hello my beautiful doves. my name is mina and i'll
be your host for today. so i was watching the new gossip girl reboot because i'm hip. only the pilot
has been released so far, but i think by the time this video will come out, probably episode 2 as
well. i'm planning to do a gossip girl dedicated video once the season is over, but for now i
wanted to talk about a phenomenon that has always kind of bothered me and it's something i was
reminded of while watching the show. and that is: the representation of teen characters in teen
tv dramas. i don't usually watch teen tv dramas to be honest. i think the appeal of watching
20-somethings engage in high school antics kind of lost their appeal for me once i graduated
high school. but when i was in middle school i was really obsessed with degrassi, glee (i know)
make it or break it, the vampire diaries... "nutrition is abysmal at this school.
you know what this is?" "toilet brush." teen wolf, i also watched a little bit of
the secret life of the american teenager and pretty little liars, but i wasn't
like a dedicated fan for those ones. i actually didn't even watch the original
gossip girl when it was airing and i tried to start watching it about a couple months
ago, and i've been chugging along with that one. i want to watch it just because i know
it's like a cultural touchstone. but it's just a little bit difficult to get through
now in 2021. as a middle schooler i think i was definitely more impressionable when it came to
teenage dramas because i wasn't in high school yet, so my perception of what high schoolers
looked like and acted like were entirely based on these tv shows. now that i'm older, i know that
these characters do not look like they're 14. they look like they're 26 and that's because most of
the time, the actors who play these characters are in their 20s. so today what i really want to talk
about is adult actors playing teenage characters and how that changes our perception of
what content is or isn't appropriate. there will be some spoilers for the gossip girl
reboot pilot episode and pretty little liars. i'm also going to be subbing in the word "snacks"
occasionally instead of "sex" because youtube has censorship issues even though everything i say is
fully educational. so i just don't get in trouble. first i want to address why adults play
teen characters to begin with because usually the reason is not actually sinister at
all. according to casting director todd thaler, "it's all because of the labor laws. the number of
hours that children are allowed to work are highly restricted, which limits the amount of time that
producers can actually have adolescents on set in the end. many casting directors choose to go
with an 18 year old because they can be on set and working for say 16, 18 hours," there are of course
some actors who are under age. molly ringwald for instance was 16 when shooting "the breakfast
club," but that's because director john hughes thought she was the best fit for the role. i am
totally fine with adults playing teens. i prefer it as we've seen from countless tragic stories.
a lot of child stars get abused or groomed in the industry so by casting more real-life
children, it's also exposing more children to the predators in the hollywood machine. but i do
think that there are some issues that arise from casting adults as teenage characters.
teacher-student relationships are unfortunately a fairly common trope. we've seen it in dawson's
creek, one tree hill, the original gossip girl, riverdale, etc, etc. these relationships
are obviously bad. they tend to romanticize a completely inappropriate age gap and power
dynamic. i've always thought this trope was extremely weird even as a child and i struggled
to grapple with who these relationship dynamics are supposed to pander to. even if the intended
audience is supposed to be children, then that's extremely gross and irresponsible because it
feeds them this idea that it's totally safe normal and even aspirational to bone your teacher.
and if the intended audience is adults, then... 911 what's your emergency? the reason why tv shows get away with this is
because all the actors are adults. so obviously when we're watching a show that visually portrays
two consenting adults, it raises less red flags. these shows also tend to cast young attractive
actors who are close to the same real-life age of their students. so yeah, if you see two people
in their 20s hooking up, it looks totally normal, doubly appealing if they're both attractive. but
we have to keep in mind that these characters are teenagers, so they can't consent to relationships
with adults, especially ones in positions of authority. teachers and 18 year old students
should still not be in relationships because there is still that power imbalance and that
makes these relationships unsafe for the students. i've seen some people say that when it
comes to explicit content and teen dramas, like euphoria or skins, that it's okay because
it's real and students are sleeping around, even with their teachers sometimes, and we shouldn't
censor these experiences. to an extent i agree. but at the same time, can we really say that a
relationship like ezra and aria is realistic. for those who've never watched pretty little
liars, ezra fitz is a high school english teacher and aria montgomery is his student. they meet at
a club outside of school and hook up and when he realizes that he's her teacher, he still continues
to encourage this relationship. aria's parents, who become aware of the relationship, start
off angry but then grow to accept it, and then if it couldn't get any worse, ezra is outed
as having a past of predating on young girls, and the pair get married in the final season. the
framing of the story is so irresponsible. i'd be upset personally, but i could maybe tolerate an
incorporation of a teacher-student romance if, and only if, it was criticized in the show, framed
negatively and if ezra went to jail at the end. "it's what she deserves." what parents be okay with their 16 year old
daughter sleeping and having a relationship with her english teacher? and also, ezra and
aria didn't even get married in the books. the writers just threw that in because a lot
of fans were shipping it. and that's already a huge red flag, like if people are romanticizing
and supporting this kind of relationship, then you've done an irresponsible job as a writer. but
that's not all. they sold official merch t-shirts that read "i heart mr fitz" on them, like i cannot
even fathom how genuinely effed up you have to be to sell shirts promoting to underage girls.
