The American Film Industry's Obsession with  
and Sexualization of the Teenage Girl 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

by 

Anwen P. Jones 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A THESIS 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Presented to the Department of Cinema Studies  
and Robert D. Clark Honors College 

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of  
Bachelor of Arts 

 
November 2025 

  



 
 

2 

An Abstract of the Thesis of 

Anwen Jones for the degree of Bachelor of Arts  
in the Department of Cinema Studies to be taken December 2025 

 
 

Title: The American Film Industry’s Obsession with and Sexualization of the Teenage Girl 
 
 
 

Approved:  Alissa Phillips, Instructor   
     Primary Thesis Advisor 

 

This thesis will analyze the ways in which the United States entertainment film industry 

has sexualized and exploited the feminine teenage body by discussing the origin of the term 

“teenager” and its consequential subject study in film within the United States post-WWII, as 

well as the beginning of the obsession over the teenage girl in cinematic media through Stanley 

Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of the novel Lolita, originally written by Vladimir Nabokov. It 

will also dissect the satirization of the genre of “coming of age” starring female protagonists, 

such as Mean Girls (Mark Waters, 2004), The DUFF (Ari Sandel, 2015), and Easy A (Will 

Gluck, 2010). It will then contrast these representations of female protagonists against those of 

boys coming of age as another means of highlighting how teenage girl life portrayal in Western 

cinematic media is used for the ridiculing and othering of real teenage girls. Next, it will go into 

how mental illness in young girls is portrayed and romanticized, both through original directorial 

intent and unintended audience perceptions, with films such as Girl, Interrupted (James 

Mangold, 1999) and The Virgin Suicides (Sofia Coppola, 2000)1 which focus on deteriorating 

mental health in young women. Finally, this thesis will explore a newer wave of veridical 

 
1 Note that all release dates in references are based on their continental U.S release and not their first ever premiere. 



 
 

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representation of being a teenage girl, such as Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017), The Edge of 

Seventeen (Kelly Fremon Craig, 2016), and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015), 

why this new wave is a huge positive change in media representation, and how we can continue 

this trend. My goal for this thesis is to function as an academic work that can be used to stimulate 

new filmic products which carry a focus of depicting teenage girls and their intricate ways of life 

without satirization, dramatization, or unnecessary sexualization. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Acknowledgments 

 Throughout all stages of the creation of this thesis, I have received a tremendous amount 

of assistance and feedback that have helped consider multiple perspectives and contexts when 

approaching a substantial topic such as this.   

 I would like to first extend my gratitude to my primary advisor, Alissa Phillips, for her 

guidance throughout the entire process, as well as for her council and encouragement outside of 

any thesis work. I would also like to thank my secondary and academic advisor Professor 

Corinne Bayerl for making it her goal to see that I succeed in the academic world in all possible 

ways and for serving as an extremely insightful secondary reader. 

 I would also like to extend my thanks to dear friends Grace Grady and Mercedes 

Pignataro for their consistent feedback and reviewal of my work as well as for their support 

during my frenzied fits of doubt and literary madness.  

 Finally, it is imperative that I thank all of those who have worked and are working 

towards the eradication of the exploitation, sexualization, and abuse of women, men, and 

children, inside and outside of the entertainment industry. In a world so entrenched in darkness 

and abuse, it is thanks to you all that we can feel a glimmer of hope and safety. 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Table of Contents 

Introduction: Importance                   6 

Literature Review                   8 

Origin of the “Teenager”                             10 

 The Teenpic                        10   

 Lolita                                                   13 

Coming of Age                 20 

 Satire                  20 

 The Female Protagonist                23 

 The Male Protagonist                                       28 

Teenage Girls and Mental Health                    33 

A New Era                  42 

Conclusion                         52 

Bibliography                   54 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Introduction: Importance 

Film as an art industry existed for seven years before the Hays code, a “moral set of 

guidelines,” was put into place in 1934. During those seven glorious years, American movies 

depicted women as people, who enjoyed drinking, smoking, sex without being objects of sex, 

and being in power above men. After the establishment of the Hays code, which was used by 

Hollywood studios from 1934 through 1968 and prohibited things such as profanity, nudity, 

suggestive body movement and language, discussion of sex, and graphic/realistic violence, film 

became more inherently political and tied with the politics of sex. After 1968 the Hays code was 

replaced by the MPAA (Motion Picture Association) film rating system, which is the system we 

know today that shows the rating of the film before the picture plays. This includes “G” for 

general audiences (suitable for all audiences), “PG” for parental guidance (generally fine but 

may contain materials parents don’t want their children seeing), “PG-13” for parental guidance 

and teenager (has material unsuitable for pre-teenagers), and “R” for restricted (must be 18 or 

older to view).  

One example of the unfortunately rich history between the film industry and sex as 

politics in exchange for success would be Shirley Temple, who had performed in 29 films by the 

age 10 and in most of these films she is dressed in uncomfortably exposing clothing and handled 

by grown men and was pedophilically described by reviewers. When she met with producers for 

movie roles, they would attempt to coerce her to perform sexual deeds, such as Freed’s 

inappropriate exposure (Handy, 2014).  

Since the establishment of film as a sexually political industry, it has been important to 

the men running it that the female body must be put down and controlled. This urge for control 

really came into its own established subcategory of sexualization of the young and teenage girl 



 
 

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with Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 adaptation of the Russian born writer Vladimir Nabokov’s novel 

Lolita. Since that creation, there has been a steady trend of the sexualization and ridiculing of the 

teenage girl which still bleeds into today's cinema. It is especially important now to understand 

how those who are in positions of power within the industry, such as (but not limited to) 

producers or directors, do this in order to dismantle this system which is growing worse by the 

day.  

With the American presidential election of 2024, men have felt more comfortable with 

speaking in ways that encourage and support violence against women. If the long-lasting trend of 

sexualization intertwined with violence of women in film continues, both filmic depictions and 

real actions of violence will only grow worse as the people in charge grow bolder in their hatred 

for women. It will continue to reflect and worsen societal views of women. The more we as 

people see negative representation of women, the more people believe it to be true, especially 

young women who have not had a chance to be someone yet, to see how great they can be. We 

cannot change the link between film and politics, but we can change how the politics work. I 

believe that changing the narrative into something empowering and positive for young girls can 

help us battle these future years of misogyny by creating a space where it is safe to share, 

authentically, the female experience.  

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Literature Review 

In film scholarship, there is an abundance of literature reviewing the basic sexual nature 

of watching film, as well as gender and sex theory naturally displayed within film. To understand 

the processes and habits of the sexualization of young girls within film, it is helpful to know how 

it is done in society and then translated over to film. Laura Mulvey’s 1975 essay book, Visual 

Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, upholds a large portion of gender and sex theory that is still 

commonly taught. Most importantly, Mulvey developed the theory of the male gaze (841), which 

is the perspective of a typical heterosexual male in Western society becoming embodied in the 

audience for film and is meant to objectify and sexualize the female body. Similarly, the term 

scopophilia (835), also referred to as looked-at-ness, is the concept that one can either gain 

pleasure from looking or from being looked at, especially through the male gaze. Within 

scopophilia, there is the act of voyeurism (840), a concept originally coined by Sigmund Freud, 

in which one gains pleasure from looking. Then there is phallocentrism (833), the concept that 

there is a privileging of the masculine in our patriarchal society, and this is done by introducing 

the phallus-less woman to reassure the power of the man. In society, the phallus is power, so in 

Western society the identifying part of the male body, the penis, is proof of phallus. The concept 

of castration, that is losing one’s phallus, combines phallocentrism and voyeurism to create the 

mirror phase (836). The mirror phase is the point of childhood in which the child recognizes the 

figure in the mirror as the “self” and begins comparing it to others, most importantly their mother 

figure. In comparing the self to the mother figure, the child realizes they either reflect their 

mother’s body and are phallus-less or notice the difference between self and mother and has 

phallus. The latter then grows castration anxiety (840) from this visual trauma and feels they 

must protect their phallus by sexualizing the other (female) body. E. Ann Kaplan further builds 



 
 

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upon Mulvey’s theories in her 1983 book Is the Gaze Male? It is within this text that she pushes 

the critical theories developed by Mulvey further into the realm of film as the embodiment of the 

male gaze and implied sex from films looked-at-ness. Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner’s 

collection Critical Readings: Media and Gender also builds off of critical feminist theory, 

mostly explored above in Mulvey’s text, and how it has shaped phallocentric, that is male run, 

society in the Western world. The analyses in this thesis, are based on the theoretical framework 

of these three fundamental studies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Origin of the “Teenager” 

The Teenpic 

Post-WWII Hollywood was struggling to stay afloat. As suburbia grew rampant 

throughout the United States, people had less and less initiative to drive out to theaters. 

Hollywood had to find ways to reel them in, and one such way said reeling was done was 

through the creation of the teenager and the 1950’s genre of the “Teenpic.” A new established 

genre created a whole new culture of targeting and isolating youths that would continue to thrive 

well into modern society and was also extremely pertinent as to how “new” films would be 

made. The early films of this genre presented youths amongst each other, participating in school 

dances, social gatherings, smoking, drinking, listening to unruly music, and ultimately at odds 

with their parents or other authority figures in their lives. With films such as Rebel Without a 

Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955), The Wild One (László Benedek, 1953), and Rock, Rock, Rock! 

(Will Price, 1956).  Hollywood had effectively created and singled out a new audience that 

became captivated by the onscreen representation of their wild emotions and behaviors.  

