Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in Us Movies

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, ensure date rape is no longer a joke, and celebrate girls’ desires, 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＂) fails to 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 serves on the editorial board for Short Film Studies.