The Juno Effect: The Teen Pregnancy Panic

all kids out of the pool for adult swim [Music] hello today we're going to talk about that wave of teen pregnancy media that happened in the late 2000s early 2010s if you were there you know if not you will in a minute so going into this I had a few questions that I needed answered and those were what started this why did it start this and were teen pregnancy rates actually really high in this time period or was this media all for nothing or did this media result in more routine pregnancies which was a very commonly held fear at the time so first what I did was research the history of teen pregnancy as a moral panic and the history of teen pregnancy as represented in film and I know that movies and TV didn't invent this interest like there were Medieval songs that young girls would go and sing about their teen pregnancies but I'm talking specifically about this wave in the 2010s so I'm not going to go all the way back to the 1400s so teen pregnancy as a moral Panic a moral Panic is defined by Wikipedia as a widespread feeling of fear often an irrational one that some evil person or thing threatens the values interests or well-being of a community or society and teen pregnancy specifically as an issue kind of didn't exist until after the second world war when teens became a thing you could also argue that the 20s was the beginning of the Teen but the 40s and 50s are really when you start to hear that word teenager prior to this the movies that are considered teen pregnancy films are generally just moral downfall movies like the movie is sometimes not even really about the pregnancy it's just a bunch of bad decisions that end up with a teen pregnancy as the consequence and I think they were more so worried about babies born out of wedlock while also being a teenager because it wasn't unusual for a teenager to just get married or get pregnant and then have a shotgun wedding for example there's 1917's what price innocence where a teen gets kind of corrupted by her Harlot friend who smokes cigarettes and drinks and kisses boys by the end of the 10 minute film she's one pregnant see down and runs into her dad at a brothel you get the gist they were meant to be shocking and wild like all the other movies in this era so think Charlie Chaplin movies were the standard for comedy and this was how they delivered teen pregnancy but don't get me wrong it's not like you were very likely to see a teen pregnancy depicted on screen at this time the movies were I'd say few and far between but I'm comparing that to the wave that I lived through so I'm not sure what the Baseline should be but regardless there was not much pre the term teens existing so moving into the 50s once teenagers become a thing and once movie Wade happened and sex ed in general kind of became better and contraception was more widely available teen pregnancy rates became lower now don't get confused this was not the best sex ed it still had a lot of opposition from people who called the teaching of this smut and a filthy communist plot the fear here was that teaching kids about sex is what would make them have sex because otherwise they wouldn't even notice that they had genitals you'll come to see that this sentiment is not one exclusive to the straight laced conservatives of the 50s there are still folks who feel this way and have expressed these feelings about teen pregnancy media and sex ed right now but until the 80s teen pregnancy kind of fell out of the cultural Zeitgeist as a moral Panic people were generally more sex positive and by the 80s the way teen pregnancy was portrayed in films was not nearly as harrowing or dark as in the decades before there were teen sex comedies where an ensemble cast of teenage boys who all look 57 years old are competing to pop their cherries but uh-oh third act conflict comes in pregnancy meanwhile in real life poverty is on the rise literacy rates are dropping teenagers are watching their parents battle addiction and as more teens drop out more had uninformed unprotected sex and more got pregnant here's a Time Magazine cover from December 1985 where the headline reads children having children and in article it says each year more than a million American teenagers will become pregnant four out of five of them are married together they represent a distressing flaw in the social fabric of America like the girls photographed many become pregnant in their early mid teens some 30 000 of them under age 15. if present Trends continue researchers estimate fully forty percent of today's 14 year olds will be pregnant at least once before the age of 20. by the early 90s teen pregnancy in the U.S was as high as it ever would be according to the CDC for age range 15 to 19 there were 61.8 pregnancies for every 1 000 females by 96 President Clinton passes the 1996 welfare act which made moves for abstinence only sex ed to be taught in schools but this is also the same time as the AIDS epidemic 1991 when teen pregnancy would Peak is the same year that Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV and Freddie Mercury tragically passed away there were lots of discussions being had about protected and informed sex and then the pill becomes widely trusted and there are just more forms of it being developed in research so pregnancy begins its steady decline to today now you may be like but wait what about the Boom in the 2000s in the early tens that caused all of this media and so that I'd say there was no moon it didn't go up from there just the media surrounding it did and I was really shocked when I found this out because I was like then what happened like what was all of that for then what were you talking about so let's step back in time for a second back to 1987 right in the midst of the