Having received positive feedback from their new audience, Hollywood continued to 

produce the Teenpic. With the new age category of “teenager” cemented into American culture, 

the term officially coined by advertising executives (namely Eugene Gilbert) eager to sell to a 

new audience (Digital Public Library of America) in the 1940’s, a new sort of mirror phase 

(Mulvey 836) occurred. Once again, a confusion surrounding what the “self” is had occurred, 

and teenagers began to try and find pieces of themselves in pop culture, which heavily relied 

(and continues to rely) on entertainment systems, namely Hollywood. Teenagers were inspired 

by films made about and for them, and they began to take on the personalities presented in such 



 
 

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films. What they did not realize, however, is that the bodies and experiences being constructed in 

these films are rarely ever someone’s reality. Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner’s collection 

Critical Readings: Media and Gender presents the argument that “The media are instrumental in 

the processes of gaining public consent. Media texts never simply mirror or reflect ‘reality’ but 

instead construct hegemonic definitions of what should be accepted as ‘reality’” (Carter and 

Steiner 2). Essentially, Carter and Steiner make the argument that media, in this case films, 

create a reality that is just believable enough so that the consumer, or viewer, believes that the 

fictitious truths presented to them must be applicable to their own lives. There is a purposeful 

duping occurring so that those controlling the media can ultimately influence or control those 

consuming.  

American teenagers felt a new sense of independence and individuality through rebellion, 

sexual dancing, and driving fast cars (Wiseman 9). What teenagers failed to realize that they did 

not create that individuality themselves. Rather, it was purposely constructed by Hollywood in 

order for entertainment institutions to have new ways to create a revenue. Carter and Steiner 

further argue that these manipulations are not perfect; rather, “There are ideological seams 

through which leak out evidence of flaws in the system and of the politically constructed nature 

of hegemonic ideology” (Carter and Steiner 3). So, yes, Hollywood did create the concept of the 

teenager and shaped their behavior. Eventually, though, these teenage consumers took it a step 

further. Rather than learning from the lessons presented in Teenpics, such as perseverance and 

communication, teenagers found themselves to be more than hopeless and misunderstood, 

leading to an era of isolation and misbehavior. The situation of the teenager was deemed so dire 

that the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation at the time, J. Edgar Hoover, published 



 
 

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an FBI report2 stating, “the nation can expect an appalling increase in the number of crimes that 

will be committed by teenagers in the years ahead” (Thompson, 2018). This is an unintentional 

side effect created by Hollywood, an unconscious reaction from the teenagers in a misguided 

attempt to feel a release from negative emotions and a very new disconnect from a society that 

now says they are ill-willed – something that had not been experienced by previous generations – 

with seemingly no solution. While this effect was, again, unintended by Hollywood, it also 

provided an opportunity to create a solution: further control and isolation through the sexing of 

media.  

It is important to understand that a majority of the Teenpics created throughout the 

1950’s were based around male protagonists who could be partnered with female romantic and 

sexual interests. These films were being created for a semi-non-sexual male gaze (Mulvey 841), 

or rather a male experience that can involve, but is not centered around, romance and sex with 

the opposite sex. Similar connections could be made with same-sex relationships, but these must 

remain implicit as the Hays Code forbade “sex perversion,” an outdated terminology for 

homosexuality. Such an example can be seen in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) between the 

characters Jim Stark (James Dean), Judy (Natalie Wood), and John ‘Plato’ Crawford (Sal Mineo) 

in which Jim and Judy grow romantically and sexually attracted to each other while Plato, 

although never explicitly stated, grows a romantic infatuation towards Jim. Plato is, of course, 

killed at the end of the film, leaving Jim to mourn their intimate friendship born from their 

connection of being rejected by their families.  

 
2 The official article is not currently accessible by the general public. 



 
 

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With teenagers perceived to be quickly growing out of control, thanks to Hoover and 

President Dwight Eisenhower’s echoing of Hoover’s claims, Hollywood needed to create another 

way to shape and guide teenagers to keep them as a valued consumer. Although the Hays Code 

was still in motion, Hollywood grew increasingly creative in order to keep the attention of their 

pubescent audience. While Teenpics did contain the male gaze (Mulvey 841), as it is complicit 

with the heterosexual male experience – again, the only acceptable sexual experience of the era –

, it was time to take it a step further and once again base films around the gaze and not just male 

experiences, that is to base a teenage depiction in film through a phallocentric scopophilia 

(Mulvey 833 and 835).  

Lolita 

On September 15th of 1955, Russian born novelist Vladimir Nabokov officially published 

his work Lolita, following the twisted obsession of Humbert Humbert towards the 12-year-old 

daughter, Lolita/Dolores (henceforth referred to as Lolita for convenience), of his latest 

marriage. The book describes Humbert as a clear-cut pedophile who is attempting to hide his 

dark perversion through his merit as a poet, describing and defending his attraction with flowery 

language. The opening lines read: “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-

lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the 

teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She 

was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores in the dotted line. But in my arms 

she was always Lolita” (Nabokov 1).  

Although Nabokov was looking to publish Lolita in the United States of America, 

publishing houses rejected his novel as most found the content to be controversial and repulsive 

considering the moral censorship that was in place during the era. He eventually worked with 



 
 

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Olympia Press, a Paris based publishing house with a reputation for publishing sexual and 

borderline pornographic literary works. It is important to note that, at the time of making a 

contract, Nabokov was unaware of the Olympia Press’ reputation (Bauman Rare Books, 2013). 

The novel was received with mixed reviews, with some considering it obscene, some considering 

it a tragic tale, and some considering it a masterpiece. Nabokov himself stated that Lolita is a 

tragedy that clearly displays child abuse and child sexual assault. In fact, Nabokov wrote to 

Maurice Girodias3, “Lolita is a serious book with a serious purpose. I hope the public will accept 

it as such.”  

Vladimir Nabokov himself was a victim of such perversion. He recalls uncomfortable 

moments with his uncle Vasily Rukavishnikov (commonly referred to as Ruka) in his memoir 

Speak, Memory4: “When I was eight or nine, he would invariably take me upon his knee after 

lunch…fondle me, with crooning sounds and fancy endearments, and I felt embarrassed for my 

uncle by the presence of the servants and relieved when my father called him from the 

veranda…” (Nabokov 68). He describes that these sort of behaviors from Ruka continued for 

another four years and, although the term of abuse was never explicitly stated, it is 

understandable and widely believed by literary academics that the attraction his uncle had 

towards Nabokov can be described as pedophilic. Later within the memoir, Nabokov describes 

how he picked up Ruka from a train station at age 11, only to be received by the words “How 

sallow and plain you have become, my poor boy.”  Once Nabokov was 15, Ruka declared him to 

be his heir and then coldly sent him away, no longer displaying any attraction. Nabokov would 

 
3 The man who suggested Nabokov use the Olympia Press, as well as the founder of said publishing house. 
4 First published in 1951 and then revised and republished in both 1966 and 1979. The 1966 version is referenced 
here. 



 
 

15 

be unable to enjoy his newfound richness due to the Russian revolution of 1917, completely 

devaluing the ruble and forcing Nabokov into exile.  

These events are paralled within Lolita; Humbert finds Lolita once again when she is 17, 

and she is married and pregnant. Humbert describes her to be pale, unattractive, and leaves her 

with a large sum as a gift for her marriage. Soon after, Lolita dies in childbirth. Because Lolita 

was no longer a child when he rediscovers her, Humbert cannot find an attraction towards her, 

solidifying his status as a pedophile. With this context, it is clear to see Nabokov wrote this book 

as an exposé and forsaking of pedophilic attraction and to bring awareness to the victims, such as 

himself, of such perpetrators. While Lolita is not the only or first time Nabokov has addressed 

child abuse and child sexual assault, it is the most acknowledged example and, consequently, the 

most misunderstood and misconceived.  

Such misunderstandings would only become more common with Stanley Kubrick’s 1962 

adaptation of the novel. Highly acclaimed by critics, Kubrick’s adaptation misses the point of the 

original novel and replaces the condemnation of pedophilia with the normalization and even 

acceptance of it. Kubrick had read the original novel and proclaimed it to be a masterpiece, but 

he described it as such: “To me, ‘Lolita’ seemed a very sad and tender love story.”  Kubrick was 

inspired and set about adapting the novel, asking Nabokov, who previously rejected any offers 

for adaptation, to write the script for him. After certain rights were negotiated, Nabokov 

complied.  

The first draft was a 400-paged script of which Nabokov took great pride in, but Kubrick 

requested that it be cut down for a much shorter runtime. Kubrick took the edited script and enter 

production for a two-year period in which almost all communications between him and Nabokov 

were essentially defunct. In fact, the next time Nabokov were to learn about the film adaptation 



 
 

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was during its 1962 premiere in New York, and he was left disappointed in the result as only 

scraps of his script were used. While Nabokov was rewarded with the title of screenwriter, very 

little of what he actually wrote influenced Kubrick’s final piece.  

Along with the general rejection of Nabokov’s script, Kubrick made two other large 

changes to Lolita (1962). First, he changed Lolita’s age from 12 to 14, making Humbert a 

hebephile rather than a pedophile since Lolita is experiencing puberty. Second, he removed all 

explicit sexual scenes, although the film maintained an “R” rating. Both of these changed would 

become exceedingly detrimental for the understanding of Nabokov’s original Lolita. 

Again, by changing Lolita’s age to 14 rather than 12, Kubrick turned her into a girl late 

into puberty rather than pre-pubescent as described by the novel. By removing her status as pre-

pubescent, Kubrick also removed the potential danger associated with depicting a pre-pubescent 

girl in a sexual nature on-screen. Thanks to the era of the Teenpic that took place shortly before 

the movie was made, the idea of a sexualized teenage girl was no longer foreign, and thus Lolita 

being 14 and being the center of someone’s sexual desires, even if it is an adult man, also 

becomes less taboo. Similarly, in the Teenpic, girls experiencing puberty also desire sexual 

experiences themselves and experience scopophilia, as seen with Judy’s character in A Rebel 

Without a Cause as she dresses sexually to garner attention from her father and later replaces that 

need with attention from Jim. Although this trope is established through a male gaze, it 

nonetheless set a precedent for future films that move outside of the category of the Teenpic. 

Kubrick taking advantage of this development and sets a new precedent, one in which the body 

of the teenage girl can and will be the object of desire for heterosexual men, the new center of 

the male gaze in films exploring racy themes.  



