FMS 394 Lesson 4 SEX AND THE SINGLE TEENAGER

 What is a “pregnancy” melodrama and what is its significance to cinematic discourses of youth?  How does a film like Splendor in the Grass both express anxieties about teens’ sexuality and use teen sexuality to express broader social anxieties emerging in the early 1960s?  How does the “Sexual Revolution” shape discourses about teens and adolescence including those circulated in film and other media texts? GUIDING QUESTIONS

 Late 1950s and early 1960s  Simultaneous courting and containment of young female desire  Average first marriage age dips to ~20 for women, 22 for men in 1960  Hormonal birth control pills approved in US in 1960 THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION April 7, 1967

 Rumblings in the Media  Cleanpics and exploitation pics  Music  Rock and Roll consumption  Girl Groups Girl Groups  Pregnancy Melodramas THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION The Shirelles in 1961

 Melodrama as a subgenre:  Heightened emotion  Struggle between vice and virtue  Intended and/or assumed female audience  Pregnancy melodrama  Hybrid of the women’s film and the teenpic  American Puritanism vs. new morality American Puritanism vs. new morality  Acknowledged female desire Acknowledged female desire THE PREGNANCY MELODRAMA A Summer Place, 1959 Dir. Delmer Daves

 Set in the late 1920s-early 1930s in Kansas  Contemporary anxieties about sexuality set in past  Consequences of denying desire Consequences of denying desire  Not just about teens SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS (1961)

Affluence, Malaise, and the Search for Authenticity NEXT TIME ON FMS 394