![]() “Boob sweat,” they’d say, as it dripped into the trash can. I have uncomfortably sexual memories of the dancers at the end of dress rehearsals, pouring tablespoons of sweat out of their tan-colored bra cups. I remember gluing a mustache on my face and ripping it off, night after night, which wore my upper lip so thin that, to this day, I can barely muster more than a Gomez Adams. ![]() Whenever I think about my days as a theater kid, I often remember this eventful production of Crazy For You. The Moms Are the Heroes of Pen15 Season Two.But I suppose the end is only natural - we can’t be 13 forever. I’ll miss Maya and Anna in all their gross and gawky glory. These recently released seven episodes will be PEN15’s last. Here, grossness is as much a part of being 13 as bad haircuts, unrequited crushes, and trying on your friend’s mom’s bra. They aren’t overexplained or pointed out as inverting societal norms. But in PEN15, these uncomfortable parts of girlhood aren’t presented simply for shock value or with a wink to the camera. It’s a refreshingly honest deviation from the way menstruation is usually portrayed: either as some triumphant coming-of-age moment or, more often, omitted altogether. We see it in the way Maya handles getting her period for the first time - hiding it from Anna, shamefully trying to fashion a pad out of toilet paper at a sleepover. In PEN15, grossness is matter-of-fact, which in itself feels radical. Even as she changes and explores and contorts her form, Maya is always so completely herself, a rarity in general, let alone as a teenage girl. It’s a confidence that isn’t ever fully dampened, even in moments of shame or embarrassment after the fact. It’s the kind of confidence that allows her to do an impression of Ace Ventura on a whim, bending over and pulling her pants down to make her ass talk. She has a kind of confidence I absolutely didn’t have at that age, a kind I’m not sure I even have now. She often acts before she thinks, her logic warped by horniness, the desire to be seen, jealousy, or some combination of the three. This compulsion pairs naturally with Maya’s impulsiveness. It’s a familiar desire: wanting our bodies to be different from whatever their current state. The way she pulls and tugs at her body - contorting it to look hotter, uglier, younger, older, bigger, smaller - is such a physical representation of the way we all came to terms with our adolescent bodies. Watching Maya in particular is as cathartic as it is uncomfortable. In one episode, Anna and Maya share a thong that they swiped from a cool girl’s bag. There are tears and blood, sweat and snot. She and Anna make out with their bedposts. (I cannot confirm or deny finding a friend’s mom’s “massager” in middle school only to realize years later what it actually was.) In a bizarre proclamation of her affection, Maya stuffs some of her hair into her crush’s locker. At one point, Maya sniffs Anna’s mom’s vibrator, an object she assumes is simply for massages. She and Anna secretly try on Anna’s mom’s bras, a naively Oedipal activity I did on multiple occasions with my friends. When Maya screams that she hates her mom, she drool-spits on herself. Like sexuality, PEN15 doesn’t shy from small moments of discomfort, subjects that come with unavoidable grossness. Who among us doesn’t recall scanning the objects in our childhood bedroom in a horny fury, thinking, Yeah, that could work? It’s nostalgic Schadenfreude, all of it almost too relatable. (Is now a good time to mention that Maya’s dad is played by Richard Karn, who, like JTT, starred on Home Improvement?) What makes these scenes uncomfortable isn’t just Maya, dead-eyed, awkwardly humping a pillow it’s the painful familiarity of it all. The things that make her horny are strange and specific but make perfect sense to anyone who has ever been a 13-year-old girl: rolling sand dunes, a photo showing a close-up of a nipple, Jonathan Taylor Thomas. There’s an episode dedicated to Maya’s masturbation, an obsession spurred by making two My Little Pony figurines kiss. Nothing encapsulates this better than the way the show handled the characters’ exploration of sexuality. PEN15 was greater than the sum of its awkward, nostalgic, and oftentimes gross parts. It wasn’t just the stringy bangs and Mudd jeans and outfits perfectly replicated from a Delia’s catalogue. It wasn’t just the sound of the dial-up internet interrupting a call on a home phone. It wasn’t just the fact that two women in their 30s (Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle) were portraying two 13-year-olds (Maya and Anna) about to enter seventh grade.
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