 
 

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Similarly, the removal of explicit sex scenes between Lolita and Humbert minimizes the 

damage done, although this was partly in compliance with the Hays code. In Nabokov’s Lolita, 

these scenes are explicit as they are important in highlighting the violence of sexual assault 

against children. These scenes, in the novel, are not romanticized, they are not insinuated, but 

rather they are told directly from the point-of-view of the assaulter with his actions remaining 

clearly violent. His kidnapping, brainwashing, and repeated sexual assault of his stepdaughter are 

not ignored but rather told like they are an achievement. The descriptions of Lolita also remain 

important here, especially the physical descriptions to remind the reader how small she is and 

how damaging the abuse thus is. In fact, little about Lolita is shared except for the ways in which 

Humbert wants to and does abuse her. Although Humbert tends to use flowery language, the 

reader, ultimately, can still clearly see the unyielding brutality committed by him. Because the 

scenes remain explicit, the actions can be condemned and clearly placed into the category of 

violence. In Nabokov’s script, Humbert’s acts against Lolita are explicitly claimed, but Kubrick 

ignores these bites of vicious reality. Once Kubrick had removed these explicit examples of 

sadism, it becomes possible for Humbert to defend it because the viewer is not totally exposed to 

his evilness. Humbert becomes a narrator with a romantic notion, a sexual attraction towards 

Lolita that, in his eyes, is responded to very well by the victim herself. It is insinuated that the 

scenes still occur, but without any depictions of violence, it becomes easier for the viewer, and 

Humbert himself, to separate the act of his assault from being a violent act. If it is not explicitly 

shown, he cannot be explicitly accused. Thus, the viewers almost become inclined themselves to 

defend him, influenced by previous sexualizations of teenaged bodies and setting in stone the 

fate of the female teenage body, both depicted on screen and the body in real life.  



 
 

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Sue Lyon, the face of Lolita in Kubrick’s adaptation, was also 14 when filming was 

conducted. When the film premiered in theaters, Lyon was 15 and was unable to watch it herself 

because of its “R” rating. New York Times journalist, Bosley Crowther, reviewed Lyon in the 

film as such: “She looks to be a good 17 years old, possessed of a striking figure and a devilishly 

haughty teenage air” (Crowther, 1962). It was obvious that those who watched Kubrick’s Lolita 

did not view Lyon’s same-named character as a young child, but rather an older girl, although 

still underaged, who could handle a sexual affair. Again, her body, or rather the teenage female 

body, had become the main object of the male gaze in the entertainment industry. Similarly, the 

photo-op for the film, in which she is wearing a bikini and heart shaped sunglasses while sucking 

on a lollipop, fueled the fire for male objectification of pubescent bodies and further absolved 

guilt of hebephilia. This photoshoot was directed by Kubrick and his producer James Harris. 

Although nothing final has been determined, it has been insinuated by multiple on-set reports 

that Harris and Lyon spent a lot of time alone together during the filming of Lolita and the other 

later projects. In 2020, childhood friend of Lyon and singer of The Mamas and The Papas, 

Michelle Phillips told journalist Sarah Weinman that Lyon and Harris had engaged in a sexual 

relationship since the start of Lolita’s filming (Fenwick 1787). Harris has denied these claims 

and Lyon had died the year previous to the interview. While Lyon, obviously, could not speak on 

this, she did state in 1996 that, “My destruction as a person dates from that movie. Lolita 

exposed me to temptations that no girl of that age should undergo. I defy any pretty girl who is 

rocketed to stardom at 14 in a sex nymphet role to stay on a level path thereafter” (Marianne 

Macdonald, 1996). Lyon, after being forced to become the face and body of a new wave male 

gaze, condemns the normalization of the teenage body, especially the teenage female body, as a 

sexual object and a ploy in film. 



 
 

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Nabokov’s novel Lolita is a tragic piece that unveils the inherent violence of pedophilic 

lust, a topic many did not think about or were too afraid to discuss. While the novel remains an 

important work, its meaning and importance has become skewed and, time and time again, 

removed from its context as an original work by Nabokov. Kubrick’s adaptation and 

romanticization of the novel shifted attention away from the violence of pedophilia and towards 

a romanticization of hebephilia, playing into the male gaze that the Hollywood industry was built 

on during the shift into teenage plots. What we are left with is a newfound publicized attraction 

to teenaged bodies in an attempt to control teenagers, especially female bodies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Coming of Age 

Satire 

 With the female teenage body cemented in the center of the male gaze in the 1960’s, it is 

not subject just to sexualization, but to objectification and ridicule. In order to keep the gender 

balance of the male gaze in order, the entertainment industry could not solely depict these youths 

as sexual objects, lest they take advantage of their scopophilia to abuse a sexual power over the 

phallocentric society they are performing for (after all, sex is power). The idea of ridiculing the 

teenage girl thus emerged, and films centered around female protagonists and made to appeal to 

a female audience grew. While, in film, these female protagonists are not always sexualized, they 

often face trivial hardships that are set up in a way that ridicules the female teenage population 

thus deriving an association between teenage girls and petty problems that take up their entire 

worlds.  

 Such problems, however, are not presented as simple or petty. Rather, they are presented 

as integral influences and motives on the girls’ life, their importance so dire that the plot of the 

film the girl exists in could not progress without them. While the address of “petty” is used, it is 

important to note that, over time, issues surrounding one’s own body, its relations, and bodily 

performance have been pushed to be viewed as important and normal in a girl’s life, and if young 

girls do not engage in these topics, then they are not existing in the realm created for them.  

 Problems surrounding the female body, its functions, and its relationships to push plot 

motives most commonly function under the lens of romance and sexuality, especially from the 

years 1980 through the 2020’s5. The teenaged girls are depicted in an angsty existence in which 

 
5 As is the year range for the films discussed in this section. 



 
 

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they are troubled by family relations, female bullies, and crippling attraction to the boys who 

exist just outside of their immediate social realm (as perceived by them and which may or may 

not come to fruition) while somehow remaining an implicit sexual object in their natural being. 

There are very little plot functions outside of these three within films that satirize and dramatize 

the existence of teenage girls to the same extents, and it is thanks to these specific plot functions 

that the concept of the teenage girl is so commonly ridiculed as such topics are, to other social 

groups, considered trivial. What is curated is a worry of the body and its appearance or 

performance in relation to how it is perceived and interacted with by others rather than by the 

self; a girl in such films considers physical change in order to be received better by others, not to 

be received better by herself. Films which depict young girls worrying over fat percentage, facial 

features, how to make a boy attracted to her, how to deal with other girls putting her down, etc. 

place those worries into the minds of young girls consuming these films, establishing a media 

influence over young girls. Thus, a bubble is created in which the girls that consume films 

surrounding such plot functions simultaneously are forced to operate in a similar manner, as 

these films and their pop culture influence become the main and sometimes only influence for 

teenaged girls, and be ridiculed because of outsider views on these functions. Teenage girls are 

set up to be a practical joke from the moment the world acknowledges them to be such and are 

effectively trapped in a social constraint that solely exists for public ridicule and isolation.  

 For example, films such as 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999), Mean Girls 

(Mark Waters, 2004), Easy A (Will Gluck, 2010), and The DUFF (Ari Sandel, 2015) are all films 

that maintain a teenage female (and American) protagonist who maintain strong personalities 

that are exaggerated to isolate them, and in specific cases paint them as socially hostile. These 



 
 

22 

strong personalities are then faced by friendship issues, and the lives of the protagonists are 

further complicated by topics of love.  

 Take 10 things I Hate About You (1999) first: Kat (Julia Stiles) is the shrewd sister of 

Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) who holds a true hatred for men in the world; she is a modern raging 

feminist. This places her role in the narrative as unsatisfactory and unsexable by the opposite 

gender and thus poses a problem for the men of the film. Although Kat is not necessarily the sole 

or main protagonist of the film, her self-agency presented allows her to be perceived as 

protagonist enough, and so she cannot exist outside of a romantic realm. Patrick (Heath Ledger) 

then, of course, must romance her to soften her personality so that she no longer poses a threat to 

the narrative. While the film is an adaptation –adaptation being key here– of Shakespeare’s 

Taming of the Shrew (1592), it remains relevant to the cultural views of its making; that is, both 

sisters of the film end up coupled with a male counterpart. Kat’s peers in the film ridicule her for 

her lack of performance under the male gaze. For example, when Kat disparages Hemingway, 

her classmate and ultimate antagonist of the film, Joey (Andrew Keegan) refers to her as “a bitter 

self-righteous hag who has no friends” (00:06:06 – 00:06:10). Similarly, the entire plot can only 

continue because Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) desires Bianca so desperately that he hires 

Patrick to woo Kat, believing that Kat could not serve any aid without being tricked into 

participating in the male gaze. Even later, when Cameron and Bianca are working together to 

find out what Kat liked to help Patrick woo her, they are surprised to find she has black 

underwear which, to Bianca, suggests she is looking to engage in sex eventually. Kat eventually 

succeeds in her own smarts and does maintain some spunk, but she ultimately is tamed by 

Patrick’s romance, both as a farce and as true affection. She could not remain outside of the male 

gaze, so she must be pulled into it in order for the plot to succeed for Cameron.  



 
 

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 In another vein, Mean Girls (2004) focuses on Cady (Lindsay Lohan) as she makes her 

social debut into high school after growing up in the African savannah. Because of her 

‘exoticness’ of not being used to contemporary American social lives, many people grow 

attracted to her platonically. While she gains friends, she quickly learns that female bonds are 

biting and are not to be trusted. She infiltrates the popular girl’s group and quickly adapts to 

sexual dressing, importance of makeup, dumbing down oneself in the presence of or even at the 

thought of boys, using one’s words against themselves and others, and the dangers of being fat. 

While Cady feels iffy indulging in these newfound habits, she becomes radicalized when Regina 

(Rachel McAdams) takes back her ex-boyfriend Aaron (Jonathan Bennett) despite knowing that 

Cady likes him. Cady thus becomes the ultimate sabotaging mean girl and, in the process, ruins 

her own non-lethal friendships and romantic ties to Aaron all while bringing attention to how 

every female bond is complicated and double-edged. She views the whole process of her change, 

in retrospect, as silly, reflecting the views of the culture. 

