Teen Movies by Timothy Shary

Author:Timothy Shary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2005-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

The Sex Craze

Many youth films in the early 1980s began to feature teens engaging in sexual practices, and the majority were decidedly negative in their portrayals, demonstrating the complications of sex, as well as the disappointments, confusions and potential dangers. Youth in these films find themselves involved in sexual activities in one form or another, whether intercourse, foreplay, or the basic negotiation of sexual preferences, and while the majority of these narratives could be characterised as comedies, they also tend to take seriously the stakes of sex.

The most common plot of youth sex films throughout the early 1980s was the quest of teens to lose their virginity. First sex is a classic rite of passage for young adults, and for both genders, sexual practice is often a signifier of adulthood. Before the era of AIDS, the most serious consequences of teen sexual practice were pregnancy, venereal disease and emotional distress. While AIDS was recognized in 1981, its capacity to be spread by heterosexual contact was not publicly understood until the mid-1980s, and not coincidentally, there was a dramatic decline in the number of youth films featuring the loss of virginity after 1986. In fact, with the exception of the parodic Virgin High in 1990, the youth sex-quest film stopped production altogether from 1986 to the mid-1990s. Then when Kids appeared in 1995, the previously playful loss of virginity was portrayed as sinister and as reviled as any crime, although like the depiction of much youth criminality, it also retained a cachet of rebellion.

Few of the early 1980s tales of losing virginity featured any of the potential medical consequences of sex, but most of them did take up emotional issues for their curious characters. To most of the teens in these films, sex was a new dark continent to be explored, and most of them faced certain fears and frustrations in that exploration, yet the majority prevailed in the end with some level of happiness. Nonetheless, few of these films could be said to have capriciously promoted sex for the population they were directed to, if only because the sex act itself was so rarely portrayed in as pleasurable terms as its anticipation.

The 1980 film Little Darlings made the sex-quest plot explicit: two teenage girls at summer camp compete to see who can lose her virginity first. One girl lies about having sex with an adult counselor while the other is greatly aggrieved when she actually has sex with a teenage boy, and the film, like most others after it, reveals the disappointments of first sex for many teens. The next year the more successful Porky’s further capitalised on the group pursuit of first sex from the male perspective, albeit removed to the 1960s. Thereafter, numerous films followed with titles that suggested the salacious manner in which most of the losing virginity sagas would operate: Goin’ All the Way (1981), Private Lessons (1981), The Last American Virgin (1982), Losin’ It (1983), Getting It On (1983), The First Turn-On (1983), Screwballs (1984), The Joy of Sex (1984) and The Wild Life (1984).

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