Teen Pregnancy epidemic just before the numbers in the US would peak in 1991. PBS and some sex ed classrooms would share the Emmy winning season 1 episode of Canadian hit public television show Degrassi Junior High titled it's late where 14 year old character Spike finds out she's pregnant and this was one of the very first teen shows and the First with a long-running teen pregnancy plot line at this time Spike went on to appear in nearly every piece of Degrassi media following this and her baby would go on to be the main character in 2001's Degrassi next generation named Emma after the Emmy that they won but I hear you we're talking about Stateside numbers so let's only talk about U.S shows so let's talk about 90210 Beverly Hills 90210 was the US's Degrassi to some extent it was I think the first and highest rated teen drama for a while and it instantly became a cultural phenomenon in the end of season one Brenda played by Shannon Doherty does the deed with her boyfriend who was AIDS tested after the spring dance in the finale she's sad that she'll miss him for the summer but overall she's pleased with her decision the prior night parents did not like this fox got so many angry letters and calls about this that in the first episode of season two Brenda has a pregnancy scare and this all opened the can of worms that was Teen Pregnancy media for television from this point any teen drama that mattered even adult dramas were more than likely to have a teen pregnancy plotline at some point in their run Reba's pilot episode was Reba finding out that her teen daughter is pregnant and deciding to support her the entire plot of Gilmore Girls is a grown-up Teen Mom raising her teenager the season finale of the first season of the OC was the introduction of a teen pregnancy plotline oh my God are you pregnant One Tree Hill had one of their main characters water break at graduation I'm sorry I have more I just think I'm having my baby there's just so much more media being made about it in the decade between 1996 and 2006 there were 14. googleable movies centered around teen pregnancy released and that number may sound small but from the first one on my list of googleable teen pregnancy films in 1917 to when it really becomes a moral Panic there were only eight and that's over 50 years and at this point all the cool girls are starring in movies with teen pregnancy plot lines Drew Barrymore was in Riding in Cars with Boys and Brittany was in Crossroads and Mandy Moore was in how to deal Misha Barton even had one of the worst ones but she was an icon status at this point because she was a literal child I'm telling you I'm willing to bet money that nearly all active teen actresses in the 90s and 2000s were sent at least one script for something with a Teen Mom plot but to be honest none of these prior Works would compare to the storm the Beast the final boss loss of Teen Movie outrage that was Juno Juno wasn't like other teen pregnancy movies Juno was fun and funny and colorful and I had a really cool soundtrack it starred two awkward teenagers who were regular and not particularly super Saints or child deviance it has funny dialogue like rain Wilson who you probably know as Dwight from the office saying his famous line that ain't no way to sketch there's one doodle that can't be undid Holmes Gillette the story was written by Diablo Cody now also known for Jennifer's Body and directed by nepotism doll Jason Reitman start Elliott page and Michael Sarah who are both insanely talented and so great in comedic roles I cannot express my love enough for this cast ever felt like you were just born to do something yes heating and air conditioning basic plot is that Juno gets pregnant with a guy she isn't dating and she's super freaked out and she takes way too many pregnancy tests and eventually decides to go to the clinic while at the clinic one of her classmates is protesting and she scares her out of going through she eventually decides that she will carry through the pregnancy and have the baby and give it up for adoption to a couple in need of a surrogate that she found through the Penny Saver ads when she tells her parents they're very understanding they don't kick her out or scream at her of course they tell her that they wish she would have been more responsible and they wish she would have told them she was having sex but more importantly they love her and they support her the adoptive parents played by Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman are great perfect even the mom is very prim and proper buttoned up blouse and Pearl's type and the dad is a cool guy who's a bit immature but that's cool to teenage girls he was in a band and he likes music and Juno develops somewhat of a school girl crush on him she puts on lip gloss before going to his house and calls him from school just to chat and despite being told by her stepmom that she's dancing on a boundary their relationship stays above board mostly in the bottom of the third act while slow dancing he tells Juno that he's leaving his wife Juno freaks out and tells him that he's old and he says how do you think of me you know why are you over here pointing out that she had a wee innocent crush on him but mostly just masking the fact that her youthful Juan Aviv sent him into a premature midlife crisis he and the wife end up splitting up Juno and Bleaker get together officially and Juno and the wife end up going through with the plan without mark when I premiered at Toronto International Film Festival it got a standing ovation and it was widely released on Christmas 2007 to similar love critics loved this film viewers loved this film the only people who didn't like this film were some pro-choice people and some pro-life people because they couldn't tell whose Side