the new gossip girl reboot also really bothered me with its representation of teachers. in the
pilot episode, it's revealed right away that the teachers are gossip girl, because they all peaked
in high school and desperately need therapy. but something i noticed immediately when they
introduced the teachers is that they're all very young. i mean tavi gevinson, who plays
the main teacher, is 25 in real life, and jordan alexander, who plays one of the students,
is 27. if the teachers and the students are around the same real life age, it feels like the
teachers have less authority and makes it seem like they're on equal footing with the
students. thankfully, i think most people in my twitter feed still question the ethics
of teachers cyberbullying their students. but imagine if the teachers were in their 40s or 50s
or 60s, which is honestly the age range that most of my high school teachers were, it would just be
so clearly inappropriate for them to be spreading rumors about their students and taking photos
of their students changing. yes that happens. "i should be arrested." "they were standing in front of a
window. anyone could have seen them." another downside to having adults play teenage
characters is that they have adult bodies, and that can create a complex for teens watching
who are comparing themselves to these people who are fully past the age of puberty. plus
you know how the hollywood machine works. 99% of the time, the main characters are played
by conventionally attractive people as well. so not only as a 15 year old are you
comparing yourself to a 25 year old, you're comparing yourself
to a very hot 25 year old. "game changer, archie got hot. he's got abs now." barbara greenberg, a clinical psychologist and
teen and family expert, says that by casting adult actors to play teenagers it can give the message
that teenagers are supposed to look good all the time. "in reality some days they're thinner,
they're a little heavier, they have pimples, their hair is a little frizzy, it's all okay." so
when actors look good in every scene and in every episode, it can make teenagers feel self-conscious
or alone. but again, just because an adult plays a teen character doesn't mean that this has
to be the outcome. framing is once again such an important part of writing these stories. i
would argue that a show like riverdale really emphasizes the actor's maturity. the characters
are dressed, dare i say, not like teenagers. granted, i've only watched a couple episodes of
riverdale, because i really could not get along any further. but the way that betty and veronica
are styled makes them look like adults. and it's really important for the costume designer, to
nail the characters ages, because you're already hiring older people. and if you dress them older,
then they're not going to resemble teenagers at all. they're going to be bad representations of
teenagers. i was watching sex education for the first time a couple days ago. it's a tv show on
netflix and it's amazing. i absolutely love it. i thought the costume designer rosa diaz did a
fantastic job dressing the characters, because the actors are all in their 20s, but they dress
like teens, and therefore look more like teens. eric wears a lot of mismatching patterns that
reflect his fun personality, but also show that he's still experimenting with his style. he hasn't
gotten things fully figured out yet. there's also a great scene where he runs into an older black
gay man and then a following scene where he copies that man's style, because he's impressionable
and a child. otis wears pretty much the same color blocking jacket throughout the whole show
because he's just a white teenage boy who doesn't really care about fashion. a lot of the characters
wear training bras and unsexy childish underwear, rather than you know, victoria's secret lingerie.
