is that if we learn about sex, we might think sex can be a pleasurable activity. If we realize intercourse can bring joy and happiness, we might embrace it for that purpose. That is a rejection of ascetics, the belief that self-denial is the only thing that’s holy, and we must reject earthly pleasures. Its the belief system of joyless, soulless idiots. Or, rather, it’s a system of belief pushed by people who don’t embrace it. Most asceticists embrace joy in their own life. But creating a miserable populace creates a population that’s easier to stamp down and control.
Second Song - Invisible Closets
When I first listened to the show in high school, I heard Touch Me and thought Melchior and Moritz were having an intimate moment together. As a young gay starved for gay media, I loved that. Now, that’s not what actually happens. Someone could probably do an interesting examination of Moritz’s sexuality and how that relates to gender and gender expression. But queer representation in the show comes through different characters: the gay Ernst and the bisexual Hanschen. Ernst is a sweet, religious boy who gets happily caught up in the more dominant, cynical, and sexual ways of Hanschen.
Hans is a bit of a weird character in that it’s possible to interpret as both a sensual, cool character and as a manipulative prick. Interestingly, he and Ernst have a reprise of Word of Your Body, the love song between Melchior and Wendla. Whereas M and W don’t work out well remotely, the gay relationship is implied to have a happy ending waiting for it despite the conservative society. They are actually in love, you could interpret it, or you could interpret it more sinister with Hans being a more refined version of Melchior’s abuses.
If we aren’t educating straight people about sex, we’re most definitely not talking about queerness. That’s actually another integral part of enforced ignorance. There is a goal of keeping people in the closet by walling off any knowledge of their sexuality or gender.
You see this push in conservative discourse over education. Florida has the most famous Don’t Say Gay education law in the United States, but it isn’t the only state. Project 2025 calls for the criminalization of not only trans identity but any material about or containing trans people. It also calls for a national version of Florida’s Don’t Say Gay bill. If you recall, one of the sponsors of the Florida law explicitly stated that his goal was to keep more gay kids in the closet.
Britain had their own experiment with Don’t Say Gay back under a bill called Section 28 which made it illegal to teach about LGBT people and their existence. Section 28 famously failed because the idea of social contagion is nonsense with no evidence supporting it. What it did do, though, was cause prolonged harm to the children who grew up under it. In her video Ignorance & Censorship, Abigail Thorn of PhilosophyTube details how Section 28 didn’t prevent her from being trans. What it did was prolong the amount of time it took struggling to discover and become comfortable with who she is. It forced her in the closet with a blindfold.
Spring Awakening takes place in a world dominated by sex negativity. The adults believe that through enforced ignorance, they can control the youth and keep the current power structures they’re invested in. The queer love story serves as another point where the musical points out that this doesn’t work. “We’re going to pretend gay people don’t exist” doesn’t stop gay people from existing. It doesn’t stop us from falling in love or having sex. What it does do is attempt to enforce homophobia and transphobia as the only form of acceptable society.
This also plays into sex education. Many of the groups that advocate for abstinence only education don’t believe in gay marriage. They don’t care that gay people in this country can get married or that eventually gay rights will be present across the globe. They will push for education that teaches sex can only be had for reproductive purposes between a cis man and a cis woman in a heterosexual marriage. They believe that the “promotion of homosexuality” is “promoting sexual risk.”
Some of this comes from fearmongering about the AIDs crisis. These homophobic assumptions end up causing harm to everyone, gay or straight. Think about the drug PrEP. Pre-exposure prophylaxis is a drug you take for HIV prevention. It’s an amazing invention powering human health. As the CDC reports, it’s highly effective at preventing transmission from both intercourse and needle sharing. Teaching about PrEP would greatly improve health conditions throughout the country. Why do we not teach about it? Because improving health is not as important to anti-sex people as desiring a world where disease is a punishment. They’re evil.
The desire is to punish we gays for being gay. Spring Awakening looks at this desire and points out, correctly, that we exist and will continue to exist with beautiful bounties of love.
Third Song - Participation Trophies
Let’s take a break from talking about sexual education and anti-LGBT censorship for a moment and change gears to education in general. One of the main plot points centers around how the school has arbitrarily decided they will have a smaller class size in the next semester. Some children will fail. They will be denied an education. They will have an ignorance forced upon them because they want to create a system of winners and losers.
It’s not as big a talking point now as it was when I was in high school, but people despise the idea of “participation trophies.” I’ll defend them until the cows come home because I love milking so I need a bunch of bull friends. In Spring Awakening, the hatred of participation trophies is an extreme version where the “prize” is, well, a position in society. In the original play version, Moritz isn’t the only character struggling. The question of which student will get that final position in the upcoming semester is a choice between Moritz and Ernst. One of them is going to fail. One of them is going to be cast out.
Let’s think about that along with the outcomes. The happiest ending in the show is for Hans and Ernst, despite the uncertainty of their future. It isn’t simply that gay is happy, which it is. They both get to keep their educations. Moritz and Melchior were both cast out.
How does that translate into contemporary moments with education? It’s tuition. Project 2025 and the GOP National Platform both call for the abolishment of the Department of Education. They would like the federal government to stop funding education entirely, but especially with any strings attached. You get the “school choice” nonsense where they push charter schools instead. Education suddenly becomes a game of “where can you afford to go?” This is also obviously the case with college. Your ability to pay or qualify for loans or aid will determine whether or not you can get an education. This is paired with the idea that education is a sort of “trophy” you have to earn in some way.
