Consent Culture And Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality In Us Movies

In teen films of the 1980s, male characters were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of them spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. Though the film industry has since begun to prioritize consent, ensuring date rape is no longer a joke and girls' desires are not transgressive, Michele Meek argues the genre still has a long way to go. Consent Culture and Teen Films examines several films from the 2000s, including Thirteen, Love and Basketball, Precious, American Pie, and Legally Blonde, to demonstrate how films now routinely illustrate sexual consent and yet still fail to offer characters autonomy over their bodies and sexuality. Affirmative consent ("yes means yes"), Meek reveals, does not protect youth from unwanted, unpleasant, or regrettable sexual encounters. She also highlights ambiguous sexual interactions in teen films--such as girls' failure to obtain consent, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults--and seeks to unravel some of consent's intricacies instead of relying on oversimplification. By exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered, Consent Culture and Teen Films proves we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency.

• | Author: Michele Meek
• | Publisher: Indiana University Press
• | Publication Date: Apr 04, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 244 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Hardcover
• | ISBN-10: 0253065739
• | ISBN-13: 9780253065735