This story is the sixth in a seven-part package about sex ed and sexual health at Menlo. It also appeared in the March 2021 47.4 print edition of The Coat of Arms.

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If you search up “top teen shows” on Google, a myriad of different websites will appear with different recommendations for what your next binge watch should be. You can click through a couple of different articles, but they will all recommend the same few shows: “Riverdale,” “Pretty Little Liars,” “Gossip Girl,” “Vampire Diaries,” “Outerbanks,” “All American,” “Euphoria” and even “13 Reasons Why.” These are shows that promise a juicy high school storyline with racy teenage characters and their frustratingly difficult parents who never seem to understand their volatile teenage angst. Whether the show’s premise is teenage vampires, teenage quarterbacks or teenage murderers, these adolescent-intended TV shows never fail on one aspect: the sex. Usually non-graphic, yet suggestive, sex scenes often make appearances in these teen-centered shows. And while the characters portrayed on the shows are supposed to be young, the actors and producers who generate these sexualized scenes are often not. 

Upper School Counselor Jake Fauver, who teaches the freshman seminar sexual health course, described his concern for the oversimplification of sex in current teenaged-based TV shows. “A lot of what they depict is either unhealthy, or they skipped the consent conversation or it goes really fast and there’s no dialogue. It doesn’t have any of the awkwardness that being intimate with somebody often entails. And, it always has to swirl in a sea of drama and gossip,” Fauver said. He hopes that the sexual health course that students take can allow them to develop a critical eye when watching shows with heavy sex scenes. Fauver described that he’s never believed that the shows should be completely removed or banned, but rather kids should be able to understand why they aren’t realistic. 

Junior Meera Rajagopal expressed her disbelief at the amount of sex scenes that occur in teen-centered shows. “How are these kids in high school? I don’t think it’s normal, the one-night-stands and sexual stuff within friends of friends. It just gets to a point where it’s like, you’re just putting this in the show to talk about sex,” Rajagopal explained. She remarked that she often forgets that she’s watching a teenage-based show until she sees the characters walking through a school hallway. 

Sophomore Reese Weiden detailed the lack of consent she often notices during intimate scenes in TV shows. She noted in particular that many recent Nickelodeon shows that have hit Netflix, such as Victorious, Sam and Cat or iCarly, often have one-off jokes that abruptly have female characters, in particular, force themselves onto the male characters. “I feel like if younger audiences are watching that they might not realize that it’s an issue,” Weiden said. Weiden hit on the double standard that’s seen in many Hollywood TV shows, the difference in the portrayal of consent for men and women. For example, the TV show “Bridgerton” recently had issues with one of the female characters getting dubious consent from her male partner before they had sex, according to Oprah Magazine, creating debate over whether a trigger warning for sexual assault should have been added prior to the episode. Senior Egan Lai asserted that the main issue with most of the sex scenes in television is simply how many of them there are, which can lead to a normalization of an inaccurate portrayal of sex. “There’s an immense amount of [sex scenes] and by making you desensitized to it, you might not place as much importance on whether or not consent is important or not to intimacy,” Lai said. 

Senior Izzy Hinshaw pointed out a particular plotline she often notices in many of the teen-centered dramas: having a character lose their virginity. “I think that sets the standard that you should lose your virginity in high school and, in reality, I don’t think that’s the story for many kids. When you have that standard it can make you feel like you aren’t good enough or experienced enough,” Hinshaw said. 

Fauver also brought up the statistics of high schoolers who have had sex by the time they graduate and pointed out that the number is lower than his students often assume it is. “Usually [students estimate] 70-80% of high schoolers have had sex by the time they graduate when the data shows that it’s 56%,” he noted. “I think there’s just a culture of comparison and assuming that everyone’s doing things because the loudest people are the ones that are,” Fauver explained.