See recent press for Consent Culture and Teen Films in NPR’s The Academic Minute, The Daily Beast, Ms. Magazine, Jezebel, and more!
Read a review of the book in the peer-reviewed Journal of Children and Media.
Released in 2023, Consent Culture and Teen Films: Adolescent Sexuality in US Movies by Michele Meek chronicles the history of adolescent sexuality in U.S. films. In looking at contemporary teen films, she demonstrates how even films that take consent into account expose flaws in our affirmative consent framework (particularly how it is highly gendered, heteronormative, and cis-centered) , and she highlights how youth sexuality remains so highly regulated in the U.S. that it is often erased.
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.
Reviews
“Meek’s study is revelatory in its understanding of contemporary concerns about sexual consent, ranging from adults’ efforts to regulate children’s sexual knowledge to teenagers’ interests in exploring their sexual identities. The extensive analysis of recent films provides numerous opportunities for reconsidering how the concept of consent is evolving for youth, who are in real life revising fundamental notions of gender, power, and expression.”
—Timothy Shary, author of Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema