Teen Glamour Sex

Teen Glamour Sex
High school is not sexy, enough with the glamour teen dramas
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Patrick Lenton is a writer, journalist, and author living in Melbourne, Australia.
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It’s now a trope as old as time (the ’80s): a whole bunch of hot actors in their mid-20s with pigtails and floppy hair float around their high school doing a whole bunch of sex and drugs and barely a single second of homework.
We saw it in shows such as Beverly Hills 90210 in the ’90s, The OC in the ’00s, and Euphoria and the Gossip Girl reboot today. Television that puts forward the fantastical premise that high school could, in fact, be glamorous, sexy and cool - but not in a weird paedophilia way. That’s why they only cast 30-year-olds to play 16-year-old girls.
There are different types of subgenre within the classic sexy glamour teen drama.
Give me an excursion to Questacon over a trip to the Maldives any day.
You have ultrarich teens, where things are amazing because of the obscene amounts of money they have. Think Gossip Girl and The OC : studying algebra festooned with pearls and catching a private jet to the Maldives, instead of going to Questacon for the school excursion.
You have edgy inner-city dramas, where the gritty urban teens are cool because they live in the Big City, working through drug addictions, eating disorders and polyamory, like the unhappy youth of Euphoria or Degrassi .
Or you have regional variations, such as the UK’s Skins , which envisions a world where teens are interesting because they are very sad and have often been recently hit by a bus.
I get that television doesn’t have to be realistic – if I wanted realism I could simply sit down and watch historical documentaries like The Crown or House of the Dragon . But I have to say, after decades of glamour teens on my television, I’m sick of this trope. When will I see people like me represented in teen dramas? When will one be brave enough to have a whole arc around the mystery of who cut the sex chapter out of Tomorrow When The War Began from the school library?
When I was in high school, I was just a long sack full of elbows, loping from class to class, dreaming of getting home so I could read a book about elves. The most scandalous thing that ever happened at my high school was when a game that a bunch of boys invented called “orange throw” had calamitous consequences for a small year 7 girl, who was rushed to hospital with a bad case of “being knocked out by a thrown orange”. Or the time a teacher quit because students wouldn’t stop calling him “Mr Pants” after he dared to wear a pair of interestingly patterned slacks to school.
From what I heard from my more attractive peers on the playground, sex was happening, but I’d almost be willing to bet thousands of dollars that it wasn’t sexy sex. From what I remember, it was various accusations of people being intimate in a wide range of public locations: parks, swimming pools, a famous and implausible City 2 Surf incident.
Whose experience of high school romance was this sexy? Credit:
It’s not just the sex that is unrealistic, what about the couture? All these teens wandering around the marble halls of their school in Balenciaga heels and Gucci snoods, with perfect hair and manicures. When I was in high school, I had one “cool” outfit for mufti days and excursions, which was entirely green: green suede shoes (Elvis b-side track), green corduroy pants, green woollen jumper. It was only logical that every time I wore it, bullies would push me into bushes, where I would camouflage perfectly, lost to the human eye until the danger had passed.
It could be that the world of the sexy glamour teen drama is impossible to realise in Australia; that our school system simply strangles anything hot and erotic before it can flourish. Netflix’s Heartbreak High reboot perhaps confirms this. While it’s still noticeably a drama, with heightened stakes and ridiculously fraught plots, it doesn’t showcase Australian teens as fashion-forward, aggressively sexual glamazons. It mostly puts forward the idea that Australian teens swear a whole bunch and do stupid things to amuse themselves, which rings true.
Despite the fact they still cast extremely attractive young adults and wear cool outfits, the storylines are more about friendship fights and rumours about lopsided vaginas, than about scandals in the emerald mines or whatever Gossip Girl was about. What sexy glamour teen dramas forget is that teenagers are mostly ratbags, who do weird things because their brains haven’t finished growing yet and because school is boring.
In fact, shows like Heartbreak High are part of a broader trend toward teen dramas that focus on the normal rat children of most high schools. Heartstopper , Sex Education , Derry Girls and Pen15 provide a different interpretation of high school and teen culture that’s refreshing and perhaps even empowering for regular teens to watch. If not, they’re at least very funny and entertaining.
I still don’t think we’ll get an episode where a young spindly boy is sad on a bus for no reason, fails a maths test and then goes home to sleep, but maybe that’s OK.
Maybe we want to avoid remembering what it felt like to be generally awkward, wearing tiny shorts because your legs keep growing and being mildly worried about punctuation pop quizzes.
Maybe, to help us forget the horror of our own teen years, we need to see Blake Lively pretending to be a teen girl, worrying about her fashion empire, getting drugged multiple times, selling stories to The New Yorker and running a newspaper … just normal teen things.
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