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 B

death juice (or something).
    This argument works less well, though, if one looks at the wider culture alongside the facts as well as at the specifics of the films. For a start, and most obviously, if teenagers are, as the figures strongly suggest, leading more responsible sex lives, then it makes no sense for movies to be so hysterical about the subject, suggesting either that all teens are having orgies or telling teenagers that sex will kill them. Fine, films shouldn’t show teenagers shagging in every car on every street corner because, first, the gear stick digging into one’s back is a major turn-off, but also because that’s not how teenagers live today, and they never did. But teenagers also don’t live lives in which if they have sex they are then emotionally damaged, publicly shamed and turned into zombies.
    ‘American movies have become much more conservative since they were in the 1980s, and this is partly because of the international market,’ says film producer Lynda Obst.Profits from China, for example, have grown by over 400 per cent in the past half decade. This then affects what studios feel they can and can’t show onscreen, and one issue they are especially conscious of showing to the increasingly important foreign markets is teenagers having sex and abortions.
    But the morality of American movies isn’t just being determined by the morals of other countries: it also comes from within.
    ‘Teen movies are much more conservative today than they were in the eighties because we’ve gone backwards domestically in terms of cultural attitudes, and studios have reacted to that,’ says Obst. ‘Pressure groups from the right have become much stronger over the past few decades, and this very much affects studios.’
    ‘We’re like lobsters in a tank and don’t notice how the temperature has been changing over the decades because we’re in the pot. Hollywood has followed America in its move to the right and we’re a much more conservative country now than we were then,’ says the editor of Variety , Steven Gaydos.
    This growing conservatism has been very much reflected in America’s attitudes towards teen sex: as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation in the US, Congress authorised $50 million annually to fund abstinence-only education. By 2008, the US government had spent over $1.5 billion on abstinence-only sex education and federal guidance forbade any discussion of contraception except to emphasise its failure rates. Between 2006 and 2008 one in four teenagers in America received abstinence-only sex education with no instruction about birth control; in 1988 only 8 per cent had done so.The Obama administration and Congress have since eliminated two abstinence-only sex education programmes yet thirty-seven states still require sex education that includes abstinence, twenty-six of which stress abstinence is the best method, even though states that teach abstinence-only sex education, such as Mississippi, notoriously have the highest rate of teenage pregnancies. As of 2011, more than half of all women of reproductive age in the US lived in a state hostile to abortion rights, an increase of 31 per cent in just one decade.
    The big teen films today are characterised by brutal and graphic violence in a way they never were in the eighties. In Twilight , the killings are depicted as romantic proof of Edward and Bella’s love for one another as they (Edward, usually) knock off their enemies. In The Hunger Games teenagers kill each other to win a reality TV show. Sex, however, is anathema to these movies: in Twilight it is seen as dangerous, and in The Hunger Games it is an awkward inconvenience. Murder, though, is absolutely fine.
    ‘One big problem is the [US] motion picture ratings system: it is much harder these days on sex than violence and so if you don’t want to get an R rating [the US equivalent of an 18], which would kill the film, but to still attract the kids, you put in violence