the movie was on and of course the people who would kick out their kid if they were pregnant and when I say people loved this movie I mean it was a cultural phenomenon for a minute the hamburger phone the orange Tic Tacs just minuscule details of this film became gifts for film Buffs this movie was so popular in fact that it spawned something dubbed the Juno effect this claims that pop culture influences young minds into acting outside the boundaries of the norm and behaving as they see in the movies now this is an obvious load of baloney when it comes to the behavior of teens and in hindsight it's hardly if ever taken seriously but I think it's a very real thing in terms of the media that was produced post-juna so five days before the Christmas release of Juno Jamie Lynn's Beer's world famous pop star Britney Spears 16 year old little sister was on the cover of OK magazine announcing that she was pregnant keep in mind this takes place on the timeline right in the middle of Britney's 2007 VMA performance and when she would be put in her conservatorship it was not a day that went by that Brittany didn't have a headline so this was huge huge news it was everywhere there were people calling for Nickelodeon to recall Zoe 101 and there's people that still to this day think that this pregnancy is the reason that Zoey 101 ended but the show had already wrapped they were still just like airing the final episodes six months later this huge news story out of Massachusetts I reported 18 girls at Gloucester High had become pregnant within the last school year which alone is I suppose a compelling story but the reason that it was so huge is because the principal of the school made a press statement in which he said that this was no coincidence these girls had all come together and made a pact that they would all become pregnant so they could be teen moms together probably because they love Jamie Lynn and Juno and he said that one of the girls had even slept with a homeless man who she did not know to fulfill The Pact this was a lie now don't ask me why their principal invented and spread a wild conspiracy theory about his pregnant students because I do not know I don't know what kind of person even comes up with this kind of story it's kind of bizarre to imply that a bunch of young girls were like I want babies so let's all have babies together my kids play house and family and stuff but I don't know I just can't imagine like having a group of friends that would all agree to this mayor of Gloucester and the girls themselves have come out and said that the story was completely false and they were simply 18 of the girls in the school who would become pregnant that year and decided to make a little support group so they could all finish school together and take care of their babies but the damage was already done the click bait articles were everywhere and the scriptwriters started pushing their pens first in the long list of media inspired by this event is this episode of Law and Order SVU that I absolutely must talk about the episode titled babes starts with a man being burned alive turns out it's some kind of sick Trend people are engaging in where they attack homeless people and post it online they trace the geo location or something from the video to some Prep School while they're there we briefly meet a member of the school's Chastity Club played by that Jesse McCartney surely he's not an important character let's move on they find the culprit looking very inconspicuous and he reveals that the story is deeper than we may have thought we just got out of control you're in control enough when you set him on fire I only did what my dad would have done he straight up confesses and turns out the reason he burned this man alive was because according to him he assaulted his sister and got her pregnant but the story takes a wee twist sister says there was no assault and not out of denial or embarrassment but because she was trying to get pregnant and this is the first her mom discovers of this pregnancy Amy what is she talking about and she says this I'm gonna kill the little bear oh my son already beat you to the park my poor timing but key part trying to get pregnant yeah we all did enter The Pact I had no clue honestly when this episode started how we were going to get here and like that's kind of all the really important information to this but I have to just tell you about the rest of this episode because it's insane but first let's hear a word from today's sponsor surfsharkvpn surfshark is a VPN which stands for virtual private Network and it works kind of like a mask for everything you do online you wouldn't go outside without your pants on and you should never go on the internet without your VPN on if you like to use public Wi-Fi to work or study or just go online shopping search encrypts your information so that any weirdos who are creeping on you can't see your private information like your bank info or your passwords and trust me there are weirdos on public Wi-Fi trying to spy on you or if you just want to enjoy a show that's available in another country like Teen Mom which is available in Canada on CTV just one click of surf shark and I'm in Vancouver eh eating poutine and watching Teen Mom if you want security and safety online and access to the world streaming libraries click the link in the description below and use my code tequila for 83 off making it the low lowest market price for a VPN and they're also going to throw in three extra months for free so once again click that link below and use my code tequila it really helps out the channel and I'd really appreciate it thank you so much and let's get back to the video they go interview some of the other girls they deliver killer lines like this one our parents will