i'm not saying that all teenagers dress really young. there are definitely teenagers who wear
iamgia and who like wearing skimpy outfits, but when the actors are older, it's important to
dress them on the young side to compensate for that age gap. a teen coming-of-age movie that
i think did a really good job is lady bird. saoirse was i think 23, so clearly over the
age of a high school senior, but you know, she wears a pinafore over a t-shirt, a look that
is very young. her clothes are kind of perpetually disheveled to show how she doesn't really care
about anything, and then it's only at the end when she goes off to college when she wears a blazer
and looks more put together to show how she's now an adult and taking her life seriously. but an
interesting detail in this movie that i didn't even know until i looked into it is that during
production saoirse ronan actually said she had an acne breakout. and the makeup artist asked her if
she would be okay letting her acne show. and she said yes. saoirse said, "i thought it was a really
good opportunity to let a teenager's face in a movie actually look like a teenager's face in real
life." and the director of the movie greta gerwig also said this: "all i see in movies about teenage
girls is they have perfect skin and perfect hair, and the reality of teenagers is, they don't!
and it doesn't make them less beautiful." what i'm mainly trying to get at is that i really
wish adult actors were dressed and presented as teenagers in these tv shows and movies. because
when they just look and act like adults, it gives the impression to teenagers, that they
should look and act like adults themselves. when there's no representation of what teenagers
actually look like and act like on screen, that can lead to something called symbolic
annihilation. symbolic annihilation describes a situation in which the absence of a certain
group from mass media depictions implies that members of the group are so lacking in value as
to be unworthy of representation. this is why it's really important to have strong minority
representation in film and tv, but on a more general note, not having realistic depictions
of what teenagers look like, aka with imperfect skin and imperfect hair, in the media can make
a lot of teenagers feel unworthy or not normal. i actually took a survey on my instagram asking
people what they thought about sex scenes and teen dramas and an overwhelming majority said they
didn't like it, they thought it was too graphic, too voyeuristic, or too glamorized. and i kind
of took that survey just to see what other people thought about it to see if anyone thought the
same thing as i did, and they did! i have those opinions as well. i also specifically wanted to
see how teens reacted to this, because i think a lot of adults, including myself, kind of forget
what it was like to be a teenager watching this kind of content. one 13 year old said, "it's so
stupid and overrated. it puts such a bad influence on girls my age." a 16 year old said, "it sets
fake expectations." and a 17 year old said, "it's too perfect, not very realistic at all,
especially when it's the character's first time." i think it's kind of harder for adults today to
really understand what teens are going through, because media has just gotten a lot more
risque than when even i was in high school, which was like six years ago. developmental
psychology professor beth daniels says, "if you think back to the first run of
90210, the majority of the characters, while they were in high school, were not
having *snacks* and yet today, we see shows where it seems like the characters are not only
sexually active, but having multiple partners, and that's incredibly uncommon for teenagers.
when i read that quote, i thought immediately: gossip girl. and look the original gossip girl
was definitely raunchy, i'm not contesting that. i believe it's implied that chuck had a threesome
in the first few episodes, but in saying that, i still felt overall there was still a sense of teen
awkwardness in the show. blair was waiting to lose her virginity to nate, her long-term boyfriend.
dan was also trying to plan out the perfect first time with serena. granted, i didn't finish gossip
girl, so i don't know if it got raunchier and is gonna make me look bad when i publish this
video, but at least in the first season, there was no graphic *snacks*. this is compared to the pilot
episode of the gossip girl reboot where audrey and aki are already going at it like bunnies. no
problem reaching home base. a lot of the *snacks* on the old gossip girl were implied. the screen
faded to black. it was just off screen in general, which is generally what i prefer. like i'm no
prude, i know that teenagers are sleeping around. but at the same time, do we really need to see it?
does it serve the plot to see it? and some of you may be thinking, why should we censor *snacks*.
it's normal human behavior and censorship and uninformed education is why children get into
dangerous situations to begin with. for one, everyone says yes, teens are all sleeping around,
but that's not actually true. at least in america, the majority of students are not sleeping around.
the centers for disease control and prevention's youth risk behavior survey (that was a mouthful)
found that from 1991 to 2017, the percentage of high school students who'd had intercourse dropped
from 54 to 40 percent. "in other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something
most high school students have experienced to something most haven't." so i think when it
comes to portraying teen antics in the media, it's important to show a balance of narratives.
