Last night I had the displeasure of watching "The Secret Life of the American Teen". What looked to me as a very long PSA mixed with one of those lame after school specials, turned out to be the stupidest show on TV for young teens. This show started out as a story about a young teen, Amy, goes away to band camp and has sex with this guy, Ricky, then finds out she's pregnant conveniently right at the beginning of the school year. So right away you think this is a show to educate teens about the dangers of sex and to force religion down their young impressionable throats. That's fine, our teens do need sex education. The problem? The script, the acting, the story lines, are all utterly lame. In fact, I think they're sending the wrong message to our youth.
In last night's episode the focus was on a girl named Grace who was beside herself with guilt because she was convince she killed her dad because she had sex and enjoyed it. I'm not going to even stop and break down how stupid that is. She then goes on to blame the guy she had sex with, who then blames the girl he lost his virginity to. Can you believe that? A guy trying to call the girl a whore because she slept with him, and his reason was because if he didn't have sex in the first place, he wouldn't have wanted more. So the message so far is, don't have sex because you can kill your parents.
Now let's look at the title of the show, The Secret Life of the American Teen. What exactly is the secret life? It can't be having sex because it looks like everyone knows who's doing who...including the parents. We have the lead character, Amy, who since having sex that one time and becoming pregnant looks like she was sucked dry of personality. Plus we have to be clear that she did not enjoy sex! Then we have the character, Adrian, who is suppose to be the slut of the school since she kept saying in one episode, "It's not my fault I like sex!". Let's forget talking about Grace since she's still crying about her dead dad, and forget all the guys too because there is nothing really interesting about them. Well maybe how bad Ben's acting is...He sounds like he's 40 and has the intensity of a rapist. So yeah, there is nothing secret about these teens.
I mean if the point of this show is to teach teens about the dangers of sex, why is it that every scene has them talking about sex. It's nonstop sex talk on this show like that's all teens do. In fact, you could make a drinking game about how many times the word "sex" is said and get very wasted. So their solution to the teen sex epidemic is to show that all teens do is talk about it? It's all very confusing. So first they teach that if you have sex you're going to become pregnant, yet the school slut doesn't have a baby or any STDs. Then they make the deeply religious girl have sex and have her dad die as a punishment. Maybe they'll have her get pregnant to so they can drive home the message that good girls can't have sex because then they'll get pregnant. I guess if you're already a slut, being known as one is your only punishment. Of course for the guys there is no lesson because we still have these double standards when it comes to sex. What's worse is that they don't place a lot of focus on contraceptives. They just like preaching religion and repercussions, and scare tactics are horrible ways to teach teens about important stuff.
Finally let's move on to the "American Teen" part, how is anything they're doing different from the teens across the globe? Shows like Skins and Degrassi have teens doing much wilder things and they're from Britain and Canada. The whole title of this show is just senseless and long. Here's a better title, "The Crusade to Promote Abstinence-Only Education", now that's catchy!
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