totally help us right Dad they asked them whose idea it was and they all say fidelia fidelia was the first to become pregnant and she encouraged them all to do the same in rocks how we're totally gonna be fidelia is a grade a [ __ ] with a major attitude problem and Olivia tries desperately to no avail to get her to listen by telling her the actual Health complications of teen pregnancy but in the end her parents came for her suddenly entering stage left is the kid who quote knocked her up Jesse McCartney head of the Chastity Club he is her boyfriend but he's not the dad he's shocked he's quivering he's shaking they're snot all over his face and he's reminding her that they're each other's first and true husband and wife respectively they made a promise to God they tracked on the father of fidelia's baby and he's a DJ whose name I cannot be bothered to remember right now so it might as well have been b-rad but what I do remember was his motto wrecking decks and getting sex this guy [ __ ] he doesn't give a damn about fidelia but they need DNA to prove that it's his so they get him they get fidelia but wait she's no longer with us check computer she was being cyberbullied by someone pretending to be b-rad after some investigation they find out it was Fran Drescher if she was a Italian the kids from the beginning's mom but the question here is can she be charged for making someone hurt themselves but what if plot twist fidelia didn't do it to herself let's refer back to the messages she sent before signing off Virginia says got to go f-a-t-h is knocking now detectives originally believe this to be fob short for father something a lot of teens often say but it's actually very cool and hip slang from the prep schools Chastity Club meaning first and true husband you guessed it was a crime of passion by Jesse McCartney himself because he was so upset that she betrayed their oath to the Lord so mad that he went and committed one of the seven deadly sins talk about Double Jeopardy but yeah that's the packed episode of SVU I had to tell you about that because not only is it the packed episode but it's also Jesse McCartney's SVU episode and if you were around in this era you remember that SVU was where Disney boys meant to mature okay back to the list there was also an episode of Bones a documentary called the Gloucester 18 a Spanish language film title alpacto and a French movie titled decept fee in which they inexplicably erase one of the girls and of course the most famous one of the bunch the 2010 lifetime film The Pregnancy Pact this is an utterly horrible film that is completely unsure if it wants to be its own work of fiction or a story ripped from the headlines they throw in a disclaimer at the beginning of the movie that it's inspired by real news reports But ultimately a work of fiction cut immediately to real footage from the media circus surrounding the Gloster 18. this movie was so bad I hardly even have much to say about it but I watched it so I'll try the main characters this super annoying reporter who used to go to the Gloucester school like she's from there and she heard about the stories she goes back there to report for her Vlog the school is so rampant with teen pregnancy that they have a nursery at the school but no sex ed and this is because of this like Mom Coalition or something at the school where they are super religious and they don't want their kids to find out what happens when you have sex I guess upon meeting the girls they're all pretty naive and generally speaking looking forward to Motherhood the first one to get pregnant was this girl and then they all made this pact they would get pregnant most of them don't actually care about the fathers they just want babies so you're supposed to get the gist that these are just your average dumb girl your uncouth ladies if you will except for our other main character her mom is the leading Force against better sex ed and contraceptives at the school and she tricks her little boyfriend who she's infatuated with into getting her pregnant and you get the feeling that in this world teen pregnancy to them is just another rebellious act like they aren't nearly as upset about the health risks that exist for them and their baby as they are when they're told they shouldn't have a baby it's almost like their entire desire to have a baby stems from being told not to so the moral of the story is don't hide sex ed and contraceptives from kids because they're gonna have sex regardless okay but also The Pact was real and they all lied you're all gonna get pregnant too so we can all have our babies together I swear we all swear this is really gonna happen it's a main point in the plot of this movie that the principal exposes The Pact and then the girls are all like oh my God reporter please don't tell anyone but it's true so everyone just gaslights the principle and says there was no pact and he must have misheard or misremembered it's just inspired by true reports not insinuating anything about the real story in July ABC Family debuts their teen pregnancy show The Secret Life of the American Teenager this show is awful it's also free to watch on the freeform website so I have to respect them for that I love a free show and I tortured myself and I watched a little bit of it for you guys so here's a little rundown the cast of characters is a complicated web of sexually active band kids the main characters Amy played by Shailene Woodley and she has a sister named Ashley who's a bit of a bad girl and she lives with both of her parents her mom played by Molly Ringwald and her dad who used to be married to this other character Grace who's of like the good Christian girl her mom Grace's mom is now married to a gynecologist and they have two kids and they're super religious and