 Girls, to other girls, are posed as threatening, a concept made up by patriarchy and its 

applied male gaze in order to foster anger and competition between women in an attempt to 

better appease the male gaze and continue functioning under male control. The female teenage 

experience becomes wholly ridiculed both by outsiders and its direct participants.  

Female Protagonists 

 Touched on briefly while discussing the films 10 Things I Hate About You (1999) and 

Easy A (2010), a female protagonist is most often not even oriented to achieve a goal for herself, 

but rather has a plot involving a love interest of sorts, as if there can be no story without her 

finding love or being in love. It has become necessary for a male to be part of her existence, no 

matter her original role, for she cannot exist alone without being threatening to the male gaze 



 
 

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(Mulvey, 1975).  While this remains the basis for female-oriented films, teenage characters are 

often split into (not exclusively) three archetypes: the Mean Girl, the Prude, and the Unsexed 

Girl.  

 Beginning with the Mean Girl, she is one that makes it her goal to “ruin” others’ lives and 

engage in backstabbing and messy gossiping. This is seen with Regina from Mean Girls (2004) 

and Marianne (Amanda Bynes) from Easy A (2010). They are typically the antagonist, the 

villainess in the other female protagonist’s life. However, they are not solely depicted as an 

enemy, but can shift in and out between the roles of enemy and friend. For Regina, she began as 

a friend to Cady but slowly shifted into enemy, displaying her power as a popular girl over Cady 

to make her submit to her. With Marianne, she acts, at first, as an enemy to Olive (Emma Stone) 

because of Olive’s perceived sexual degeneracy, but once Olive’s shaky friendship with 

Rhiannon (Aly Michalka) falls apart, she swoops in to take on the role of best friend. Of course, 

Marianne reverts back into enemy once she hears the rumor that Olive slept with her boyfriend 

and gave her chlamydia; Olive has reverted back into a sexual enemy and thus becomes a person 

of competition. These girls function to be a perceived common enemy between protagonist and 

audience, a girl to blame and/or hate to detract some of the negative attention away from the 

male villains within the films.  

 Then, you have the Prude. This is the girl who prefers to stay away from men and sexual 

topics, either because they are displayed as a radical feminist (and thus unsexable, as seen with 

Kat) or to be an exaggerated version of a religious girl (as seen with Marianne). They are, 

throughout the movie, objectified and sexualized despite their abstinence; in fact, it is the fact 

that they are abstinent that fuels their perceived sexuality. This further stimulates the concept that 

no form of the teenage girl is safe from the sexualization of the male gaze, because all bodies can 



 
 

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and are ultimately sexed by it. In the case of Kat, the men of the film discuss her as a body to be 

conquered, because if her body can become desecrated and introduced to the “pleasure” of sex, 

then her mind and raging personality can consequently be tamed. With Marianne, her role as a 

religious girl is satirized by the childish dressing of her. She is displayed with a baby face, 

pigtails, and large breasts. While her mind is presented as holy and chaste, the male gaze dresses 

her body in mock-religious sexuality, a body that surely cannot function outside a world of sex. 

Furthermore, the other girls of the film mock the Prude for her chastity, forcing her to become 

isolated by her own sex and further playing into the concept of female co-competition. 

 Finally, there is the Unsexed Girl. This role tends to overlap with the treatment of the 

Prude and covers a decent amount of the female protagonists, especially in the early era of 

female-oriented teenage films of the 80’s. The Unsexed Girl functions outside of main social 

circles and is often either unknown to her peers or is unrecognized by her peers as a girl. She 

looks and acts unassuming or tomboyish, preoccupied with her own daily troubles until a sudden 

encounter with a sexually viable male. See, for example, Andie (Molly Ringwald) of Pretty in 

Pink (Howard Deutch, 1986) in which she lives alone with her father, poor, with a best friend 

who is wholly in love with her. One day, out of sheer boredom, Steff (James Spader), a popular 

boy from her school, grows an attraction to her but struggles with this attraction because of her 

low social status. Similarly, the character Samantha (Molly Ringwald) of Sixteen Candles (John 

Hughes, 1984) is practically invisible at school and, somehow, invisible at home as hectic 

happenings overlap. She faces an attraction towards Jake (Michael Schoeffling), a popular older 

athlete at her school, and enters his radar when a letter about such attraction is passed to him 

rather than being passed to Samantha’s friend. Because of this coincidence, he also grows an, 

extremely fast, attraction to her because of her newfound visibility.  These two films also engage 



 
 

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in the concept of the makeover film, in which the Unsexed Girl is transformed into a realm of 

feminine gender performance and thus becomes a sexual object.  

Another important character in this role is Bianca (Mae Whitman) of The DUFF (2015), 

although she overlaps slightly with the Prude as well as sub-categories “nerd” and “tomboy.” 

She is the friend of two popular and beautiful girls, while she remains essentially invisible and 

forgotten by her peers but maintains a strong tomboyish personality. This is a heavily played into 

gag that reoccurs throughout the film to reemphasize the ridiculousness of a teenage girl lacking 

femininity and ultimately being unsexable because of lack of gender performance. She is 

described, by her childhood male friend Wesley (Robbie Amell), as the DUFF (Designated Ugly 

Fat Friend) of her friends, and she becomes crushed. Even after attempted to engage in 

femininity in face of her crush, she is ultimately used, her attempt at sexuality ignored, and 

Wesley swoops her off her feet in the end.  

While the Mean Girl, the Prude, and the Unsexed Girl are not the only character 

classifications for teenage girls within film, they seem to be the most repetitive and easily 

applicable. Since these are the most repeated archetypes in films centered around teenage girls, 

they are the archetypes that vulnerable young girls are exposed to the most often. Again, such 

archetypes and their associated tropes create a bubble in which teenage girls copy the actions and 

behaviors of the characters they see in these films, and that bubble forces an unstable existence.  

Films such as the ones just explored create a common idea of a beauty standard and 

social norms that do not accurately reflect the way the everyday people, especially everyday 

teenagers, look and act. However, because satirical and dramatized pieces of media are what 

teenagers are consuming, there becomes and implication that the standards and norms 

represented in film are what should be replicated. Of course, teenagers are going through puberty 



 
 

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and experience changing bodies, uneven skin, and much more. Needless to say, the average 

teenager does not look like Lindsay Lohan after a team of makeup artists dress her up. This 

should not be a bad thing, but with tropes like the makeover of the Unsexed Girl, it becomes 

increasingly impossible for teenage girls to feel good about their looks because they are told, in 

these media, that if they are not fitting in with the beauty standard or not embracing a set idea of 

femininity, then they are unlovable and unsexable and need to change themselves in some way 

(Marston 7). This mindset is extremely mentally damaging and fosters unhealthy relationships 

with one’s own body, encouraging depression and eating disorders to take root in these 

vulnerable girls who are already more prone to negative emotions due to the puberty they are 

experiencing (Somerville, Jones, and Casey 124).   

Similarly, there is a fostering of uneasiness surrounding female friendships in one’s 

teenage years. Again, Mean Girls (2004) depicts a spiderweb of relationships, and the 

friendships held between teenage girls are shaky and deceptive. Time after time, the girls in these 

films are shown to be gossiping about one another, giving backhanded compliments, sabotaging 

each other’s lives, and competing against each other to gain the romantic and sexual attraction 

from a boy they both like. A similar thing occurs in The DUFF (2015), where Bianca claims her 

two ex-best friends are now her enemies because they are pretty and thus competition for her to 

be socially recognized. These movies force girls to be the enemy to one another rather than 

recognize the patriarchal society that they live in as the enemy, creating a layer of anti-feminism 

through media influence. That is to say, in the Western patriarchal society, in female social 

circles, your peers are your enemy because you all wish to perform under the same gender and 

social expectations but better than others. This further creates the mindset that not only are other 

girls the enemy, but oneself is also an enemy and thus oneself must be critical in their own looks 



 
 

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and actions in order to perform with the highest social sensitivity (Somerville, Jones, and Casey 

129).  

Furthermore, with the re-making and revival of such films (i.e. the Mean Girls musical 

being made into a movie and other consequential sequels), there has been a heavy integration of 

film advertising and merchandising through modern social media. This means TikTok’s, 

Instagram accounts, YouTube videos, and other social media promoting or even simple sharing 

of films. Which the integration of these films and their messages into social media, another layer 

of influence becomes applied to the lives of teenage girls. While there may be teenagers out there 

who never saw these movies outright, if they use social media, they are more likely to be 

exposed to such promotional content and more inclined to go see the movies. According to the 

Pew Research Center, in 2024, 87% of the teenage girls interviewed reported they used 

YouTube, 66% reported they used TikTok, 66% reported they used Instagram, 57% reported 

they used Snapchat, and 15% reported they used Twitter. With such a decently sized chunk of 

the female teenage population online, it becomes easier to expose them to these films and their 

tropes, whether the films are being re-made or not.  

Male Protagonists and Characters 

Whether they are a male character in a female-centered film or the main protagonist of 

their own media, boys are presented to approach life by their own means, able to hold power in 

the scene, get up to mischief, and actually enjoy things. This does not mean that male-centered 

plots are devoid of love or sexuality, though. Rather, in teenage male oriented plots, there is 

often a girl involved who is the main attraction to either the protagonist male or his group of 

friends, and she is often, in some way, conquered by them. While boys may receive a kiss or 

relationship from girls, it is just an added reward to their plotline and does not control their plot. 



 
 

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Similarly, there is an emphasis on male bonds or competition (as needed) and a lack of plot 

centered around being a teenager. 

For example, films such as Stand By Me (Rob Reiner, 1986) or The Sandlot (David 

Mickey Evans, 1993) focus on groups of young boys whose friendships grow stronger by 

spending time together and having adventures. In Stand By Me (1986), the boys are roughly 12 

years old and just about to enter their teenage years, and in The Sandlot (1993) the boys’ ages 

range from 12 to 14, right at the start of their teenage years. Leaning into the later years of being 

a teenager, The Outsiders (Francis Ford Coppola, 1983) follows a similar angst of growing up 

and leaving behind childish naivety and wonders that was expressed in Stand By Me (1986). 

