Hey guys welcome back to my channel and today we're going to be talking about a
subject very close to my heart and that is sexualizing adults that play high
schoolers. So my first question is just why!? I get that it's "okay" because the
actors who are playing the teenagers are of age (sometimes), but they're still
playing into some very fucked up male fantasy of wanting to bang underage
women. There was Donna's pole dance in 2001, there was the Glee cast photo shoot
with GQ in 2010, and more recently in Riverdale there was Betty's pole dance
and her cam girl career in 2017. And I can't be the only one that's kind of
freaked out by this. Maybe it's because I'm older and I don't
really understand "teen culture" anymore, but this just really rubs me the wrong
way. Yes Donna's pole dance was supposed to
be a comedic set up for the real punch line which is when she kicks Eric in the face but
that doesn't negate the sexual nature of the first pole dance which was there to
titillate the male viewer. Sure she was in her 20s in the scene, but she's still
playing a high schooler in a show for high schoolers as well as adult men. What
message is descending to people? Same with Betty striptease in Riverdale like
she's supposed to be 16! I'm all for expressing your sexuality openly and
freely, but clearly these setups aren't meant to empower women. Donna does get
her revenge on Eric after she kicks him, and honestly he deserves it for
constantly making remarks about her huge chest. Way to normalize this behavior. The
setup for Betty is that it's a long time serpent ritual. Originally she doesn't
want to perform, but then she has a change of heart and decides to perform a
striptease in front of grown-ass men. Like are we ever gonna talk about her
issues? I mean maybe it's empowering for the character, but clearly she has some
very deep-seated daddy issues. In any case, I don't think adult actors should
be playing teenagers because if the adults were real teenagers and doing the
exact same things, we wouldn't be okay with it. If you want to do high school
role play in the bedroom, that's another thing, but don't go around romanticizing
and normalizing it for a young impressionable audience who might be
coerced into doing some things that they are not ready or want to do. To conclude,
we need to stop sexualizing young people on TV because when we do we become
hypocrites. We say okay to sexualizing teenage girls without ever
really caring about them as people. We say teenage girls are lying when they
say they're depressed or anxious, we don't care about what they like what
their goals are, and what they're interested in. Instead we look down on anything
associated with teenage girls - boy bands, YA novels, fan fiction, or whatever
else they're into. We don't want to see 15 year olds for what they are - awkward
dorky, and uncomfortable. We want women to go from prepubescent child to busty woman
overnight. We need to validate young girls and their awkwardness or else
leave them feeling alienated and alone and with this intense pressure to grow up
I didn't even go into the whole thing about Mila Kunis lying about her age and
honestly I have no problem with her lying about it to get the role, however
after the creators found out about this, they should have changed her dialogue
and made it better suited for a fourteen-year-old girl. There's one episode where
she has to hit on a man who's also dated her mother. She's
constantly getting hit on by older men who are six or more years older than her. How
was this okay? Laurie, Eric's sister portrayed by the late Lisa Robin Kelly,
is constantly slut-shamed throughout the show. However, she's a predator in her own
right as she's dating Kelso who's supposed to be 16 where she's in her 20s
and a college dropout. The more I think about the show the more makes no sense
to me. The characters in That 70 Show barely even go to high school. School is
never a really big part of their lives and when it comes to Riverdale it's more
of a mystery thriller than a high school drama. I feel like they could have made
That 70 Show and Riverdale with the adult actors just playing adults living with
their parents and nothing much would really change about the shows, but of
course for some reason people think it's raunchy and funny when suppose that 16
year-olds talk about their sex lives because the reasons. The most insidious
thing about this trope is that it makes it seem as though young adults
always want to have sex, when in reality they might not have any idea about what
sex even entails. Having adults play teenagers adds to the idea that teenagers
are "asking for it" and "want it". Thus playing into the culture of victim blaming. The
trope also overlooks asexual people and makes it seem as though sex is the
end-all-be-all to being a teenager and thus we create this vicious cycle of
supposed kids on talking about their sex lives because
that's what 30 year old executives think kids talk about and then real kids
thinking that this is what they're supposed to be doing. Let kids just be
kids. Sex is part of growing up, but it's not the only thing about growing up. We
want girls to grow up so fast and I feel like there's a whole genre of
traumatized girls in order to make them seem more adult than they actually are
and that's extremely damaging, but that's for another day.
Thanks like comment and subscribe and I'll see you in the next one