they're obsessed with their youngest Graces virginity and they make her wear a purity ring she's dating this like Meathead football player named Jake who's kind of obsessed with having sex with her knowing fully well that she doesn't want to until she's married so I don't know like what his objective is and I guess he doesn't either because he cheats on her with this girl Adrian and she's supposed to be like the hot mean girl she's not in the band she does the thing with the batons I don't know what that's called but she does that which it's cooler but Adrian is actually in a relationship with this very popular and flirty guy named Ricky but the reason that Ricky is so promiscuous is because of Trauma from CSA by his father when he was a kid so Ricky and Amy apparently had some kind of encounter at band camp over the summer you don't think I could ever forget the night we spent together at band camp do you okay well this one time a band camp and the show only picks up at like the day Amy finds out that she's pregnant you only see like 10 minutes prior to her like have knowing you know but I just can't imagine how this would have happened they can barely hold a conversation with each other like it's just they have no chemistry at all I just don't understand how I'm supposed to believe that they like hooked up or something it doesn't make sense and Amy's ashamed of Ricky being the dad and she's really in denial about the entire thing and her friends come up with a plot that she will hook up with this nice guy Ben and convince him that he's the dad now Ben I hate Ben I was very pleased to see that this is not an unpopular opinion at all but it does seem like the writers put him in there to be the better option against Ricky who is really like promiscuous but also maybe it's reverse psychology because they want you to think that Ben's the better guy because he's like obsessed with her and he's all nerdy and weird and Ricky's like the cool guy and so they want you to you know not like him if I don't know I have no clue but Ben's so but he's just so weird he says he loves her the day he meets her he says it to her face like the next day and then he says he wants to marry her within three days of meeting her and he kind of takes over her whole life he makes her keep the baby so that they can get married and play house because that will somehow fix the complications that come with a child and that's a major problem with this show in general it's very very heavy-handed with the Christian propaganda the only option for a pregnant person in this universe is to have it and keep it and any other suggestion is immediately shot down as an impossibility and also marriage magically solves the emotional and financial and possible health problems that come with having a child as a teenager but probably the most memorable thing about this show was the PSAs at the end of every episode the first time too many teens have the sex talk with their parents it's when they're telling them that they're pregnant parents if your teen has a question about sex don't assume they're doing it and teens if your parents aren't talking to you about sex don't assume they don't care for more information visitation.orgfamily.com foreign nothing new really to the conversation and critics said as much but the general population loved it it was doing some of ABC Family's best numbers and when the season one finale aired on the same night as episodes of 90210 and Gossip Girl their finale got more views and it doesn't stop there two months later news breaks the Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter Bristol is pregnant and this obviously is Major news so to people looking at the TV it really does feel like teen pregnancies are happening all over 2009 brings us MTV's 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom and then the pilot episode of Glee which prominently featured a teen pregnancy plot there's also the movie Precious and this is a really difficult and Hard movie to watch it tells a very traumatic story that I've seen a lot of people say that they could only watch once but it is another one of the big teen pregnancy movies like Juno but it doesn't tell that same story that we keep saying over and over and over again I'm gonna quickly talk about precious so content warning now for incest and abuse if you want to skip this section I'm going to put time stamps this film was set in 1989 the main character precious is a 16 year old girl who lives with her mother in Harlem she's illiterate she's living in poverty and she's the mother of one child and newly pregnant with another both of which were the result of essay by her father and mother that started from the time that she was an infant beginning of the film precious getting kicked out of school because of this second pregnancy and she's referred to an alternative school where she can learn alongside other students who are still in pre-ged classes and her mom discourages her from doing this because she wants her to get benefits which her mom takes for the other child even though the child lives with the grandmother and not them and precious really suffers living with her mom with verbal physical and like I said sexual abuse from both of her parents but despite what she said precious does go to the alternative school and starts taking classes and you start to see her open up as she learns to read and write and she meets other people at the school and forms a connection with her teacher later precious goes to the social worker's office and she talks about the actual situation going on in her home with the first child not living with them and then all the abuse she suffered with her mom and her mom's benefits get taken now what was already a dangerous situation is even worse but before