yes, some kids are sleeping around, but also some kids are not, and both of those decisions that
these kids are making are totally normal and totally fine. but when every character in every
teen tv show is drinking, partying, doing drugs, having sex, it creates a sense that this is the
norm, which can make a lot of very normal high schoolers feel very abnormal. and secondly, a
lot of the *snacks* portrayed in these shows are extremely unrealistic and that could also
be harmful. this is one of the problems that came about with the sex positivity movement. this
movement really prioritized embracing your body, destigmatizing sex and kinks, and empowering
women in the act. and those are all really wonderful things, but the problem i think
can be summed up by this one article i read. "the movement placed the onus on the woman
to defy her fears, instead of dismantling the patriarchal and puritanical structures
that caused them in the first place. paired with the absence of comprehensive sex ed
that's not centered around abstinence, imploring women to engage in heedless
sex in the name of liberation leaves young girls vulnerable to manipulation,
grooming, and increased risk of stds." a lot of these teen shows with explicit scenes
do encourage sex because they show it in a very glamorized and appealing lens, but then they fail
to address a lot of things that teenagers really need to know such as consent, sti information,
contraception, and even other things like dysfunction, anxiety, and trauma, which are
very common problems that teenagers have but never get any representation in these shows.
and i think that's all really dangerous, because a lot of teenagers will just copy or
base their expectations on what they see on tv as illustrated by the social cognitive
theory, which basically states that we pick up behaviors by observing others. and a lot
of the times, what we see on tv is not reflective of what real experiences are like. this is once
again why i really love the show sex education, because despite the fact that there is a lot
of graphic *snacks* in the show, it's never glamorized. it's always portrayed as being very
awkward and fumbly, because they're teenagers. and honestly i cringe a lot when i watch
this show because it's just so awkward... but that's a good thing! that really is a good
thing, because there's nothing more concerning than a show trying to make its audience get turned
on from watching teenage characters hooking up. "can we change the channels? i just really
don't think soft p----'s the right tone." and i think the *snack* scenes really serve
the plot. it's always shown intentionally to illustrate a problem that a couple is having,
hence why they seek therapy. for those of you who don't know, sex education is about a high
school boy whose mother is a sex therapist, so he just knows a lot from living under
her roof and listening in on her sessions. he opens an informal clinic at a
school where kids ask him for advice. "and it would have been inappropriate
if jackson had continued to make grand gestures to a girl who made it clear she wasn't
interested. do you understand ian? no means no." there's just really good stuff all around in
that show. but enough hyping it up. unlike sex education, i think most teen dramas like riverdale
and euphoria are tailored for adult consumption, which is why the *snacks* are always so hot and
heavy, and why they feel more voyeuristic than necessary for the plot. the problem here
is that teens like watching teen dramas, so even if these shows are made for adults,
which honestly, i do think is kind of a strange concept... to think that a show centering
minors would be aimed for adult viewers, but even if the show is made for adults,
teens will still tune in. and i was really thinking about that a lot, like the concept
of teen dramas being made for adults. like we're seeing a lot of gritty teen dramas come
up these days: riverdale, euphoria, 13 reasons why... and something that tv psychologist honey
langcaster-james said really stuck with me: "one of the things that we do with entertainment
is we gain mastery over potentially difficult emotions. some people wonder why anyone would
ever watch a horror movie or a thriller. why would you want to sit and be scared?
but there is an element of reassurance and being able to experience those
emotions from a removed perspective, and i wonder if the same can be said for teen
fiction. through the processes of empathy with a character, you're experiencing those emotions
that were challenging, but now from this more mature perspective, you're gaining an opportunity
to master those emotions that you once felt so consumed by and now can have a more detached
and bemused look upon that time in your life." however for teens watching, that's not the same
experience because they're currently living through it. and by showing a glamorization of
trauma or unsafe practices, it can lead teens to mimic the behavior they see on screen, which would
inevitably bring them along a dangerous path. and thus the sex, which is there for adult audience
tastes, can feel exploitative. one minor also wrote to me, "i feel like teenagers are a fetish
for grown people who hate their early teens." all in all, what i would really like to see is
more responsible storytelling. i think as adults, we can get our hookup fix with show-centering
adult characters. we don't necessarily need to see any graphic depictions to appreciate
or enjoy a teen drama, and i wish networks would understand this, or at least prioritize this
view. i don't really know how the industry works in terms of that, i don't want to put all
the onus on screenwriters, but i just think the entire industry needs to start prioritizing
the health of kids. screenwriters, hot take, i think do have a moral obligation. and yes, art
is art, but does it really affect the art to just throw in a condom? anyways, thank you all so much
for watching. let me know in the comments what you think about this and i'll see you guys next time.
i hope you have a lovely rest of your day! bye!
