Television Teens and Sexual Relationships
Is Madame Bovary Needed to Expose the Fantasy of Teen Dramas?
Mar 11, 2009
The sexual revolution hit almost half a century ago, but televisions seem to still treat sex as something shocking or tantalizing. Most so-called television dramas rely on storylines about love affairs, lost virginity, or unwanted pregnancy.
Whether or not these stories actually increase ratings, series seem to use soap opera plots to jump on a soap box about the “right” of teens to have sex. For the parents who disagree with this viewpoint, few shows are respectful of there being a variety of viewpoints about sex. Thereby, are teens getting the wrong ideas about sex by watching television?
Sex and the Small Screen
When hormones and sexuality are changing even the appearance of the individual, adolescents are being bombarded by the idea that they should be finding someone with whom to have sex.
These pubescent pupils of life tune into various teen shows for entertainment, and instead are encouraged toward life views. Thus the electronic babysitter of the past sixty years is potentially influential in shaping young minds.
For decades, television has been used to teach children lessons. Children claim to have been taught to read by Sesame Street, and family comedies show their child characters learning about how to treat others kindly or other humanistic values.
Is television now teaching children about what their attitude should be toward sex?
Teen Drama
Teen characters were always part of television comedies, dramas, and soap operas. Even the current television trend toward teen main characters and their troubles is not uncharacteristic of the genre of television.
At around the same time as the popularization of television, teenagers were coming to have more pocket money, and thus were becoming increasingly targeted. Even in the relatively early days of television there were nighttime dramas such as Peyton Place, which ran on ABC from 1964 to 1969, which predominately focused on a group of teen characters. However, these shows have less often held a mirror up to the reality of being a teen and more often sensationalized the extreme of teen drama.
So with more and more teen shows flooding the small screen, preteen and teenage viewers may be in danger of being fed a fantasy version of being an “In Between.”
Gossip Girl
Among teen dramas currently airing on The CW, Gossip Girl takes a nonchalant attitude toward teen sexual activity, seeming to approve of it so long as the teens use birth-control and believe themselves to be “sort-of” in love.
Like predecessor teen dramas, the show explores some of the considerations of having sex from a young age, but usually only as an excuse for time-filler or plot-filler.
Wild child turned tamer, Serena van der Woodsen (Blake Lively) was depicted as having sex with her boyfriend as his Christmas gift, presenting sex less as an act of mutual emotion and more as something which can be given as a recreational pastime, just as one can be given a video game.
More dangerously, episode “Victor, Victrola,” was hyped as being about who would be the first sexual partner of main character Blair Waldorf (Leighton Meester). Blair was shown losing her virginity on the eve of her seventeenth birthday to decadent womanizing drug-user Chuck Bass (Ed Westwick) when she was intoxicated and depressed about possibly having broken-up with her longtime boyfriend. Pitiable as was this occurrence, it had the potential of exhibiting the importance of being able to live with poor choices and getting past mistakes. Instead, the show irresponsibly implies that Blair and Chuck are “meant to be.”
Many shows like this justify the extreme lives of characters through an argument of the characters being “unhappy rich kids” in an extreme world. But even disregarding questions about the excuse of shows centering round middle class characters, it has been proved that wealthy characters can still have more realistic problems.
Gossip Girl gained executive producer Josh Schwartz from former series The O.C., which, although guilty of presenting certain outlandish plots, overall, took a more realistic approach to human relationships and concerns of teenagers.
The Secret Life of the American Teenager
By contrast to shows like Gossip Girl, ABC Family series, Secret Life, shows teen characters who look like they are being played by teen actors. The characters actually speak to their parents and experience a variety of concerns.
Yet, the show still depicts the majority of its characters as being sexually active from the age of fifteen or even sooner. In fairness, it does more greatly explore the feelings which accompany having a sexual relationship, but it still descends into the realms of fantasy, showing young teens to have found lifelong love.
Equally, most shows such as this and Brenda Hampton’s former creation, 7th Heaven, seem to present the idea that religious reasons are almost the only motivation for teens waiting to have sex. Surely, non-religious teens also have the right to say, “I’m not ready.”
Sex and the Sitcom
Unlike most counterpart dramas, which should be more realistic than comedy, sitcoms have more successfully explored sexual considerations of teens.
Family Matters (1989-1997) aired an episode about pressures on teenage boys to have sex, resolving sex as something that should be about quality, not quantity.
8 Simple Rules (2002-2005) showed one teen of the central family as being dumped after being used for sex.
George Lopez (2002-2007) realistically depicted the harshness of life as a teen mother through the character of Grandmother Benny and showed teen-daughter Carmen as being encouraged by her parents to wait until she was older than high school age to even consider having sex.
What Teens Are Taught
Gustave Flaubert wrote the nineteenth-century novel Madame Bovary to exhibit how fantasy romantic novels caused young girls to sometimes have dangerous ideas about romance and reality.
Modern teen dramas, without balancing the debate, show teens as regularly finding true love in high school, having adult relationships, and finding joy in teen parenthood. Is this the same disservice to twenty-first century teens as romance novels were to nineteenth century teens?
