by Kevin Sparrow

The Midwest Teen Sex Show is a monthly web series that features a host and actors tackling subjects about sex ranging from masturbation to anatomy to STIs. As host, Nikol Hasler spends her time wrangling tough information, honestly answering teens’ questions about sex and helping make America’s parents uncomfortable one episode at a time. She chats with Cul de sac Magazine about how the show came to be, dangerous dildos and the queer side of sex education.

CM: How was the Midwest Teen Sex Show originally conceived?

NH: [Director] Guy Clark is someone I went to high school with, and we reconnected many years later. He had the idea for the show because all of the podcasts that we really enjoy watching are educational, but they also involve humor. He knew that there was nothing like this regarding sexual education, and he kind of knows my sense of humor already and thought it would work out. We got together, we ended up writing three episodes, put an ad on Craigslist for [actress] Britney [Barber], and that was that.

CM: Can you explain your role on the show and history in teaching teens about sexuality?

NH: My whole adult life has been about trying to take care of my kids and get by. I was working a lot of jobs, below minimum wage jobs, to try to put food on the table. I had my first son right after I graduated from high school, and then I had two other children. For me, this is something to do to get me out of the house. Then, I realized given my own history—my background was in the foster care system and in sexuality—how useful it can be to use my own experience and talk to teens. I ended up finding the way that I talk to people is a way that they really respond to because they don’t feel like I’m talking down to them, and it just makes them more comfortable.

CM: Because the Midwest Teen Sex Show has a very irreverent and sometimes racy sense of humor, how do you respond to criticism of the show?

NH: Oh, you know, I do a lot of cutting, and then I have those people killed.

[laughter]

It varies. Sometimes, I deal with it better than others, and that depends on what it is they’re attacking specifically. I take in the criticism, I listen to what they have to say, and if it’s something I feel we need to change on the show, we all talk about it. We decide what we can do to make it better. Even people who watch the show on a regular basis have criticisms for us. If we think that they’re valid, we take it and we learn from it. A lot of it is about being diplomatic, going directly to the source of the person who’s criticizing the show and saying, “Let’s talk about this.” And then, bombing them… delivering dead kittens to their doorstep.

[laughter]

CM: How are the writing duties of the show divvied up between you and the other writers?

NH: Usually the way it works is I write down an outline for the areas of the topic that I feel need to be addressed. That involves a lot of research, going to other websites, seeing what it is teenagers are talking about and have questions about, even asking people who I’m in regular contact with through Twitter and Facebook what they had questions about when they were teens. I write that out; I write a loose script out for myself. The sketches are a combination of everyone involved with the project. Britney is really excellent at taking a character and improvising. As far as the editing goes, that is completely Guy Clark.

CM: Can you tell us a little about the decision to have the live show? How does that impact the show’s mission?

NH: We heard from so many people saying we only have this one episode coming out a month. We started noticing for people coming back to the website, the numbers started declining because why would they come if there’s not going to be new content? When we were deciding the different functions we want for our site, we thought it would be really cool to further become a part of the community we are creating the show for. If you can start pumping up it’s live and everybody is able to get together and start talking to each other, then it creates more of a family feeling. It makes them feel like they’re more a part of what’s going on. The live shows have been hard, I’m not going to lie. Every time there’s a live show, my stomach just cramps up, and I’m worried all day about what I’m going to say and how I’m going to look. It’s really hard to do a live show.

CM: Speaking of keeping people feeling a part of the show, in the Halloween episode on HPV, I noticed Britney is wearing the exact same pair of green argyle socks I have. I kept looking at these socks the whole time.

NH: She stole those from you. I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but she totally took your socks.

[laughter]

CM: How do you make costuming and other technical decisions?

NH: We do all of our shows on no production budget whatsoever. Once we determine what the sketches and what the characters are going to be, it’s all a matter of calling each other and saying, “Do you happen to have this outfit?” We have a big bag of costumes and wigs that we rifle through and decide what will look best. Everything is up to location. Sometimes we don’t even know the location we’ll shoot at until the day of because we’re relying on other people to donate their space. We had to borrow someone’s car for the HPV episode. And then we had the dream sequence things on that show where I show up holding ridiculous items; those are things that I just had laying around the house

CM: Kind of like Dogma 95 style.

