Read Life Moves Pretty Fast: The lessons we learned from eighties movies (and why we don't learn them from movies any more) for Free Online Page A

anyone being in her butt. At first she uses Apatow’s argument, saying that if Juno ‘had the abortion it would be a short movie’, which is a fair point, but it does provoke the response that the screenwriters should either have written a less improbable scenario in which that particular woman would keep the baby, or they should have been more deft at dealing with the woman’s reason for not having the abortion. Page’s voice rises a little when she adds: ‘And at least we say the word abortion,’ suggesting she knows that’s a pretty weak argument.
    But the problem isn’t that Juno had the baby, I say. It is that she decides not to have the abortion because of something a pro-life protester said.
    ‘Ohhhh, I see, that’s a good point,’ Page says, sitting back in her chair.
    So how does she feel about the film in light of that perspective?
    ‘Well, I feel like we –’ she begins gamely, before giving up. ‘No, that’s a good point. But it’s funny, I never thought that she responds to the protester but of course you’re right.’
    It would initially seem to make no sense that eighties teen films were so relaxed about sex, especially compared to teen films today. In 1980s America, Aids was ravaging the country, the anti-abortion movement was emerging and Republicans were in the White House. If there was ever a time when pop culture might have tried to scare teenage girls off sex, then the eighties was surely it. Yet instead, eighties teen movies generally make sex look, well, great, even (gasp) for women, while teen movies today make sex look absolutely terrifying, especially for women.
    It would be easy to see this shift as a reflection of the rise of the Christian right and growing conservatism of America, but there is another way of looking at it. Yes, girls in eighties movies joyfully jump into the sack with everyone from Patrick Swayze to Andrew McCarthy, but this looks less cheering when one considers that, offscreen, teenage pregnancy rates were, for the first time in decades, rocketing in the US. The LA Times described the eighties as a ‘greenhouse’ for teenage pregnancies due to a combination of the fraying of unions leading to many teenagers’ parents losing their jobs, budget cuts on afterschool programmes and rising school drop-out rates. Worse, the Reagan administration cut budgets for abortions, health clinics, sex education and birth control programmes. While rates of teen sex were just as high in Europe, rates of teen pregnancy in England were half as high as they were in America because, as the LA Times put it, ‘contraception is far more common [there]’, by which they mean it was easier for teenagers to have access to free contraception thanks to the NHS and health clinics. By 1989, one out of every ten American girls was pregnant before her twentieth birthday.
    So one could argue that teenagers in today’s US teen films aren’t more scared of sex than they were in the 1980s; they’re just being more responsible about it. This attitude shift is reflected in their offscreen behaviour: from 1991 to 2000 the number of teenage pregnancies fell by 50 per cent across the United States, across all demographics. But despite the strenuous efforts of the Christian right and Republican Party, while American teenagers are having sex slightly later than they were in 1988, they are not, in the vast main, abstinent (all politicians would be very depressed if they knew how little what they say affects teenagers’ behaviour). Instead, increased use of contraception accounts for as much as 86 per cent of the decline in teenage pregnancies since 1990. The rise in condom use also means that boys and men are taking more responsibility when having sex. So one could even look at a film such as Twilight and see – beneath the scaremongering and weirdness about sex – a sliver of modern relevance in that Edward, in his own vampiric way, tries to be responsible with Bella and protect her from his