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 the film industry now routinely prioritizes consent, ensuring date rape is no longer a joke and girls' desires are celebrated, sexual consent remains a problematic and often elusive ideal. 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 sexual 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, 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 proves we must continue building a more inclusive consent framework that normalizes youth sexual desire and agency with all its complexities and ambivalences.

Book Information
ISBN 9780253065742
Author Michele Meek
Format Paperback
Page Count 240
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press
Weight(grams) 152g