Rider Strong wasn't happy with how sex was handled on Boy Meets World

Rider Strong, Will Friedle, and Danielle Fishel—the former stars of ABC’s Boy Meets World, who are now the present hosts of podcast Pod Meets World—have not been shy about airing their criticisms with the ways they were treated as teen actors on the long-running sitcom. Fishel has recounted in more than one episode the ways she was treated negatively, as a child, by series showrunner Michael Jacobs, including threats to fire her, and a pay gap between her and her male co-stars. Now, Strong has offered up another critique of the series, expressing his frustration in a recent episode of the podcast about the ways the show handled sex.

As noted by Buzzfeed News, the show’s hosts were addressing listener questions, including one about the three episodes of the series (all related to either sex, or alcohol) that were kept off Disney Channel when it ran reruns of the series after it went off the air on ABC. Strong revealed that he’d raised concerns, at the time, about season 5's “Prom-ises, Prom-ises” to Jacobs, only to have his concerns dismissed.

Specifically, Strong says he was unhappy that the episode—in which Fishel’s Topanga and Ben Savage’s Cory consider having sex together for the first time after their senior prom—never addressed questions about safe sex or birth control:

The fact that we would not bring up Cory and Topanga using condoms or having a discussion about birth control at all, and yet the entire episode was about will they or will they not… I remember just being so upset and I brought it up, I remember talking to Michael about it and saying: “Can we talk about this? Maybe you generationally don’t understand that, but we were growing up in the era of AIDS, this is something that we have to talk about. When you are discussing losing your virginity, you discuss how you’re going to do it and how to be safe about it.”

But Jacobs apparently dismissed Strong’s concerns: “He completely blew me off and told me it was a ridiculous thing to worry about and that we don’t even need to discuss it. I felt, at the time, that that was incredibly irresponsible.”

Fishel, for her part agreed, saying that, “I remember also feeling very uncomfortable the whole week for similar reasons, but I don’t have specific memories other than just, kind of, ickiness about the week.”