Michele Meek, "Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies" (Indiana UP, 2023)
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.\nIn\xa0Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies\xa0(Indiana UP, 2023), Michele Meek traces the history of adolescent sexuality in US cinema and examines how several films from the 2000s, including\xa0Blockers,\xa0To All the Boys I've Loved Before,\xa0The Kissing Booth, and\xa0Alex 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\u2014such as girls' failure to obtain consent from boys, queer teens subjected to conversion therapy camps, and youth manipulated into sexual relationships with adults\u2014Meek unravels some of consent's intricacies rather than relying on oversimplification.\nBy exposing affirmative consent in teen films as gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered,\xa0Consent Culture and Teen Films\xa0suggests we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.\n\ufeffPeter C. Kunze\xa0is a visiting assistant professor of communication at Tulane University.\nLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices\nSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/gender-studies