by KATIE JGLN
Down the rabbit hole of this increasingly common phenomenon
A few days ago, I started watching the second season of Euphoria. It’s the latest HBO coming-of-age TV series.
And just like any other teen drama — think Skins, Degrassi, 90210 or Gossip Girl — it depicts heartbreak, drug use, mental illness, sexual exploration, and a lot of underage sex. Nothing new there.
But unlike all these other shows, I found it to be a deeply uncomfortable watch.
While all the actors who have sex scenes are at least 23 years old, the characters they play are 16 or 17 years old. And many of them, especially the female ones, are hypersexualised to the point it feels wrong to watch it. But this hypersexualisation is more than just characters having sex — it’s also how they act, talk, present themselves, and how they are viewed by others — including adults.
The result?
An exacerbated, violent and even perverse adolescent sexuality.
While hypersexualised images of young women have been commonplace in mainstream media for a while now, lately, it seems like the entertainment industry tries to push back the boundaries of young girls and sex.
How exactly is this phenomenon of hypersexualisation of teenage girls expressed? Why does it exist in the first place?
And how can we fight against it?
Some female teen characters exist only to be objectified
There’s a fine line that Euphoria has tried to walk since its inception. It’s between criticising the male gaze — which portrays women and girls in an over-sexualised way — and glorifying it.
But lately, it seems like its writers fell into the trap of the latter.
And no other character represents this better than Cassie, played by Sydney Sweeney. She’s your typical teen girl, emotionally vulnerable and constantly battling the need for male validation. Many have been in Cassie’s place — myself included — only to realise later in life that tying one’s self-worth with male approval is ridiculous. And damaging.
But in the show’s newest season, her relatable and nuanced personality is completely abandoned. And instead, she is reduced to a Lolita-esque prop who cannot be described beyond taste adjectives like juicy, yummy or something equally as gross.
Whenever she is shown having sex — which is practically all of the time — Cassie is almost always fully nude. Although the show includes both male and female nudity, the camera often follows the female characters’ bodies in a way resembling the codes of pornography.
Cassie is no longer your relatable teenage character. She is purely there to cater to a male fantasy. She is a man’s conquest. A sex goddess. And also a 16 or 17 years old girl.
Now, there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that teenagers have sex and that they’re sexual beings. This isn’t the problem at all.
But it’s one thing to create a TV show that explores the sex lives of teens in a realistic and even informative way — a great example of this is Netflix’s series Sex Education. And entirely another to cater to the very gaze that has, in popular culture, made out teen girls to be far older, more mature, and therefore fair game for sexual attention from everyone.
To put it simply, the problem lies in both hypersexualising and adultifying underage girls.
And that’s, sadly, not an unusual thing in the mainstream media.
We keep forcing girls to become adults way before their time
In 2017, Millie Bobby Brown — actress best known for her role on the TV series Stranger Things — was named one of the sexiest TV stars by W magazine.
Guess how old was she when that happened. Go ahead. You’ll probably be way off anyway.
Ready?
She was 13 years old.
For a long time now, teen girls have been some of the most heavily objectified people both on-screen and in real life, which feeds into a larger narrative of paedophilic culture. Just think about Shirley Temple, Brooke Shields, Britney Spears, Natalie Portman, Miley Cyrus, and many other female celebrities when they were underage.
Whether you’re looking at TV shows, movies, ads or music videos, young girls are frequently portrayed on screen as objects with little to no other purpose than being sexually appealing for male pleasure. Yes, even when it comes to children’s TV. One study found that sexualising content appears on average 24 times per children’s program, and 72% of it targets young female characters.
So what happens when little girls are constantly exposed to sexually motivated young women in media?
Well, they begin to think that they have to conform to this standard. That they, too, exist only as an aesthetic object. And that to be noticed and loved and thriving in a heteronormative, male-dominated society, they have to be both sexy and sexually available.
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