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Oversexualizing Teenagers

Teen Dramas

By Alexandrea CallaghanPublished 11 months ago 3 min read
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Teen dramas are and have always been a popular genre. Some of them, like Dawson’s Creek, go about their characters' romances in an honest and somewhat wholesome way. Others (and this is unfortunately the majority) like One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, Riverdale and most recently Euphoria have a habit of oversexualizing their teenage characters. Now this is wildly problematic for so so many reasons but the strongest of which is that this leads to real life consequences.

Shows like Euphoria that use actual nudity are kept from being categorized as child pornography by a slim technicality. Yes the actors portraying these characters are of a legal age, however the characters they are playing are minors…any grown man on the production team or crew that thinks that it's okay to depict CHILDREN having sex with full nudity needs to be locked up immediately. Riverdale has this same problem on a slightly smaller scale, as they do not actually make their actresses fully strip. They use classic CW nudity, One Tree Hill falls under this category as well. And that is also a problem. Portraying young women (even of age women) as minors committing sexual acts is inherently and undeniably disgusting, and immoral. These grown men producers skirt the legality line with practiced hands.

This phenomenon also gives creepy old men license to live out their creepy fantasies. Let's be clear that there is never ever, ever a reason for a grown man to write, direct or film young women in their underwear or in the case of Euphoria, completely naked. It has never once served the story, or furthered the characters. I’ve thoroughly watched Riverdale, One Tree Hill and Gossip Girl and the sex scenes are always a waste of time. It's filler that doesn’t need to be there and the allusion is always enough. We know what’s happening when they start making out BEFORE the clothes come off. No one needs to see it.

And the biggest problem with the way these shows are handled is that it opens powerless young women up for abuse. Now that the girls of One Tree Hill are opening up about their time on the show we now know how uncomfortable they felt. The thing with teen dramas is that they almost always star young actors that don’t have established careers yet. Which in turn means that the director and the producer hold far more power then they ever should. This power was 100% for sure abused on the set of One Tree Hill where the women were made to feel like they couldn’t speak up when they were being propositioned and preyed on. We’ve all heard some shady things about Sam Levinson (the creator of Euphoria) as well. Whether or not he’s actually done anything to his actors is almost irrelevant because his actions through the development of his show are enough that we as a public need to stop giving him a platform. Though we have not heard anything about the power dynamics on the set of Riverdale, we generally don’t hear about this kind of abuse until the actors are out of harm's way, which means the show has to end first.

The conclusion is simple, there is no reason why teenage characters ever need to be shown having sex. It opens the door to too many real life problems as well as solidifying creepy societal behaviors from grown men that never went to therapy. And anyone who takes part in something like this needs to be fired immediately. Hollywood had the illusion of healing with the me too movement but the reality is that nothing changed and we need to do better.

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About the Creator

Alexandrea Callaghan

Certified nerd, super geek and very proud fangirl.

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  • Mark Sams11 months ago

    Brave and very unpopular stance. Absolutely correct, i have turned off several shows recently for this reason.

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