NH: Yeah. “What do we have? Do we have a tomato? Can we work with a tomato?”

Every once in a while we have to run out and shop. In that same episode you see Larrisa get stabbed in the eye with a vibrator. We went out to the store to find the appropriate eye-stabbing vibrator.

CM: It’s got to have the right heft to it.

NH: Yeah, it really does. This is serious business.

CM: More mainstream sex education shies away from the topic of homosexuality, but I’ve noticed your show is always very conscious of explaining sex to heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual teens. How has that developed, and is there an emphasis in each episode to maintain this balance?

NH: It’s interesting when this question comes up because we don’t notice it as much as other people do. It’s just so much a part of the way we think and process things. We don’t have a big sit-down discussion and say have we fairly represented everyone in this. It’s just an understanding that within the realm of sexuality there are so many different people. It’s such a non-issue. It comes naturally to us.

CM: Will there be any episodes featuring gender expression as a topic?

NH: I just had a three-hour conversation with a friend of mine about gender expression because I’ve noticed such a wonderful trend in the younger people who contact me of leaning toward androgyny, and it’s okay to make [their] own decision. Adults tend to say if it’s gender expression in one way or another, it makes you gay or straight. I love the way today’s teens are taking hold of that and saying, “I get to choose the things that I enjoy.” It redefines masculine. It redefines feminine. It just blurs the lines. It’s really fun to watch that going on; and so, of course I would love to do a show about this, but I would also love if we could do an entire documentary on that.

I wanted to touch on the reason [gender identity] came to the forefront of my mind. Yes, I’ve been hearing from all of these teens who are talking about it, but it also became a big part of my life. [With] my son, who is about to be 11 and is very effeminate, we’d have these sit-down talks where I’d say, “Are you gay?” because of this misconception I had that all these things that he enjoyed doing—the lavender baths, taking the San Pellegrino to school in his lunch bag, and the list goes on and on—I thought, “He seems like he’s gay to me.” He said to me, “I don’t know if I’m gay yet. I don’t know if I like guys, and I don’t if I like girls. It just seems I enjoy doing all these different things.” He’s very comfortable with it. It made me think about my own misconceptions surrounding gender identity.

CM: What are some other upcoming topics?

NH: We just did an episode on condoms that should be out next. We’re going to be doing prom in April. We also want to do a sex workers episode. We still need to do Homosexuality, Part 2. And we want to do an entire show on rape. Those are just some of the ideas that are kicking around. We have such a huge list of show suggestions from people. Everything from the basic stuff like kissing all the way to fisting.

I was speaking to a group of college students the other day. They ended up showing the Fetishes episode. All of these questions came after that, with all these college students saying, “Explain this part of fetish to me.” This one girl ended up asking me, “Do teenagers really have questions about this? Because I don’t remember being interested in fetishes when I was a teenager.” I asked her if she’s interested in them now. She said no. Well, maybe you’re just not interested in fetishes, but we have plenty of teenagers writing in and saying, “Am I completely weird for liking this one thing?”

CM: Can you tell us a little about the new program, Real American Family?

NH: It’s a separate project to the Midwest Teen Sex Show. We have a few other separate projects. We did one called “Don’t Be an Idiot Online” for ECrush, and that’s just teaching kids how to deal with online safety. But Real American Family is something I’m really excited about because there’s a non-profit, One Economy, and they started this Public Internet Channel. Their goal is to take technology and introduce it into low-income neighborhoods, rewire all the tenements so that everybody has access to the internet, and then, creating content that will help teach them to use technology to better their lives. It sounds like this magical, beautiful, utopian idea. We were thrilled when they came to us and said, “You make people laugh, but you still get information out there. Could you do a show for us?” And that’s what we’ve been doing. We did one on single parenting. We shot the second one on healthy eating. We have another one on trying to find a job and losing your job in a rough economy.