However, in The Outsiders (1983), the ages range from 14 to 18. Despite the character statuses 

as teenagers, these films do not revolve around that the way that the previously mentioned 

female-centered films do. While there is an emphasis on leaving behind childhood, their entering 

into being teenagers does not completely alter their personalities and ways of functioning in 

social settings, as seen in the 80’s films centered around teenage girls. Rather, these films all end 

with an emphasis on humanity, or rather shared identity. The boys within the films just described 

do not feel isolated from one another because they know they have all experienced the same, or 

similar, events and feelings, and thus know they are not alone and share some sense of identity 

and community with one another.  

There are more recent films centered around teenage boys, but they follow a similar vein 

of “growing up” with a shift more towards embracing the classic phrase “boys will be boys.” For 

example, films such as Superbad (Greg Mottola, 2007) and Project X (Nima Nourizadeh, 2012) 

follow young male protagonists eager to live life, get up to no good, and engage in sexual 

debauchery. For example, Superbad (2007) follows the three teens Evan (Michael Cera), Seth 



 
 

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(Jonah Hill), and Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) – with a heavier focus on the friendship 

between Evan and Seth – as they attempt to get alcohol and attend a party where they have the 

potential to engage in sexually explicit activities with their respective girls of interest. Of course, 

things go awry, with Fogell being assaulted by a robber during his attempt to buy alcohol while 

Seth and Evan get mixed up in all sorts of trouble. While Evan and Seth often bring up wanting 

to have sex with girls from their school, the film in its entirety is not solely based on their 

sexuality; their sexual desire is just a matter of fact that continuously pops up in humorous ways, 

and it is not used to exploit their role in the film. In fact, most of the focus of the film surrounds 

the staggering friendship between Evan and Seth and the troubles that may shake it. There is no 

competition between the two males, their sexual interests do not overlap, and the only thing that 

may come between them is the prospect of being far away from one another. 

Project X (2012) follows birthday boy Thomas (Thomas Mann) and his friends Costa 

(Oliver Cooper) and JB (Jonathan Daniel Brown) while their peer Dax (Dax Flames) records 

Thomas’ special day. The first section of the film is devoted to promoting the party that they are 

throwing for Thomas’ birthday and is filled with uncultured pranks and spoken sexual deviancy, 

playing perfectly into the concept of “boys will be boys.” As the party unfolds, Costa convinces 

Thomas and JB to just relax and enjoy themselves as the chaos of hundreds of people consumes 

and destroys Thomas’s home. They do relax, fully enjoying the drugs and alcohol available to 

them while also engaging in sexual proclivity, although the latter puts Thomas in trouble with his 

childhood friend and longtime crush Kirby (Kirby Bliss Blanton). In the end, with the home 

caught on fire and totally destroyed and the trio in legal trouble, Thomas’ father still displays a 

semi-proud attitude because of the sheer amount of people and destruction his son brought to 

their home. 



 
 

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In both of these films, the boys encourage one another and are even encouraged by other 

older males to engage in chaos and sexual deviancy because these acts, for boys, are viewed as 

appreciable and funny, and, in the end, the boys will not face any long-lasting negative damage 

to their reputation. In fact, the larger of mess these boys create, the more they become celebrated 

by their peers. This is the direct opposite of the treatment of girls of the same age, and it is 

because these characters are not girls that they can be celebrated. For example, when Cady in 

Mean Girls threw a party, it ended up being disastrous for her in the sense that she ruined her 

friendships, ruined the potential for movement in her romantic relationship with Aaron, and was 

punished by her parents for having the party. Despite her party being far less destructive than 

Thomas’, only one is punished in all possible ways because of their gender role and the tied 

consequences to said gender role.  

Something else that is important to point out is that in spite of their debauchery, the boys 

still depicted in film, somehow, end up with a wholly positive relationship with their sexual 

interests, with little to no repentance for their actions. However, for the female protagonists 

previously discussed, most are found to have repent in some way – with Cady it was a public 

apology and a total restructuring of her personality, with Olive it was another public apology and 

explanation of previous actions – before they can even begin to rebuild a relationship to the men 

they are attracted to. Again, the characters gender roles structure the way they are treated by their 

peers and by the consumers of the media they exist in: the boys can be forgiven for almost 

anything as they are merely participating in “boys will be boys” behavior while the girls must be 

penalized and rehabilitated for situations that they often did not put themselves in, but were 

rather forced into. 



 
 

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The obvious difference in treatment of the teenage male and teenage female protagonist 

has remained consistent since the evolution of the Teenpic. While the former does not place a 

focus on sexuality but does use it as a means of accomplishment, the latter uses engagement of 

sexuality as a means to receive punishment and isolation while simultaneously sexualizing the 

punished. This mistreatment of the teenaged female body has been and continues to be pushed by 

the male gaze even when the female body is replicating the actions committed by the male body. 

Boys are allowed to engage in their sexuality because they are holding the power in a position of 

sex, while girls cannot engage in sexuality, but can only be engaged with. Functioning outside of 

being engaged with will lead to some sort of punishment for the girl, often social, while the boys 

are either not presented with any consequences or can easily recuperate damaged social bonds. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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Teenage Girls and Mental Health 

Beginning in the late 90’s, a new wave of romanticizing teenage girls started through the 

depiction of mentally ill girls. Films began to follow the challenges of what it is like to be a 

teenage girl, the minuscule details that have been previously glossed over in past media 

representation. They home in on specific problems as well as everyday life: making stupid 

decisions, a realistic lack of romance during high school, complications with romance and 

dealing with the male gaze in everyday life, dealing with sexual assault, dealing with negative 

body image and dealing with gender and race discrimination, all during what is considered “the 

most important/best years of your life.” Such films help show that it is difficult to consider a 

certain era of one’s life to be the best when everything is so miserable, an accurate representation 

of life. There appears to be a general lack of these films, and many of the films that do exist 

surrounding topics of mental health are directed by men that continue to project an image of 

teenage girl life as something romanticized and perfected, a sort of art that nobody really knows 

how to perform, and how girls should conform to these expectations by performing through their 

struggles. Through all this, a desire to be sad is born within young girls. 

One of the more well-known examples of this would be Girl, Interrupted (1999) which 

follows the protagonist Susanna (Winona Ryder) and her stay at a psychiatric hospital after a 

suicide attempt. In this institution, she makes friends with other troubled girls: pathological liar 

Georgina (Clea DuVall), anorexic Janet (Angela Bettis), schizophrenic Polly (Elisabeth Moss), 

OCD-ridden and self-harmer Daisy (Brittany Murphy), and sociopath Lisa (Angelina Jolie). A 

widely diverse group of women representing a community previously unexplored and 

underrepresented, and while the intent of such representation was to make the public aware the 

real mental troubles people, especially young girls, experience and the ways they may handle 



 
 

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mental illness in all of its destructiveness, this film has, unfortunately, been forced into a new 

form of stereotyping and sexualizing girls.  

Again, Girl, Interrupted (1999) has achievements in the sense that it exposed a main 

public to the mental health crises experienced by youth, a topic briefly touched upon in the 

Teenpic of the 50’s before being swiftly dropped. What greatly aids this achievement is the fact 

that the film is adapted6 from the memoir of Susanna Kaysen and the recounting of her personal 

experience in a mental hospital while she was 15 after a suicide attempt, and that director James 

Mangold held up communications with her during production. With both memoir and film 

enthusiastically received, with the former by young women experiencing mental illnesses and 

engaging in self-harm and the latter by a wider, more diverse audience, the taboo surrounding 

mental health for young women had begun to lift.  

However, this accomplishment would be followed by a severe drawback. Kaysen, after 

the publishing of her memoir, was approached endlessly by young women claiming “’You wrote 

this book for me’” (Merrigan, 2018), crowding her with personal tale of struggle with mental 

illness, and even show off their self-harm scars to her (Merrigan 2018). Since her memoir was 

one of the first female-published works discussing female mental health, its readers felt an 

intense connection to both the memoir and Kaysen with no outlet for their feeling of being 

understood other than of forcing it upon her. A similar occurrence took place after the film 

adaptation was released, albeit an extremely delayed occurrence, as the film had long sense 

escaped the small bubble of young women battling with their mental health’s and entered the 

general public domain of an audience.   

 
6 It is important to note that the key word here is “adaptation”; several characters and key events in the film have 
been fabricated to better aid the plot and were not originally in Kaysen’s memoir.  



 
 

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Around the late 2000’s, following the social media boom, there was a newfound 

obsession with aesthetics, especially aesthetics based on physical media that were mass-

consumed. This newfound fascination surrounding aesthetics was especially prominent on the 

sites Tumblr7 and Myspace8. While the latter has become unusable with nearly all its media pre-

2016 having been purged, Tumblr is still popularly used especially for engaging in and sharing 

aesthetics. According to Business Insider, in 2014 38%, the largest demographic, of active users 

were aged 16-24, while users aged 25-34 came in close at 32% (Hoelzel, 2014). The site reached 

its heyday in the early to mid 2010’s, which is also when aesthetics surrounding feminine 

behaviors and looks derived from physical media began to emerge and be shared through user-

uploaded images paired with tags such as “#girlhood”, “#thechicdiet”, “#girlinterrupted”, 

“#girl”, “#beautiful”, “#coquette”, “#lolita”, and other similar feminine based tags. A majority of 

these tags were paired with images that depicted extremely skinny girls (as this era witnessed a 

new peak of wide-spread eating disorders and negative body images due to a new wave of 

cyberbullying), girls in frilly clothing, girls with a size difference to their male counterpart (the 

former smaller and shorter than the latter), girls crying, and still images from films and TV 

shows.  

