What Teen Movies Still Get Wrong About Sex and Consent

When author, filmmaker, and professor Michele Meek first got the idea for her latest book, Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies, back in 2014, she quickly realized that she might have to wait for culture and society to catch up before it could be published.

“This was before MeToo,” Meek tells the Daily Beast over Zoom. At the time, she was getting her Ph.D. in Gender & Women’s Studies at the University Of Rhode Island and wanted to build off the work she’d done for her thesis, which was all about consent. So when the MeToo movement ignited in late 2017, prompting millions of women to open up about their experiences with sexual abuse and harassment, Meek was moved to see the progress that could be made with widespread awareness.

“I thought it was so great that this topic was in the public conversation,” she says. “I did wonder if the problem might be solved.”

But as we moved into a “consent culture era,” as Meek describes it, she continued to think about how films had contributed to the problem and how they could also help to improve it. The result of her findings is Consent Culture and Teen Films, which was published by Indiana University Press in April. In the book, Meek chronicles the history of teen sexuality in modern movies, looking at how they now take consent into account while also exposing the flaws that are still rampant in the teen genre.

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This even includes how, when films do explore consent, they are typically heteronormative and cis-centered, and most sexual encounters are still highly gendered by prioritizing girls’ concerns over boys’. Ultimately, Meek’s book suggests how movies and modern culture must continue to build a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes the sexual desires of teenagers.

“I really decided to focus on teen films because I was really interested in how youth was represented and imagined in terms of their sexuality and consent,” she says of her book’s focus. “American movies have improved a lot since the 1980s for sure. But that doesn’t mean that they’ve stopped showing how complicated consent is.”

Consent Culture and Teens Films lays out just how problematic American teen films have been over the past few decades, particularly ones from the 1980s. In the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds, for example, characters spy on and photograph naked sorority girls and then pass around the images, while another man impersonates a girl’s boyfriend in order to have sex with her. Porky’s has a similar scene where its characters peep into a girls’ locker room. And ’80s teen star Molly Ringwald has previously spoken about how Judd Nelson’s Bender “sexually harasses” her character Claire throughout John Hughes’ The Breakfast Club.

“These were beloved films for teenagers, and they were seen by a lot of teenagers,” says Meek. “It’s really hard to make a movie, but I feel like filmmakers have a responsibility to think about what they’re putting out there. Plenty of scholars argue that these movies weren’t made as educational films for how teens should behave. I agree that the idea isn’t to show the ideal situation. But there’s a balance and responsibility so people don’t see this as some kind of model of behavior.”

Meek is at least a little bit hopeful about the progress that has been made with modern teen movies in the wake of the MeToo movement. The characters in Blockers, To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, and Alex Strangelove each take consent into account, while also depicting the intricacies and difficulties that still emerge before and after intimate situations.

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“MeToo had a direct impact on how Hollywood presents sexual interactions,” says Meek, who adds that female directors working in the teen genre, like Olivia Wilde and Greta Gerwig, have helped to explore these sequences in a new and more nuanced manner. In particular, she praises Wilde’s Booksmart for its awkward sex scene between Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Hope (Diana Silvers). It’s full of “fumbling and mistakes” as the characters are drunk, while “consent is still definitely part of it,” Meek explains. “This is exactly where the complexity of consent really comes to the surface. The scene is so subtle and confusing and real.”

Meek also highlights how the script for the 2019 coming-of-age comedy Good Boys, about a trio of sixth-graders trying to attend a party, was altered. “They wrote consent into the story. One of the characters asks if he can kiss one of the girls.”

Despite this progress, though, Meek also uses Good Boys as an example of how the genre still often relies on problematic storylines. “The basic foundation of the plot of Good Boys is that they want to spy on a teen girl neighbor and see what she’s doing sexually,” Meek explains. “There’s non-consent baked into the idea. We’re still at the stage where rape culture and consent culture are co-existing.”

Meek blames a lack of imagination in Hollywood for the genre’s inability to fully move beyond these misogynistic tropes. For instance, she says that some contemporary teen movies have merely replaced teen boys with teen girls in sexual “aggressor” roles—which does nothing to fix things.

“Some newer films simply try to flip the formula on its head. They have the girls be the aggressors rather than the boys,” she says. “We’re supposed to accept that it’s OK for them to act that way, even though we know it’s wrong. This is where the lack of imagination comes in. They think this is empowering girls. It isn’t, plus you don’t have to empower them at the expense of somebody else.”

While not as many teen movies are being released directly into movie theaters, which continue to be dominated by superhero movies, sequels, remakes, and other blockbusters, the genre continues to thrive on streaming services. “Some of the most popular films on streaming have been teen films,” Meek notes. “These films have enormous popularity with adults and youth, and they have a huge staying power. They are part of the public imagination in a way that other genres just aren’t.”

That staying power only reinforces the importance of making sure that the genre depicts sex and consent in a responsible way that won’t age so poorly, the way those ’80s movies did. Meek says that Hollywood still has huge strides to make—even though one solution is staring them in the face.

“To be frank, we need to get beyond an era of tokenism. We need more diverse voices in storytelling,” Meek says. “In terms of teen films, I think there’s a potential to be in collaboration with youth more. I think those results could be really interesting. They would really talk about what’s important to youth today instead of directors who are in their forties, fifties, and sixties.”

Meek believes that the framework, creative talent, and accessibility is already there to make this a reality. In particular, she’s encouraged by the flood of young creators on TikTok and YouTube who are sharing and shaping their own narratives around sex, and suggests film studios could start working with them to come up with more interesting teen stories.

“Media is always changing and evolving. Independent content is more popular than ever, equipment is more accessible, and we are moving towards an era of short-form content,” she says. “There could be some really interesting collaborations or results that come out of that.”

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