Horrible Abstinence-Only Sex Ed Curriculum Inspired Hulu’s Comedy “Plan B”

The moment screenwriter Prathi Srinivasan had to take a purity pledge alongside the other girls in her high school sex education class is burned into her memory.

“All the girls got up to give a chastity pledge where we had to say something like ‘We swear to God that we will never let someone defile us,’” Srinivasan recalled of her experience as a teen at her Plano, Texas, public high school in 2007. “It was just disgusting.”

That restrictive and sexist environment, along with the fact that anti-choice legislation was forcing clinics and other reproductive care facilities across the state to close, meant that Srinivasan and her best friend and writing partner Joshua Levy saw from a very early age firsthand how reproductive rights in their community were under severe threat. The pair would be inspired by those experiences to go on to write the screenplay for the new Hulu feature film Plan B, which is about a teen girl who has to go on a sudden and unexpected road trip with a friend in order to access emergency contraception.

Srinivasan says the main inspiration for the film was the guilt and confusion she felt as a teen girl as a result of years of purity-based lesson plans. “That stuff was so baked into me that you had to almost learn to deprogram yourself from a lot of shame and self-hatred,” she said. “This sort of stuff is unfortunately what droves and droves of children are being taught. It's a very ugly thing.”

Levy also clearly remembers that day in sex education class and how confusing it was to see Srinivasan and their other female classmates have to recite this pledge. Levy and Srinivasan would later rail between themselves about the unfairness of Texas’ abstinence-focused curriculum. “Everything is based around not condoms, not birth control, not any of that,” said Levy. “Instead it’s all based around ‘Do not have sex.’” Texas state law as written mandates that schools present abstinence “as the preferred choice of behavior in relationship to all sexual activity for unmarried persons of school age.”

We had the chance to talk with both Srinivasan and Levy about their new film, how their childhoods in Texas have fueled their activism, and how they hope the next generation of teens will push for something better.

In addition to being about one girl’s quest to get emergency contraception, this film is also about the very deep friendship between two teens of color in a small town. How did your own relationship influence that?

Prathi Srinivasan: Plano is actually a pretty neutral place — it’s Plain with an O, so it’s a pretty neutral location. But Josh felt, ‘I don't feel represented,’ and I thought, ‘I don’t feel represented myself,’ and we just ended up finding each other. We were so close as teens that I insisted that Josh take me to prom, and he did! So we have always had that very real, very close friendship, from the get-go. Because of that we both essentially just wanted to reflect that degree of friendship with Sonny and Lupe.

Joshua Levy: I think we also both felt like outsiders to a certain degree, and with Prathi being an immigrant from India, and me being LGBT and a mixed-race Chinese American, when we found each other we essentially said, ‘We’re not going to let go.’ That’s how we became friends and then we became writing partners and then eventually moved out here to Los Angeles together and started our careers together.

Your experiences with sex education at your high school seemed really traumatizing and not particularly informative. How did you eventually get the information that you needed?

Srinivasan: I was lucky enough to have a friend that said, ‘This is wack’ [when I told her about our sex education classes]. That was validating in terms of the gross feelings that I had. But my resources were unfortunately extremely limited to a pamphlet that I found online. It was not great.

Levy: I moved to Plano from San Francisco, which is obviously a very liberal place. So in San Francisco they had taught us in sixth grade things like ‘This is what a condom is’ and things like that. But in Texas they never mentioned anything about LGBT sex at all. It was just men and women. It was a culture shock and I thought, ‘What is going on here?’ The day that they did the pledges for all the women I was like, ‘Wait, why aren't men doing this? I'm so confused.’”

The scenes in the film that portray the sex education classes Lupe and Sunny go through are really horrifying and are intensely focused on victim blaming. Can you tell us a little bit more about why you felt the abstinence-only curriculum you were taught singled out girls in particular?

Srinivasan: There was a class I remember that was seared into my memory because it genuinely shocked me when we were just in eighth grade. The teacher was to bring up a scenario and they would go through the room and everyone had to have a new, different take on how the situation would go.

So the scenario began as: ‘A girl goes to a guy's house to do homework.’ Then they asked, ‘What are all the different things that could happen?’ So one kid would say, ‘They could do homework,’ and then the teacher said, ‘Well, what's the next thing that could happen?’ You were penalized if you repeated someone else's thing, so it went from ‘They could do homework’ to ‘Well, they could hug’ to ‘They could get into a fight,’ ‘They could get drunk.’

It just kept going and going until they hit ‘They could have sex’ and then ‘They could have nonconsensual sex.’ Then the teacher said, ‘Exactly.’ But we didn’t say that. You were the ones who told us that if a girl goes to a guy's house to do homework, she could get raped. And that was the curriculum in school. We all had to repeat that if a girl goes to a guy's house for homework she could get raped. That was in eighth grade. It was gross.

While watching Plan B, which is a comedy, viewers can’t help but also think of real-life teen girls and others who might one day be in this scenario. Did that also influence the script as well?

Levy: What we wanted to do with the story was use actual laws in America that could have prevented the girls from getting a Plan B pill. The main focus was using the conscience clause in South Dakota, which is where this movie is set. There is a law there and in several other states known as the ‘conscience clause,’ which allows pharmacists to refuse to give Plan B to customers based upon their own moral code. There was also the more insidious thing where there were laws that shut down Planned Parenthoods based upon some arbitrary law that would say things like ‘The hallways are six inches too narrow.’

Srinivasan: There was a rash of those kinds of measures passing in Texas. People would also call Planned Parenthoods ‘abortion factories’ and stuff like that when it’s like, no, people need these clinics for things like Pap smears and breast exams. What we wanted to do was display these 16-year-old girls awakening to these facts and then trying to do something about it.

Finally, can you tell us what it is like working so closely with a best friend from childhood? How do you work through the sometimes bumpy parts of collaborating on a creative project?

Srinivasan: It’s typically pretty seamless because we have a pretty easy rapport at this point. At the end of the day, if we have different opinions we usually go with which one feels more authentic as opposed to anything else.

Levy: It’s actually a lot of fun working together. What we’ll do is just sit on the floor, like my living room floor, and crack jokes at each other all day. We’ll just think, ‘What’s the funniest way we can do this?’ Doing it with a best friend is even better because you know what will make the other person laugh and they'll know what to say to make you laugh. So you're having a good time and it doesn't feel like work.