we can see her mom's reaction to it she goes into labor she ends up being in the hospital for an extended period of time longer than a typical birth because she's a teenager and her mom never comes to visit she spends time with the friends she's made at school and she writes back and forth with her teacher when she goes home there's this really terrible violent fight between her and her mom where she and the baby both get hurt but she does make it out and she goes to her school where her teacher finds her in the morning and she helps her get into a halfway house and things are going pretty well for her for a period of time she's living at the halfway house and she's going to school and the baby's being taken care of there when she's at school she's learning more and more she's more ambitious every time she writes and we hear her writing but then her mom comes in and visits her and she tells her that her father has passed from AIDS and precious goes and gets tested and she does also have it her babies don't and remember this was set in the 80s and at that time an AIDS diagnosis was kind of a death sentence and then at the end of the movie there's a scene where she's in the social worker's office with her mom and she gets her baby back and her mom is kind of talking about the abuse that happened to Precious and it's just it's really really difficult to watch it's a really sad scene I said Carl what are you doing and he told me to shut to shut my fat ass up and it was good for her and what did you do then I shut my bad ass up and I don't want you to sit there and Judge Me This Way shut up and you let him abuse your door I did not want him he's my daughter I hated her supposed to be loving me who was supposed to be making love to me with you can really hear the cycle of abuse demonstrated in her dialogue and throughout the film you see how positive precious is and she has this happy place that she goes to whenever something really bad is happening to her and she fantasizes about being a celebrity and having Paparazzi taking her pictures and everyone fawning over her and the movie ends with her telling her mom that she won't hear from her anymore and she walks out with her two babies this was Gabourey sidibe's debut performance and she was nominated for an Oscar for it and tonight she is sitting at the Academy Awards in the same category as Meryl Streep and Monique won an Oscar for her performance and the movie won the grand jury prize at Sundance and the Oscar for Best Picture needless to say I think this movie sat with a lot of people it's a perspective that's nearly never seen in TV and movies but of course there are a lot of people who don't like this film because it's so upsetting and to a lot of people it just feels like trauma porn I kind of didn't know how to include this movie in the video because I feel like it serves a different purpose than all of the other stuff that I'm covering but I feel like it would be wrong to talk about teen pregnancy media without talking about one of the most popular movies one of the most celebrated movies that came out of this time period about the topic but even though this movie was super mega huge and had the distribution money of Oprah and Tyler Perry behind it it didn't shift that Narrative of teen pregnancy media the same way something like Juno did because at this point the market was so saturated what else was there left to do but just saturate it more so let's talk about MTV at this point in the late 2000s they're best known for their cycle of reality shows where they depict people that are just the right mix of personality and obnoxiousness so that like-minded people can watch and enjoy and everyone else can hate watch and point and laugh and make fun what's with a constancy by your door it's kind of consistency man I think sweet 16 the hills Jersey Shore next Bully Beatdown parental control MTV was constantly showcasing people who you were kind of supposed to make fun of the Teen Mom franchise was different right the first show in the franchise beginning In Summer of 2009 was 16 and Pregnant 16 and Pregnant is an anthological docu-series following the lives of pregnant scenes between the ages of 15 and 19. each episode would show one of the moms going through the pregnancy usually having drama with the father of the child and their own parents and they'll usually show you a little bit of their life after they come home with the baby too these are all of the moms of season 1 of 16 and Pregnant you may recognize some and some you may not there were definitely more popular or inFAMOUS moms of the bunch now the difference between 16 and Pregnant and all of the other movies and TV shows that I've talked about is that these are real people these are real teenagers with their real children the drama that's happening between them and their family is real and will really impact the life of that child that you're seeing on the screen and so when we talk about backlash you're thinking everything that Juno and all of the other stuff got about glorifying teen pregnancy and then also personal attacks on each of the people and all of their loved ones the New York Times called them real-life junos who were not scoring in the 99th percentile on the verbal portion of their SATs and despite this backlash just like all the other teen pregnancy media this show was huge two million people tuned in for the debut and 3.5 million tuned in for the season finale after getting just a taste of these people's lives seeing portions of the drama they had to offer the world like Macy whose boyfriend was a loser and completely checked out the whole pregnancy and was broken up with at the end of the episode I'm not gonna go until you look you're such a interesting me to like get in and out it's not