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, ensuring date rape is no longer a joke and girls' desires are celebrated, 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") does not 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.
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.
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Regulating Adolescent Sexuality in U.S. Cinema: From Censorship to Child Pornography Laws 2. Flipping the Heterosexual Script and Race-Based Sexual Stereotypes in Teen Comedies of the 2010s and 2020s 3. Queering Consent: Navigating Performative and Subjective Consent in Queer Teen Films 4. "I Was Not Lolita": Child Sexual Abuse and Children's Agency in The Diary of a Teenage Girl and The Tale 5. The (In)Visibility of Trans Teens: 3 Generations, Adam, and Boy Meets Girl Conclusion: Adolescent Sexuality and the Adult Imagination Filmography Bibliography Index
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)
