Consent Culture and Teen Films
Adolescent Sexuality in Us Movies
by Michele Meek
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Book Presentation:
Teen films of the 1980s were notorious for treating consent as irrelevant, with scenes of boys spying in girls' locker rooms and tricking girls into sex. While contemporary movies now routinely prioritize consent, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls' desires, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal in teen films.
In Consent Culture and Teen Films, Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexuality in US cinema and examines how several films from the 2000s, including Blockers, To All the Boys I've Loved Before, The Kissing Booth, and Alex Strangelove, take consent into account. Yet, at the same time, Meek reveals that teen films expose how affirmative consent ("yes means yes") fails to protect youth from unwanted and unpleasant sexual encounters. By highlighting ambiguous sexual interactions in teen films—such as girls' failure to obtain consent from boys, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults—Meek unravels some of consent's intricacies rather than relying on oversimplification.
By exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered, Consent Culture and Teen Films suggests we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.
About the Author:
Michele Meek is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Bridgewater State University. She is editor of Independent Female Filmmakers: A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos and presented the TEDx talk "Why We're Confused about Consent—Rewriting our Stories of Seduction." For more info, visit michelemeek.com.
Press Reviews:
"Meek's study is revelatory in its understanding of contemporary concerns about sexual consent, ranging from adults' efforts to regulate children's sexual knowledge to teenagers' interests in exploring their sexual identities. The extensive analysis of recent films provides numerous opportunities for reconsidering how the concept of consent is evolving for youth, who are in real life revising fundamental notions of gender, power, and expression. This book may at least provoke more educators and parents to respect how the movies adolescents are watching are often confronting current conditions of youth sexuality in ways that many adult authorities are not."
-Timothy Shary, author of Generation Multiplex
"This thoughtful and timely volume demonstrates that teen films have become a key site for negotiating the emergent discourse of consent and adolescent sexual agency. Through astute analyses of recent American films, Meek teases out the complexities and contradictions inherent in the ideal of affirmative consent. Consent Culture and Teen Films is an essential addition to the literature on teen films and on Hollywood's representation of adolescent sexuality."
-Kristen Hatch, author of Shirley Temple and the Performance of Girlhood
"Meek's work challenges readers to look critically at the narratives presented to youth; she invites us to actively participate in fostering a media environment that empowers, educates and, most importantly, urges conversation. This engaging, thorough, and thought-provoking book proves itself a significant contribution to both film studies in general as well as the broader conversation surrounding consent and youth representation."
-Film Matters
> From the same author:
Independent Female Filmmakers (2019)
A Chronicle through Interviews, Profiles, and Manifestos
Dir. Michele Meek
Subject: Director
> On a related topic:
America on Film (2021)
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by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
Subject: Sociology
Gay Men at the Movies (2016)
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Subject: Sociology
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