impossible either or pharah who was the popular cheerleader who lost the father of her child two months before giving birth or Amber who gets in physical fights with her boyfriend who also is one of her older brother's friends ebony who wanted to marry her boyfriend and go into the air force together but they can't both go if there's a baby and Whitney who finds out her mom is pregnant too and Caitlyn who decides to give her baby up for adoption I just wanted it better than what I had um and I know that I can't do that so I'm just doing the thing that I think's about this you know I know that you guys can provide for a lot more than I can the people couldn't have just a taste they were dying for more so four of these six girls were selected to continue their stories and seven months later Teen Mom was on the air can you still live like a teenager once you've become a mom teen mom is that more classic reality show format that you know the hill style it bounces back and forth between the girls I think this extension of the show is where it starts to get a little problematic because yeah you get to see Macy and Bentley grow up which obviously people were very interested in because in the 2011 census those names were both very popular but also they end up platforming some not so great people like Amber who physically assaulted her fiance Gary on the show several times and ended up going to jail for it and then there's Farrah who constantly fights with her mom and then it escalates to physical or verbal abuse and then her mom ended up getting arrested for punching her in the mouth but if you know anything about reality TV I'm sure you know that that sounds great to them and the franchise just grew like a weed a 2011 MTV was airing season three of 16 and Pregnant and Teen Mom and season one of their new series Teen Mom 2 which started some of the people from season 2 of 16 and Pregnant they found an endless Gold Mine of real life drama in these young pregnant girls and I'm sure they were paying these girls handsomely so when you're in a situation like that I mean and those same negative side effects of the show that we saw in season 1 namely MTV standing there and recording repeated domestic violence over months and never stepping in continued in every iteration of the show and this franchise is one of the most infamous things to come from this wave of media mostly because it's still going besides the spin-offs I've already mentioned there was also Teen Mom 3 Teen Mom young and pregnant teen mom young moms Club Teen Mom family reunion and Teen Mom girls night in and I honestly might be missing one they've also taken it outside of the US with teen mom Poland Teen Mom UK and Teen Mom Australia and discussing this show like I said is really different than discussing something like the Pregnancy Pact or Juno because these are real people regardless of how you feel about reality TV they are real teenage girls or were at some point in a very very vulnerable place in their life and some people watch it just for comedic value I'm sure some people watch it just for drama as bad as that may sound and for the women from this show at least the ones that I know of from seasons one and two who are now on teen Momo G this is their career now they do the other things that come with being an influencer and I'm sure they make a lot of money from that kind of stuff but I'm pretty sure the Teen Mom franchise is their main thing so with this show they're able to give their kids nice things and let them have good experiences and you know live comfortably because of the show so when talking about possible harm that the show could cause to the moms or the kids or other family members I think it's a really nuanced discussion because that show has been life wrote them since they were 16 or 17 so I don't know just food for thought but something that I noticed that started to pop up on the Internet around the time that this show was really big were Teen Mom YouTubers and these were things like I got pregnant at 15 story times or a day in my life as a teen mom videos and I'm sure this is still a big part of YouTube and Tick Tock and other social medias but I feel like it really took off in this era of Story Time YouTube videos and stuff and then that also makes me think of another big part of 16 and Pregnant YouTube which was The Sims it's a pretty well known and documented fact that simmers have always had a sort of fascination with teen pregnancy particularly during the life of the Sims 2 and 3 The Sims 3 was released in 2009 so people would have still been playing The Sims 2 all around during this whole time there were people making mods so that your teen Sims could get pregnant and of course there were the YouTube videos we all know let's plays are one of the main pillars of gaming on YouTube now growing to be one of the most popular types of videos since the mid-2010s but before that simmers made music videos and short films I guess one of the most prolific was a Sims 2 music video to the song Concrete Angel by Martina McBride which if you aren't aware is a song about child abuse and these Sims videos often touched on these really sensitive topics as we've explored teen pregnancy stories don't always have to be sad and twisted stories but these creators seemed to think otherwise most popular one that I've seen is a video uploaded by user honeyhead cutie in March of 2010 titled Sims 2x teen pregnancy X and I must emphasize that this is based on a true story this video has 28.3 million views here's the plot line seems like they all get into an argument and then Blondie hooks up with the guy they also hook up here in this scene where her butt cracks out and then he goes and hooks up with the black-haired girl all the while Blondie has no clue so then