As of August, 2025, the Girl, Interrupted tag has 60,000 followers with the top posts 

depicting a common mindset in which girls do not find themselves to be good enough, do not 

find themselves to be pretty enough, wish to be isolated from society, wish to avoid sexual 

interaction, and find themselves trapped by their own sadness. Similar to the way those young 

women became attached to Kaysen, the young girls on this site find comfort in the fact that 

 
7 Founded by David Karp in 2007. 
8 Founded by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson in 2003. 



 
 

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enough people feel so similar to the point it can be considered a new genre of girlhood. And thus, 

the aesthetic of the suffering teenage girl had been solidified thanks to social media and its 

ability to connect people all over the world. If one were to look into the early days of the Girl, 

Interrupted tag, specifically before 2016, one would find a plethora of gifs and still images from 

the film, mostly of the characters Daisy and Lisa during their fits of depression and mania. The 

aesthetics of these two characters specifically were highly popular due to their unabashed 

representation through the eyes of Susanna, and young women felt comforted by the fact that 

teenage girls could experience such rages of fit and sadness and still be viewed as icons in their 

own twisted ways.  

Fits of manic depression and manic anger had been romanticized by the population that 

Girl, Interrupted (1999) was representing because it was a widespread and beloved 

representation. Teenage girls felt that if they could starve themselves the way that Daisy did or 

burst out against anyone who speaks against them like Lisa did, they could, somehow, gain back 

power over their lives and their sadness. They become girls represented, yet lost in the sea of 

others who feel that they are a character in their sadness.  These girls lose themselves in a 

community of others just like them – and even those not suffering from mental illnesses – in 

which they promote a lifestyle of self-harm and depression with no effort to leave it since they 

are at least a part of a prized aesthetic.  

A nearly identical phenomenon occurred surrounding the aesthetics of The Virgin 

Suicides (2000), which was released mere months after Girl, Interrupted (1999). The film 

follows the Lisbon sisters Lux (Kirsten Dunst), Mary (A.J Cook), Therese (Leslie Hayman), 

Bonnie (Chelse Swain), and Cecilia (Hanna Hall) through the eyes of the semi-anonymous 

collective of neighborhood boys. These girls face isolation, sexual repression and engagement, 



 
 

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depression, and suicide. While both The Virgin Suicides (2000) and Girl, Interrupted (1999) deal 

with teenage female depression and other mental illnesses, what ultimately makes them different 

is the ways they are presented. Girl, Interrupted (1999) is based on the memoir written firsthand 

by a woman recounting her own teenage years, meaning it is not originally posed in a male gaze, 

but both the film and novel form of The Virgin Suicides (2000) are told through the perspective 

of a male, with the former being told through the eyes of neighborhood boys obsessed with the 

sisters and the latter being written by a man, Jeffrey Eugenides. Because of this form of 

observation of the teenage girl by the male gaze, The Virgin Suicides (2000) becomes a story that 

becomes detached from the characters suffering, pushing the suffering Lisbon sisters to be 

characters viewed and observed with no free agency and detached from interior understanding, 

an opposite from the agency seen with the intimate and personal story told from the perspective 

of a girl suffering as seen in Girl, Interrupted (1999). 

The collective of boys from the neighborhood in The Virgin Suicides (2000) inherently 

romanticizes the girls and their suicides because they are telling the viewer about said suicides – 

and what led up to them – through a story telling format that is detached from the girls’ firsthand 

experience. The film begins with one of the boys doing a voiceover: “Cecilia was the first to 

go… Everyone dates the demise of our neighborhood from the suicides of the Lisbon girls. 

People saw their clairvoyance in the wiped-out elms, the harsh sunlight, and the continuing 

decline of our auto industry…we find ourselves going over the evidence on more time. All to 

understand those five girls, who, after all these years, we can’t get out of our minds” (00:01:26-

00:03:31). To these boys, the tragedy of what happened to these girls is mythicized, a story to 

recount over and over again to both keep the girls alive in some way, but also to exploit the girls.  



 
 

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The boys keep track of the mental decline of all the girls, especially Cecilia and Lux, and 

make sure to emphasize the ways in which the girls perform to keep up airs of being peaceful, 

sound-of-mind, religiously good girls. In Cecilia’s case, their obsession is less sexual and more 

morbid, as she committed suicide so quickly into the film. Their descriptions align more with the 

ways in which she expresses her depression and antisocial behavior, with the most vivid 

descriptions being of her first attempt, her parents pushing for recovery, and her ultimate death. 

For the others, though, is done through descriptions of their clothing, notably the dance scene in 

which the girls are made near-identical dresses by their mothers that ultimately hides their 

figures, their social encounters, and their sexual encounters, with an extra focus on Lux’s 

sexuality. The boys focus solely on the way these girls perform in public and provide no insight 

to their behavior when alone or any interior thoughts. Without these, the girls are nothing else 

but characters in the boys’ lives, having no traits personal to them besides what can be outwardly 

observed, leaving them hollow and all that more mysterious.  

It is because of this that the collective, and others, are allowed to obsess over the girls in 

such a way. Outside of the collective, for example, Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) becomes 

obsessed with Lux and puts in the utmost effort to sway her and her parents in favor of him after 

Cecilia’s suicide. He selects 3 boys who measure up to the Lisbon’s expectations to provide 

dates for her sisters so that he himself may take Lux to the school dance. After the dance, Lux 

and Trip have sex in the football field. After this, Lux falls asleep and Trip promptly abandons 

her, finding no more use in her now that she has been “used” and thus removed from the pedestal 

he had previously placed her on. Lux ultimately misses her curfew, and the Lisbon sisters are 

promptly put under house arrest, pulled from school and not allowed to leave or have guests. 



 
 

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During this time, Lux finds solace in inviting boys (and adult men) to the house and having sex 

with them on the roof, which the neighborhood boys’ enjoyably watch.  

This further pushes the voyeuristic male gaze which takes both pleasure and pain in the 

sexual engagement of teenage girls. On the one hand, the boys are fascinated by Lux’s sexual 

promiscuity, engaging in sex in plain view (although slightly hidden by the nighttime shade). 

They watch her together through a telescope, engaging in direct scopophilia (Mulvey 835) and 

turning her into a pornographic character by describing the actions she is committing. In this 

moment, the boy’s mindset flip from simply being attracted to Lux to viewing her as a solely 

sexual object with little else to offer. They feel correct in this opinion because of the way the 

men she does have sex with treat her, verifying her role as sexual relief who does not need to be 

cared for in any other way. On the other hand, because of the intense switch from sister to sex 

object, she is ultimately reduced from sister to sex object and is simultaneously punished, 

although not physically or overtly, for this reduction. While she engages in such activities to gain 

some power back over her life, she ultimately still craves for just one person to understand her on 

a deeper level, a wish that would never be granted, forcing her further into a depression and 

shallow performances.  

The other sisters are generally forgotten by the boys, since they don’t offer sexual relief 

the way Lux does, until their suicides: Mary puts her head in the oven, Therese drugs herself 

with sleeping pills, Bonnie hands herself in the basement, and, finally, Lux leaves the car 

running with the garage door closed. The boys feel the strongest sense of loss with Lux since 

they became the most attached to her but still mourn the other sisters because they witnessed 

their bodies firsthand, having been invited over the night they committed suicide. The film ends 

with another voiceover in which the boys state: “It didn’t matter in the end how old they had 



 
 

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been, or that they were girls. But only that we had loved them, and that they hadn’t heard us 

calling, still do not hear us calling…” (01:30:44-01:31:00). The collective manages to place 

themselves in the role of victim, feeling lost at the thought that the girls had never understood 

their feelings toward them. Their claim that their age and gender did not matter is also 

contradictory to the very reason they faced such attraction toward the girls. By being the opposite 

gender and of similar age in a heteronormative story, these girls were doomed from the start to 

be things to be looked at with perverse and exploitative eyes that never saw beyond surface level 

gender and societal performances.  

Similar to the way the aesthetic of Girl, Interrupted (1999) became romanticized, The 

Virgin Suicides (2000) was another hot topic on Tumblr. If one were to look at posts with the 

tags “The Virgin Suicides” or “Lisbon Sisters” before 2016, one would find various still images 

in which the sisters would look sad or depict the scene of their suicides. In said sadness, the girls 

are either completely by themselves or only with their sisters; they are never depicted with 

anyone besides their sisters, creating an emphasis on the isolation that pushes their sadness. One 

may also find images not from the film itself, but rather various random teenage girls attempting 

to emulate the dress style of the sisters, with flowy dresses, embroidered underwear, and rolled 

up uniform skirts. They edit such photos to appear color washed and over exposed, replicating 

the color grading of Coppola’s film.  

These girls not only want to copy the aesthetics of suffering in the film, they want to be 

the girls suffering, and they achieve such status by committing to eating disorders, mildly 

distraught expressions, and subtle sexual performance. These girls have seen the way the Lisbon 

sisters were romanticized by the neighborhood boys, and they begin to think that if they become 

like those sisters then they too might become romanticized by either boys or their peers. Once 



 
 

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again, the aesthetics of suffering trumps one’s own health and individuality as users find comfort 

in a collective experienced sadness, with no efforts to get better in hopes of being rewarded for 

their copied performances.  

However, this romanticization does not end with the original female audience. The 

concepts of the virginal coquette student, the sad and sexual lonely girl, and the ultimate manic 

pixie dream girl have all become well-known sub-categories that girls and boys alike overuse to 

describe the atypical teenage girl who is visibly (genuinely or performatively) depressed. Again, 

for the teenage girls, these categories are a desired performance and description to achieve. 

These categories are simultaneously over-sexualized and over-romanticized by the teenage boys 

who witness them. This, in a way, forces the girls who are performing under such sub-categories 

to be on a pedestal, sinfully idolized and further isolated from their peers. Being sexualized is 

inherent to these sub-categories because of their origins, and years of culture shifts has not and 

will not change that.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 
 

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A New Era 

While there has been a consistent history of sexualizing the teenage girl in film, there has 

been a new wave of American film in which female directors and writers band together to make 

films that present ways of life of the teenage girl that is both accurate to the generalized 

experience of the teenage girl and denies the male gaze pleasure of superfluous sexualization. 

What has helped this new wave be received as an accurate depiction of feminine teenage life is 

the way that most films produced are semi-autobiographical, with screenwriters and directors 

(often the same person) pulling from their own experiences from their teenage years. These films 

also apply the focuses of the modern fourth-wave feminism9, which focuses on sexual abuse, 

harassment, violence, and workplace sexism, and the historical second-wave feminism10, which 

focused on sexual liberation, ending cyclical abuse, and challenging traditional gender roles. 

