A love letter to all my school friends' older sisters
(Or how a Netflix comedy special about blow jobs has me reminiscing...)
There’s a part in Jacqueline Novak’s astonishing comedy stand-up special, Get On Your Knees, that was released on Netflix this week, that reminded me of a defining relationship I had at school, but one that I had long forgotten about.
If you’re not familiar with Get On Your Knees (or didn’t catch it live when Novak was touring the UK in 2022), I would venture to describe it as a philosophical coming-of-age stand-up routine about blow jobs. The show slightly defies description, but that’s my best shot. Directed by Natasha Lyonne, it includes an abundance of literary references from Philip Roth to Vladimir Nabokov, and it is an astounding and poetic 90-minute set that acts as a rebuttal to traditional gender dynamics.
But this is not a newsletter about the brilliant Novak; I would implore you just to watch it and read Carrie Battan’s exhaustive profile of her in The New Yorker last week. This is about a sacred relationship (and one that’s little-discussed culturally): that between you and your school friends’ older sisters.
In the show, Novak, now 41, reminisces about a defining experience growing up. She describes being 12 years old and visiting her very best school friend, where she finds herself with said friend, and her friend’s 16-year-old older sister along with her best friend. Novak is excited to be there, as these older girls were the sort of people “you can get real information from” and they knew their “role was to teach”.
The older girls decide to teach the confused 12-year-olds how to give a blow job by demonstrating on a cucumber (“You’ll need to know eventually,” they tell Novak). If this moment sounds exploitative or shameful, it’s not supposed to. Certainly Novak doesn’t look at it that way. She recounts this as a formative and empowering moment and one that stays with her for life. While none of my friend’s older sisters fellated a vegetable for me, it did remind me of the way I worshipped them and of the clandestine bits of information they bestowed on me.