Last night, I made the long-suffering Chris go see I love you, Beth Cooper with me. Well, that’s not true. I offered to go by myself, several times. I wasn’t sure he needed to be subjected to a stupid teen romance. But he insisted no no, I’ll go so we found ourselves two adults with four teenage girls in the theatre watching, well, a stupid teen romance.
This will sound like justification but the reason I go is to keep up with teen culture. In South Africa, I even wanted to go see the Hannah Montana movie for the same reason but my friend Abby put her foot down.
Suuuuuure, Jess, admit it, you like cheesy teen flicks.
Okay, some of them are cool.
I love you, Beth Cooper is definitely not a work of art. It had a few moments. But one of the things I’ve been wondering lately is this: “When did romance disappear from teen culture?”
This movie, by its very definition, is meant to be a romance. And it’s true that the two main characters get to know each other and have some romantic moments. But their “romance,” if you can call it that, was pretty dull. By far, the most interesting part of the movie was the subplot, the gay kid getting romanced by two slutty teenage girls out for whatever kicks they could find on graduation night. As we walked away from the theatre, Chris wondered (*spoiler alert*), “Who was that movie meant for? I wonder how many parents would want their teenagers watching a movie with a threesome.”
Well, I can certainly think of a few parents I know who wouldn’t want their kids to see that. But on the other hand, a 17 or 18 year old is still a teenager and doesn’t need parental permission to go see it. And these days, teen culture is, ahem, libertine. In case you didn’t know. And maybe the problem with being libertine is that it kicks romance right out the door and down the street and into another town.
Not that I’m moralizing. I am, after all, something of a libertarian. But still. Libertarian is not libertine, despite attempts by people who aren’t libertarians to define it as such.
So. Beth Cooper’s “romance” was sullied by the norms of adult sexual culture in 2009.
We also watched Juno a couple weeks ago, which came out 2 years ago but was worth the wait. Juno is in an entirely different class of movies than I love you, Beth Cooper. It had character, grit, something worth saying. I found Juno’s reaction to her pregnancy a bit too blase to be realistic (c’mon, any 16-year-old that finds out she’s pregnant is going to have something of a melt down), but once we moved beyond the abortion clinic into the phase of seeking parents to adopt the baby, it was a compelling and moving film.
What’s interesting about films for and about teens these days is the assumption that teens are pretty sexually active. I don’t disagree with that assumption at all, but what I do find odd is the idea that they’re sexually active in the same way adults are. I don’t doubt that there are plenty of teens engaged in casual sex, one-night encounters, etc. But on the other hand, I’m sure there are plenty of teens who have a spark of romance left in them, who believe somehow that you should only have sex with somebody you love. I don’t see many of those teenagers portrayed in movies or on t.v. these days. Juno alludes to this in one of the final lines of the movie, which I can’t remember verbatim, but which goes something like this, “Bleeker turned out to be a pretty good boyfriend. I know it’s not supposed to happen backwards, where you fall in love with somebody after you have their baby and give it up for adoption, but it’s allright that it worked this way for me. Sometimes life is unexpected.” Okay, she didn’t say it like that at all, but that’s the gist of what she meant.
Though I’d like to see more romance in teen culture, romance isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In recent years, I’ve struggled with the y.a. romance novels I read back in the day–Anne of Green Gables, for example. As much as I love L.M. Montgomery’s novels, and as much as I must admit they were staples of my reading fare when I was a teenager and provided foundational principles of love, friendship, and literature in my life, I must also admit that the romance in them has the potential to be destructive to young women’s abilities to be self-aware, self-sustaining, free and equal adults. The idea that we are all meant to be with someone, that there is one soul mate out there that the universe (or, in the case of religious circles, GOD) has destined us for, causes enormous anguish, not to mention propels girls to look for that rather than pursuing their many interests and finding a companion along the way whose goals and morals are compatible but who doesn’t seek their identity in her any more than she seeks her identity in him. Or, in some cases, doesn’t find a companion along the way but nevertheless lives a fulfilling and interesting life.
As I’ve already mentioned before, this is my huge problem with the Twilight series. Isabella Swan loses her entire identity as an independent young woman because she falls in love with Edward Cullen, yet the book presents this as acceptable because they’re *swoon* in love and *swoon* destined for each other.
Malarky.
Yet so many parents, and especially religious parents, swoon (yes, swoon) over those books because Edward and Bella are abstinent.
Well, let me tell ya, the value of abstinence does not substitute for hugely damaging ideas packaged in a compelling tale. The Twilight series takes this notion of destiny and soul mates into an entirely new realm. Sure, Anne of Green Gables contained many morsels of that idea, but Anne (and Emily, L.M. Montgomery’s other compelling character) had intelligence, remarkable fortitude, a conscience, and a will of her own, which no man was going to take from her. Not so Isabella Swan.
If I love you, Beth Cooper represents one end of the teen romance spectrum in 2009 and Twilight represents the other, maybe teen culture doesn’t need an injection of romance after all. Maybe society just needs to redefine what it means by romance.
ually, I’ve been trying to figure out whether I should stick with my Blue Shield of California plan or switch to some other plan. The question has boiled down to this: “Which company is going to screw me over the least?” I know that I’m going to get screwed; but if I can choose the degree of screwedness, I’ll feel a little better about life.
For years, I’ve considered El Paso home. What I love about El Paso: my family, my two best friends and their families, my husband’s family, the gang at 
…is fooling themselves. So Henry Louis Gates Jr., one of the most famous black scholars alive today and a professor at Harvard, had some trouble getting his key in the lock of his Cambridge home. Police arrived to investigate a possible break-in. (Can anybody say racial profiling?) When Gates showed them his i.d. to prove that he owned the home, they arrested him for disorderly conduct. Un-effing-believable.