While this recent era, from around 2015 to the present day, has not yet been described as 

a true film movement, it has been clear to see that this sort of film is more dedicated to protecting 

teenage girls from the heavy hand of the male gaze, but also does not coddle them or reward 

them for dramatized or sexualized gender performance. These films are often very raw and 

refuse to sugarcoat the intense emotions and sexual confusion that teenage girls experience. In a 

word, these films are real. They do not shy away from explicit abuse or cycles of sexual assault, 

they embrace the confusion surrounding oneself in such formative years, and they place the 

teenage girl clearly in sexual acts without painting her as a sexual nymphet. 

 
9 Inspired by Tarana Burke’s activist work and establishing of the #MeToo movement in 2006 and further defended 
by feminist author Laura Bates in 2012. 
10 While a single origin is debated, this era was heavily inspired by the feminist American writers of the 50’s and 
60’s such as Angela Davis, Bell Hooks (Gloria Jean Watkins), and Betty Friedan. 



 
 

43 

An example of such film is Lady Bird (Greta Gerwig, 2017). The film is loosely based off 

of Gerwig’s relationship with her own mother and the feelings she experienced as a teenage girl. 

It follows Lady Bird (Saoirse Ronan) as she tries to get a handle on the complicated relationship 

with her mother (Laurie Metcalf), discovering who she is and what she wants to do with her life, 

the harsh reality of the world, and love and sex. She is quick to sadness and anger, as seen when 

she jumps out of a moving car when arguing with her mother, and wants nothing more than to 

feel like she has a place where she belongs with people that are fond of her. She pushes her way 

into the theater program and meets Danny (Lucas Hedges), and they share a close bond until she 

discovers that he is gay. She slowly abandons her best friend Julie (Beanie Felds) for the popular 

girl Jenna (Odeya Rush) in an effort to pursuit popular and mysteriously moody boy Kyle 

(Timothée Chalamet). She eventually has very disappointing sex with Kyle, is slowly uncovered 

to be a liar, and is rejected by her new friends until she reunites with Jenna.  

Lady Bird is by no means perfect, and she also does not receive a fully happy ending. 

Instead, she receives a realistic ending. Lady Bird and her mother continue to fight to the point 

they do not say goodbye to one another when Lady Bird moved to New York to attend an 

(unnamed) university. She gets far too drunk at a welcome week party. She finds herself alone 

and looking wrecked at a church, the only familiar spot in her otherwise new and scary world. 

The film ends with her calling her parents, accepting the name they had given her, Christine, and 

thanking her mother.  

Gerwig makes little to no attempt to make Lady Bird a fully loveable character, because 

real people are imperfect and hold traits that are more difficult to love. Lady Bird made countless 

stupid decisions in the film, such as lying to her new friends about where she lived and her 

economic status and admits regrets to many of her own decisions. She expresses her 



 
 

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disappointment and frustration with how she and Kyle had sex, how horrible sex felt for her, and 

about how frustrated she was the only one losing their virginity. She continuously picks fights 

with her mother and pushes for the things she knows they cannot afford. Ultimately, Lady Bird is 

annoying but redeemable because of the striking similarities between her and a real person. 

A similar character is developed in The Edge of Seventeen (2016) with Nadine (Hailee 

Steinfeld). She grows up under the shadow of her brother Darian (Blake Jenner) and battles 

negative self-image, the death of her father (Eric Keenleyside), and battles with her mother (Kyra 

Sedgwick) with the help of her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson). Nadine is very quick to 

anger, feeling that every action her brother and mom do are to spite her, and feels that nothing in 

the world works out for her. Once her best friend and her brother sleep together, that feeling 

becomes amplified for her. 

Throughout the film, Nadine can be interpreted as an entitled and annoying character. 

Her behavior is constantly damaging her social relationships until she finds she is completely 

alone. The only character that seems to “tolerate” her the entire film is her teacher, Mr. Bruner 

(Woody Harrelson), who finds no difficulty in chastising or mocking her behavior and whom 

Nadine finds solace in. However, despite such a negative image of Nadine being curated, the 

audience is still experiencing sympathy for her because of the way her mental health deteriorates 

from this isolation and the ways she expresses her deep sadness in her life. Similarly, she is not 

written to act this way just to be the antagonist of her own life; she herself is frustrated with the 

way she acts and wishes she could change. In fact, she even says to Krista: “You know, ever 

since we were little, I would get this feeling like… Like I’m floating outside of my own body, 

looking down at myself… And I hate what I see. How I’m acting, the way I sound. And I don’t 



 
 

45 

know how to change it. And I’m so scared… That the feeling is never gonna go away” 

(01:29:13-01:29:45). 

Similar to Gerwig’s development of Lady Bird, Kelly Craig has Nadine mature 

throughout the film, although not entirely, to the point of apology to the people in her life that 

she had a strenuous relationship with. However, that awareness of one’s own action is what sets 

Nadine distinctly apart from Lady Bird. While Lady Bird feels a sense of injustice in her life, she 

does not, or rarely, accepts that she has created her own problems. Nadine is overtly aware of the 

way her behavior affects her relationships, but she feels too frustrated about the perceived 

injustices to change that behavior until the end. This self-awareness is also what sets her apart 

from other protagonists who are their own antagonists in other films. For example, Cady’s 

descent into mean girldom is what ruins her own relationships and what destroys her personality, 

but it is only until the end that she is made aware, with the help of others, that her behavior is the 

issue. This allows Cady to be perceived as a self-antagonist and is thus allowed to be shunned by 

the audience and the characters around her. Nadine, on the other hand, is the redeemable self-

antagonist because her awareness allows the audience to feel sympathy for her and her emotions, 

ultimately allowing the audience to connect with her on another level. That feeling of knowing 

your emotions and the actions caused by your emotions are irrational but being too caught up in 

that emotional state to act differently is a very common human experience and furthers the 

realism of the presentation of the teenage girl. Emotions, especially in one’s teenage years, are 

always rapidly changing to the point that the body experiencing them does not and cannot always 

understand why such changes are happening. What the body does know is that they are tired of 

the way they are acting but cannot change.  



 
 

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Another thing that pushes the realness of this film is the relationship between Mr. Bruner 

and Nadine. Neither one is very kind to the other, but it is because of this that their relationship 

can wholesomely exist. Mr. Bruner is constantly telling Nadine the things she is doing wrong, 

but also never rejects her when she needs the space to express her emotions and frustration with 

whatever situation she is caught up in. Although he is blunt, he is not dismissive. When Nadine 

comes in claiming she is going to kill herself, Mr. Bruner makes a joke that he was writing his 

own suicide note, but then still, subtly, gets Nadine to tell him why she is feeling that way and 

what she could do to possibly feel better. There is also absolutely no threat of the sexualization 

of their relationship. Rather, Mr. Bruner takes on a more fatherlike role towards Nadine by his 

offering of advice and always picking her up when she is down. He also does not shame her for 

her awkward expressions of sexuality towards another student, even if it is still awkward for him 

to hear. While she panics over it, he encourages her to take time off to relax and if she is feeling 

hopeless or recklessly upset, he tells her to let him know and offers his number. 

Of course, Nadine does not function totally outside of the realm of sex, but instead 

engages with it in a way that she has power over the situations of sex she finds herself in. The 

film does not push her to be a sexual character or to be sexualized by being in any situation with 

a boy but instead allows her the authority of having failed sexual relations and expressing the 

complete awkwardness of flirting as a teenager. Her classmate Erwin (Hayden Szeto) has an 

obvious crush on Nadine, and she entertains it shortly, not out of her own romantic interest 

toward him but more so because she no longer has any friends in her life. However, when things 

go too far and Erwin agrees to sex with her in his pool after she quotes from The Graduate (Mike 

Nichols, 1967), Nadine sets a boundary and expresses she only views him as a friend. Erwin is 

upset over this, claiming “You don’t say that stuff to a man” (00:57:49-00:57:50) and then plays 



 
 

47 

a song calling Nadine a “dickhead”. Nadine does not apologize for making Erwin feel upset, but 

instead holds her ground, protecting her agency over her own sexuality and laughing at the 

situation. 

 At the same time, she is managing her own crush on the school bad boy Nick (Alexander 

Calvert), whom she feels an unwavering sexual desire for. She appears at the Petland he works at 

to get his number and eventually texts him claiming she would like to engage in sexual activities 

with him. He accepts and invites her out on a date. Of course, no date is really to be had as he 

picks her up in his car and then parks in a parking lot, ready to be serviced by her. The situation 

quickly progresses, moving from making out, to fondling, until Nick is on top of her and ready to 

have sex. Nadine feels uncomfortable and unsafe and retracts her consent. When Nick does not 

listen to her, she forcibly pushes him off, and he kicks her out of his car. Nadine is left, cold and 

wet from the rain, crying from the embarrassment of being shamed for rejecting sex forced upon 

her and from the rejection of her emotional vulnerability. Once again, she is dealing with the 

extreme complexities of sex and the uncontrollable rapid change of emotions. However, she still 

remains in control of her own sexuality, even if it left her feeling bad, and is thus safe from 

sexual projection of a male gaze (Mulvey 841).  

Another film that works with control over one’s sexuality paired with the sexual 

exploration of teenage years is The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015). The film, 

set in San Franciso in the 1970’s, follows 15 year old artist Minnie (Bel Powley), her mother 

Charlotte (Kristen Wiig), and her mother’s 35 year old boyfriend Monroe (Alexander Skarsgård). 

More specifically, the film follows the affair between Minnie and Monroe and explores the 

dynamic of sexual hierarchy and purposeful performance for the male gaze (Mulvey 841) 

through the perspective of Minnie. 



 
 

48 

The early parts of the film depict when Minnie and Monroe are first left alone together in 

a bar, engaging in inappropriate physical contact that is not explicitly sexual. Minnie is shown 

biting Monroe’s arm while he claims he can’t even feel it, until Minnie takes his finger into her 

mouth, sucking on it while the two hold eye contact. Monroe removes his finger and sits down, 

now avoiding eye contact, and Minnie’s expression visibly shifts from happiness to worry, her 

mood dampened by that slight rejection. When Monroe then states he was hard, slightly 

uncomfortable before laughing, Minnie grows happy again while Monroe places her hand into 

his pants. The feeling is new for Minnie, and she is more curious about what the penis feels like 

rather than feeling full arousal. This event leads to their first time engaging in explicit sexual 

relations, solidifying their affair.  

