From what I heard from my more attractive peers on the playground,sex was happening,but I’d almost be willing to bet thousands of dollars that it wasn’t sexy sex. From what I remember,it was various accusations of people being intimate in a wide range of public locations:parks,swimming pools,a famous and implausible City 2 Surf incident.
It’s not just the sex that is unrealistic,what about the couture? All these teens wandering around the marble halls of their school in Balenciaga heels and Gucci snoods,with perfect hair and manicures. When I was in high school,I had one “cool” outfit for mufti days and excursions,which was entirely green:green suede shoes (Elvis b-side track),green corduroy pants,green woollen jumper. It was only logical that every time I wore it,bullies would push me into bushes,where I would camouflage perfectly,lost to the human eye until the danger had passed.
It could be that the world of the sexy glamour teen drama is impossible to realise in Australia;that our school system simply strangles anything hot and erotic before it can flourish. Netflix’sHeartbreak High reboot perhaps confirms this. While it’s still noticeably a drama,with heightened stakes and ridiculously fraught plots,it doesn’t showcase Australian teens as fashion-forward,aggressively sexual glamazons. It mostly puts forward the idea that Australian teens swear a whole bunch and do stupid things to amuse themselves,which rings true.
Despite the fact they still cast extremely attractive young adults and wear cool outfits,the storylines are more about friendship fights and rumours about lopsided vaginas,than about scandals in the emerald mines or whatever Gossip Girl was about. What sexy glamour teen dramas forget is that teenagers are mostly ratbags,who do weird things because their brains haven’t finished growing yet and because school is boring.
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In fact,shows likeHeartbreak High are part of a broader trend toward teen dramas that focus on the normal rat children of most high schools.Heartstopper,Sex Education,Derry Girls andPen15 provide a different interpretation of high school and teen culture that’s refreshing and perhaps even empowering for regular teens to watch. If not,they’re at least very funny and entertaining.
I still don’t think we’ll get an episode where a young spindly boy is sad on a bus for no reason,fails a maths test and then goes home to sleep,but maybe that’s OK.
Maybe we want to avoid remembering what it felt like to be generally awkward,wearing tiny shorts because your legs keep growing and being mildly worried about punctuation pop quizzes.
Maybe,to help us forget the horror of our own teen years,we need to see Blake Lively pretending to be a teen girl,worrying about her fashion empire,getting drugged multiple times,selling stories toThe New Yorker and running a newspaper … just normal teen things.