It seems from the moment the phrase "high school" is thrown into a movie pitch at any blockbuster studio producer's office, a drive to turn it into a sensationalized exposé of adolescent stereotypes is aroused in every industry executive with an office on Santa Monica Blvd.
The teen-flick industry has always capitalized on one very odd, occasionally controversial, and always humorous constant: teenagers have a hell of a lot of inconsequential and casual sex.
For centuries adolescence in western society has gone hand-in-hand with a loss of innocence. It's an age where childhood naiveté gives in to the horrors of puberty and inevitable maturation.
An emerging concept of "teenagedom" over the last few decades has accompanied a brave new world of adolescent sexuality. The cultural notion of 'high school' has become a whole new sexual platform, and nearly every Hollywood production featuring characters in their senior or junior year makes some effort to reflect the high school social hierarchy in the sexual exploits of the protagonist.
Teams of poorly-paid studio writers have created their own fantastical high school world, re-enacting their adolescent days with a new sensationalized edge. Creating character types, from "jocular", to the more recent brand of "emo" (which, in this broadband age, has already become antiquated) has become just one more method by which the adult world lives vicariously through the lives of their youth.
It seems that in our youth-obsessed society, anything recalling memories of the good old days of hedonistic senior year experimentation triggers an automatic reminiscence of a 'carefree' and 'guilt-free' time.
Somehow this has left a severely altered memory of high-school - one that paints teenage boys as hormone-driven sloths (which is actually not to far from the truth) and girls as abstinent perfectionists.
This over-simplified high school model operates on a grid according to how often any given teenager is getting laid. Of course complying with other societal norms, whoever coined this system created an inverse relationship between girls and their male counterparts, with the former prizing abstinence and the latter going for anything but.
But do these stereotypes properly reflect the amount of sex western teens are having? According to a study commissioned by the Guttmacher institute, only 46% of teens between the ages of 15 to 19 have ever had "sex".
The concept of what constitutes 'sex' blurs the statistics even further, as sexually active teenagers have learned more about sex and its consequences from Brentwood-based actors than local sex education programs.
Misguided adult involvement, especially such intended to entertain Freudian curiosities, has been instrumental in screwing with our generation's attitudes and knowledge of sex. Social pressure, peer pressure, hormones, and the new tug-of-war between popularity based on getting laid and family-friendly abstinence, has pitched teens into a battleground over what to do with their bodies.
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