One of the most common things looked at when portraying youth, and especially young girls is sexuality and sexual desire. As Harris talks about in Future Girl, good girls are girls that don't have sex unless they are in a loving relationship with a boyfriend and they are typically white and upper class. Bad girls are ones that do slutty sexual things with random people or talk about enjoying and having sex and are typically girls of color and lower class. Olive is definitely a can-do girl, she is rich, white, smart, a virgin and has a good family. Olive is the perfect can-do girl until she becomes an at-risk girl by becoming a slut in the eyes of the public. One scene that keeps popping into my head that very strongly connects with the idea that youth is ignorant and makes bad choices is the scene with Olive and her guidance counselor, in this scene the guidance counselor talks to Olive about the rumors she has been hearing and tells Olive that he doesn't know what she is doing and that she obviously wasn't thinking. In this film youth are mostly shown as people whose emotions cannot be taken seriously, however Olive's family does a good job treating Olive as an equal rather than as a child. One of Olive's teachers also did a good job treating her as a person rather than a foolish child, but once she became the school slut he talked to her and told her that she didn't know what she was doing or what she really wanted. Olive is also portrayed as a consumer, as discussed in Producing Girls by Mary Kearney, girls are simply seen as consumers and Olive very easily fits that view. One scene that is used to show this is when Olive goes out to buy new cloths to fit her new persona as the school slut. I think that race and class has a big effect on how the film comes across to the viewers. If Olive was not an upper-class white girl this film would have come across as a negative view of race and the lower-class rather than a humorous look at sex and the rumor mill in high school. As we discussed in class, satire is a great way to look at sex in youth because it makes it easier to see an issue that people don't really want to look at because there is humor involved.
This film mostly just reinscribes discourses surrounding adolescence and slightly challenges them. This films most definitely makes youth look innocent and stupid. The film shows this stupidity as strictly about sex. Olive is a very smart girl and does a good job in school, however when it comes to sex and relationships she knows very little. However the film also shows the guidance counselor as overly sexual and somewhat stupid when it comes to sex. I think that the film is trying to use satire to show that people need more education on sex and that the issue of sex mixed with adolescence is a recipe for disaster.
Brown, Adriane. Class Lecture. Introduction to Youth Studies. Ohio State University, Columbus, OH. 3March 2011.
Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-first Century. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Kearney, Mary Celeste. "Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture."Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-century American Girls' Cultures. New York: New York UP, 1998. 285-306.