Blondie finds out she's pregnant she goes and tells her friend and then her friend goes immediately and hooks up with the guy again but this time Blondie catches them she runs outside sobbing But ultimately decides to go back in and give the guy a piece of her mind but they just argue and nothing really comes of it she and the black hair girl talk and makeup and this is where I'm a little confused like was anyone dating in this situation I honestly have no clue like what was anyone's relationship to each other here but either way black-haired girl is pissed now so she goes to tell him how she feels but he's not hearing it he slaps her in the face and then I'm not positive what this is insinuating but I guess we can infer she runs downstairs Blondie goes into labor and has a beautiful healthy baby and she and the black hair girl live happily ever after there was also Gabrielle van overbeaks The Sims 3 a teenage pregnancy story uploaded in November 2010. this video has nearly 5 million views tells the story of a girl who hooks up with a guy presumably a boyfriend or something becomes pregnant is disowned by her parents and then accepted by the guy who impregnated her he proposes they move into a little house she delivers healthy baby all is well right no they get into a fight he leaves her unable to care for the child which is then taken by CPS the end but you get the picture just this General period of time there was a sort of obsession with teen pregnancy and I think it came from teens and young people and there's even a part of me that wants to say this was all a part of this larger obsession with taboo child bearing because it wasn't just the obsession with teen pregnancy there was also the obsession with big families first there was John and Kate Plus Eight which was a family with a pair of twins who then had sex toplets but they had a TLC show where they really did not look very great and TLC did not help at all in polishing their image which we know is possible because when the next giant family phenomenon came in the form of the Duggars and 19 Kids and Counting viewers thought that they were a relief and we know now that there were some very sick things happening with that family also I can't forget the media circus that surrounded Nadia Suleiman the woman who had 12 embryos implanted in her through IVF and went on to carry out tuplets AKA Octomom and it really wasn't just octuplets she also had six kids before so she was going to have 14 children and eight of them were going to be the same age typically someone her age getting IVF would get three at most embryos implanted I think and so a lot of people were questioning the ethics of the doctor just asking who would approve of something like this to happen and then there was just the ethics of her wanting to do it when she lives with her mom in a house that was pre-foreclosure and the hospital told her that if she was unable to prove that she could provide a better living situation for the babies that they wouldn't be released to her she did have the babies and she and they were healthy and she got to take them home you see what I'm saying consuming popular culture in this time was just baby baby baby baby baby and I feel like there has to be some kind of connection with people's obsession with teen pregnancy and these families can't prove it but I think it this isn't a Fascination that cease to exist there are still Teen Mom videos being uploaded to YouTube every single day there are still Teen Mom Sims videos being uploaded to YouTube there's Teen Mom content on Tick Tock but as far as mainstream pop culture I think the Panic of teen pregnancy has more or less subsided as the numbers continue to become lower and lower and this is in no way any type of moral condemnation of this content or the people who were in it or created it or enjoy it I just find it really fascinating that this all happened at one time when there was no rise in teen pregnancy I just really expected there to have been a rise in teen pregnancy that resulted in all of this media um and also just the belief that people had that consuming this media as a young person would make you want to have a child and then you know my age group we grew up watching that as pre-teens so and there was research that came out that suggested that teens that watched Teen Mom or 16 and Pregnant whichever show were less likely to have unprotected sex as teenagers and they were more likely to have sex talks with their parents and all of that stuff and if that's true that's all a good thing that's a result of this media so it is a really nuanced topic and I know that doesn't really exist online but you know let's try what do you think were you a viewer of this media did your parents write a letter to Fox after that episode of 90210 did you boycott Zoe 101 let me know tell me down below I'm glad we could spend this time together and talk about some movies and TV shows maybe some you'd forgotten about or never heard of thank you so so much for watching and I would really really appreciate it if you hit the Subscribe button if you like what you see and I really can't wait to see you next time bye [Music] [Applause] foreign [Music] the first time too many teenagers have the sex talk with their parents is when they're telling them that they're pregnant parents if your teens have a question about sex don't assume they're doing it and teens if your parents aren't talking to you about sex don't assume they don't care teenage pregnancy is 100 preventable start talking for more information visit stayteen.org or abcfamily.com

Channel: mila tequila

Views: 1,637,195

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Id: bN4qydawRLQ

Length: 44min 29sec (2669 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 31 2022