One of the strangest teen series I can remember from my own teenage years was The secret life of an American teenager, which operated for five seasons on what was then the ABC family. It tells the story of 15-year-old Amy, played by Shailene Woodley, who becomes pregnant at the group’s camp and has to face the challenges of a teenage mother. It was created by Brenda Hampton who was also responsible for 7th Heaven. So you can imagine how sex was treated in the show.
Woodley became a household name because of this show, but the actress admitted that she was not really happy with the way the series dealt with teenage sex.
In a revealing profile with Agitation, the 28-year-old actress spoke about how her Saturn year was disrupted and spoke openly about sex and sexuality, which for someone who took her big break on a sex show teenagers, opened a few questions. For Woodley, when she signed in for Secret life it was after reading three episodes, but the contract was for six years. These first three episodes, according to Woodley, corresponded to what she had seen in her real life.
“[Those episodes] they all went home, ”she explains. “I had friends in high school who were pregnant. It was like everything I wanted to send to the world. “
However, as the show continued, he took a pro-abstinence message in which the characters “wore rings of promise, vowed to flee until marriage and shamed those who engaged in sexual intercourse”. The character of Amy was not the sympathetic character who would give a representation to his peers as Woodley thought. Still, she and many other cast members were stuck.
“There were a lot of things that were written in the scripts that were not just me, but a lot of the cast, disagree,” says Woodley. “There were belief systems that were pushed that were different from mine. However, legally, I was stuck there. To date, it’s one of the most difficult things I have ever had to do. So be Secret life made me express my own belief systems more clearly. “
What is so disturbing to me is that as a teenager, who was already receiving poor sex education because of all my Catholic school years, there was never a good balance in the messages regarding adolescent sexuality. “Losing your virginity” has always been treated with such weight, but casual sex right after was the norm. STDs only appeared to emphasize moral failure or to scare people, rather than being a relatively normal part. While ideally people should not receive their only sex education from television (or fanfiction), programs that are aimed at teens should – at the very least – not make them ashamed of sex or present a only means of sexual health to be precise.
Fortunately, we’ve evolved somewhat since then in terms of teen dramas, but the way we approach these issues is still important, as there should be a balance between abstinence and adolescent hypersexualization. Oh wait, it’s called Sex education.
(via Decide, image: ABC family)
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