One way you can “earn” this “trophy” is by not being disabled. I talked about it in my video over Project 2025 and its Mandate for Leadership. There’s a push in certain parts of the American conservative movement to require disabled students to sign away their rights under IDEA in order to go to these charter schools that they’d like to replace all of public schooling. This will inevitably lead to students with disabilities being left behind and receiving little to no help. They will receive an enforced ignorance.
Let’s also talk about the push for “job training” to replace education. Some of the groups behind Project 2025 have pushed for education standards to be created by local businesses and for high school students to have the ability to opt out of a general education and instead go for some form of job training, including apprenticeships for hazardous jobs that will result in harm to our children. The idea here is that if you struggle academically, schools should give up on giving you an education and instead decide to make you into a proper laborer. This isn’t me saying that trade education is bad. It’s me saying that it is not a replacement for general education.
Spring Awakening shows that denying people an education, for whatever reason, leads to bad outcomes.
Fourth Song - The Dark I Know Well
A lack of sex ed leads to some terrible outcomes. Let’s talk consent.
Have you ever heard anti-sex ed people rail against sex ed for younger kids? They pretend as if talking to them about anything to deal with sexuality is pedophilia. But you know what is important for young kids to know about? Something that qualifies as sex education? No-no squares. And an important part of teaching about those squares is teaching the correct scientific terms for genitalia so that reports of abuse don’t get lost in the cutesy names kids are taught to call things. If a vagina is called a kitty, for instance, then a report of serious abuse, “He touched my kitty,” could very easily get lost as about being an actual cat. This is a legitimate issue in children’s healthcare and advocacy.
In Spring Awakening, in this repressive, sex-negative community of enforced ignorance, several of the characters are sexually abused. Fathers take advantage of their daughters. Ilse’s excommunicated life is one filled with abuse from men who attempt to take advantage of her. Wendla learns that one of her friends is being abused and goads Melchior into whipping her. In the original play and the original version of the musical, Melchior and Wendla do not have a consensual moment. Wendla, who doesn’t know what sex is, is raped by Melchior. The musical changed this, and I understand why to a certain degree, but I think the show loses something here in its message about education.
If you are not taught about sex and you are not taught about consent, what happens when you’re assaulted? Wendla’s mother confronts her and makes it clear that she views the encounter as Wendla’s fault. When you do finally learn what sex is, but that education mostly consists of the shame and blame game, you get victims taking on guilt for being assaulted.
One of the things it seems the Girl Defined sisters have had to conceptually confront in their slight deconstruction of purity culture is how it contributes to marital rape. Go watch Rachel Oats’s videos for the details there. If the only education you get about sex is that it’s something between a husband and wife when married, when you don’t talk about consent, there is an unspoken, perhaps unmeant, idea that marital rape doesn’t exist.
Abstinence only education doesn’t simply not work. It doesn’t only lead to increased health risks. It doesn’t only attempt to keep gay people in the closet. It doesn’t only promote sexist, gender essentialism. It leads to abuse.
Fifth Song - Abortion
We now live in a post-Dobbs world here in America where conservatives have succeeded in restricting abortion in ways that have killed people and will continue to kill people. Speaking of, in the show Spring Awakening, after her sexual encounter with Melchior, Wendla gets pregnant. Her embarrassed mother takes her to get a backalley abortion because back in ye ancient 1800s Germany, there were not safe and legal abortions.
This kills Wendla.
There is a well-documented history of relationships of power imbalance, whether romantic, familiar, or elsewise, where the more powerful party forces an abortion upon the party with less power. In the musical, this is a mother forcing it on her daughter. You might be more familiar in our modern age with conservative politicians sending their mistresses to get abortions because their “pro-life” values are just fictions they play to take advantage of the angry masses.
The point of this moment in Spring Awakening is not that abortion is inherently evil or dangerous. This plot point spells out the obvious: people will always seek out abortions whether for themselves or for others. The difference is whether they’re safe and legal or underground and inherently dangerous.
Project 2025 demands over and over the abortion never be called healthcare. The document makes no case for any exception. As I discussed in my video over the Mandate for Leadership, this will kill people. There are certainly situations where abortion is the only option to save a woman’s life. It is healthcare. But this isn’t only a Project 2025 thing. The Trump Administration signed onto the Geneva Consensus Declaration. To make short a long discussion I had over that in the same video I discussed P2025, that Declaration insists that abortion is not healthcare. It’s signed primarily by countries where women are discriminated against, rape is legal if you marry your victim, and you can kill your female relatives if you say it’s because they’re a whore. It’s an evil collection of countries who clearly don’t give a shit about the health of women.
Doctors have pointed out that exceptions for the life of the woman are also exceptionally vague. What is the percentage of risk where an abortion ceases to be illegal? What is the immediacy? If someone has cancer, they can’t get chemo while pregnant. If the cancer might kill them after a couple years if untreated, and if chemo might save their life in the long run, is that immediate enough and dangerous enough to allow that woman to get an abortion so she can start cancer treatments?
Conclusion
Spring Awakening has, unfortunately, become more relevant in the 2020s than it was in the late 2010s. If you’re looking for a timely, popular musical to produce, I’d keep this near the top of your list. Why this show, why now? Because anti-education, sex-negative conservatives are attempting to enforce ascetic censorship on the rest of us in an attempt for control that will inevitably result in increased negative health outcomes. It’s a show that says, “Enforced ignorance does not protect anyone. It only harms.”
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