The way Minnie describes everything happening is like that of a child making 

observations. She expresses her curiosity, her wonder towards the feelings, and the words she 

uses to describe their acts imply that it is all new for her and she is wholly inexperienced in the 

realm of sex. While they do not have sex that night, Monroe expresses a want to have sex with 

her, and Minnie is comforted by this. She finds happiness in knowing that she is sexually 

desirable to someone. Of course, for anyone new to feelings of arousal and new to the discovery 

of their own sexuality, being reaffirmed that those feelings are not shameful and being rewarded 

for those feelings then encourages that person to continue to engage with those feelings. 

This is exactly what Minnie does. She finds solace in her relationship with Monroe, 

feeling like she is in control of her sex life through the engagement with and affirmation from 

Monroe. Of course, unlike Lady Bird and Nadine, she cannot be in control of her sexuality 

because the relationship she is engaged in naturally has a power imbalance, ultimately leaving 

her to be exploited by Monroe. Though, there is a difference between the exploitation of Minnie 



 
 

49 

compared to the exploitation seen with Lux and is more aligned with the exploitation seen with 

Lolita. She is swept up by said comfort, but is not in control.  

When she has sex with Monroe for the first time, she calls her friend to share the news, 

but is not met with the same level of excitement. Instead, her friend says: “He’s so old. Ew, ew, 

ew. Minnie, he sleeps with your mom… Don’t you kind of feel like he’s taking advantage of you 

or something” (00:16:21-00:16:31). Unlike the relationship in Lolita, an outside view explicitly 

observes the unbalanced power dynamic and means of exploitation. There can not be an equal 

relationship, especially not an equal sexual relationship, between an adult and a minor11, even if 

the minor feels excited or explicitly states they want to engage in sexual relationship with 

someone who is older.    

This power imbalance becomes more obvious and more dire as Minnie grows desperate 

for affection and approval from Monroe, feeling negative toward herself when that affection is 

deprived from her. Monroe has effectively placed his control over Minnie through the power of 

sex, utilizing his position as an experienced adult over an inexperienced girl to keep her hooked 

and to keep her quiet. She knows that if her mother were to discover their affair, that sexual 

affection would be stripped from her and she would be left empty and alone. Minnie also worries 

that her mother may blame her for the affair and thus parental affection would also be stripped. 

This scares Minnie deeply, so she continues to keep it secret and aims to keep Monroe, and her 

mother, happy with her in order to ensure he does not leave her.  

Minnie soon finds herself wanting more from Monroe, wishing to engage on a romantic 

level rather than a purely sexual level. When she sees her mother and Monroe cuddling on the 

 
11 It is important to note that, in the 70’s, the age of consent in California was 18, 3 years older than the age Minnie 
is depicted to be in this film. 



 
 

50 

couch, for example, she feels bitter and left out. Being forced to keep their relationship private 

has also stripped her of the opportunity to be loved wholesomely, without sexual contact, 

furthering her position as a sexually exploited object; she served no purpose for Monroe outside 

of sex. When Monroe encourages this concept by calling her a Nympho, Minnie gets upset, 

calling him disgusting and feeling angry towards herself. Slowly, she begins to understand that 

this relationship has not been built upon love and cannot produce any love, that she can only be 

approved by Monroe through sex on his terms. She maintains no power.  

In order to change this, Minnie attempts to engage in sex with a boy from her school, but 

he claims her excitement for sex has scared him. She is left, sexually rejected, and feeling shame 

over her own sexual desires. She begins to feel isolated, fearing attempting any romantic or 

sexual acts with other people, and begins to think something is wrong with her. This is all a 

result from the affair experienced with Monroe. By never having any control over her own 

sexuality, when she is left to her own devices she does not know how to properly engage it and 

instead feels shame and disgust toward herself. Ultimately, Minnie’s love for Monroe is rejected 

by him, and she feels wholly unlovable and hopeless. She sees that she was used as an object of 

sex and that their relationship never had any hope because Monroe knew  

Unlike Kubrick’s adaptation of Lolita (1962), The Diary of a Teenage Girl does include 

explicit sex scenes. This, again, plays into the power dynamic present between Minnie and 

Monroe. The male gaze and its abusive intent cannot hide behind implied sex, but is rather laid 

bare with the acts itself. While it is important for teenage girls to know that their feelings of 

sexuality is normal and not shameful, they also need to know that they are always at risk of being 

used, especially by older men. This film works beautifully in ways that Kubrick’s Lolita failed, 

expressing the harmful intent of sex when used improperly. It does not attempt to hide the power 



 
 

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behind sex and does not hide the immorality of an older man engaging in sex with a minor. Sex, 

in the western patriarchy, remains a form of power, and will be used in order to maintain a 

gendered, and aged, hierarchy in which teenage girls are pushed toward the bottom.  

All of these characters, again, are written very complexly and very realistically. With 

Lady Bird and Nadine, they are morally grey characters, as are most real people, who are battling 

the confusion paired with teenagedom. They experience damaging relationships through their 

own behavior, the want of being viewed as better than one really is, and the rapid-fire emotional 

changes that can ruin one’s entire day. They also explore the awkwardness and failure of 

romance and sex that teenagers do face, not attempting to romanticize losing one’s virginity and 

emphasizing the importance of having control over one’s sexual experience. Minnie’s character 

then allows the perspective of the not-uncommon sexual exploitation that teenage girls often feel 

whether it be with teenage boys or older men. That feeling of being stripped of a right to 

romance and control over sexual experience is a horrifying and emotionally charged experience, 

which Minnie expresses in a beautifully raw way.  

By providing the space for female writers and directors to share their own emotions and 

experiences of their teenage years, the opportunity to provide accurate and comforting depictions 

of teenage girls also grows. This space is much needed to help undo the previous romanticization 

and levels of exploitation curated in films focused on teenage girls of the past, to serve as a 

beacon of understanding for the tribulations experienced by teenage girls going through sexual 

exploration, changing emotions, changing bodies, and mental health crises. A new hope for the 

future of women can be created by allowing their experiences and by exposing the misuse of the 

teenage body as an object of sex both in film and in the real world. 

 



 
 

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Conclusion 

From the case studies presented throughout this thesis, it can be inferred that the previous 

inner-cinematic voyeurism of the intrusive male gaze (Mulvey 841) is accepted outward, in the 

real world, enforcing that fear of castration (Mulvey 836) presented early in the mirror stage 

(Mulvey 836) to be held consistently through teenagedom. While there was an already 

established patriarchy and male gaze in the day-to-day life of the American people, its reflection 

in and application to film has been especially damaging to the teenage mind. With the 

establishment of the teenage girl in a new age of technology and media as a new frontier of 

inspiration or influence, teenagers are left to soak up the misogyny and sexual exploitation of 

teenage girls in film. This has, in turn, taught teenage girls that their exploitation is normal and 

taught teenage boys that it is alright, and even encouraged, to ridicule and exploit girls of their 

own age. 

Even when these girls are not presented as a notable sexual object or a main character 

within a film, they are ultimately punished. When the character is not sexually viable, they are 

either punished through mistreatment by other characters or by being socially invisible or they 

are forced to be transformed into a sexual character, although this is often also to ridicule them. 

When a character is sexually viable, then they are unable to maintain their social relationships 

and are exploited by the boys in the film in order to maintain sexually viable. This bleeds into the 

real world, encouraging girls to act and dress in certain ways in order to be socially accepted and 

to feel wanted by the opposite gender. This also encouraged them to be revered by their same-

gendered peers but simultaneously curates a culture of competition in which no other girl can be 

a true friend if they can also be perceived as sexually viable. 



 
 

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Of course, not all films depicting teenage girls wholly or explicitly function under these 

forms of phallocentric exploitation. Even though the films described above position teenage girls 

in positions of power over their sex and expose the forms of sexual exploitation of them, the 

depictions are not perfect. While films like Lady Bird (2017) are an incredible step forward for 

the empowerment of teenage girls, they are also not without their faults. There is still the 

engagement with a knowing performance for the male gaze, simply because it is so engrained 

within American society and within the American film industry, it is almost impossible to 

escape. At this stage of U.S society, it may be impossible to wholly escape a male gaze, but that 

does not mean it is impossible to shift from the male gaze being the main way of making film in 

order to empower women.  

And, of course, there are blind spots within this thesis itself. While the films discussed in 

the last section are all directed and written by women, there are still films not discussed written 

or directed by men that work to avoid the exploitation of the teenage girl. This thesis also solely 

focuses on the American film industry and its products, and there are so many other films and 

shows outside of the U.S that both play into the male gaze and work to escape it. Similarly, a 

majority of the films discussed are focused on white heteronormative protagonists, a constraint 

that leads to a theoretical focus and functioning inside of a white phallocentric film world.  There 

are fewer mainstream American films that focus on queer and non-white teenage girls, but they 

are equally, if not more, important and imperative to discuss in order to move away from said 

white phallocentric film world. A lack of diversity is another product of this male gaze, and it is 

important for teenage girls of all kinds to know that they have power over their lives, they have 

the power over their sexuality and their life as a whole. 

 



 
 

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Bibliography 

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Carter, Cynthia, and Linda Steiner. “Sex/Gender and the Media.” Critical Readings: Media and 
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“Children in Progressive-Era America.” Digital Public Library of America, Digital Public 
Library of America, dp.la/exhibitions/children-progressive-era. Accessed 28 Oct. 2025.  

Coe, Phyllis, and Milton Subotsky. Rock, Rock, Rock! Performance by Tuesday Weld, 
Distributors Corporation of America, 1956.  

Craig, Kelly Fremon. The Edge of Seventeen. Performance by Haley Lu Richardson, et al., STX 
Entertainment, 2016.  

Crowther, Bosley.