Sexual Emancipation and the Maturing of Youth Films

What should we make of the movies that declare themselves as teen-films, but their (sexually explicit) content renders them inappropriate for teenagers in the eyes of the censors? An example of such films is The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015), an American independent film that joined a relatively small series of movies about sexually active and promiscuous teenage girls. In it, we observe the world of the 1970s mainly through the eyes of a sexually curious fifteen-year-old that enters an affair with her
mother’s boyfriend. Such a move away from the phallocentrism of the classic age of cinema is in itself no longer groundbreaking, but, in this case, the focus on the sexual curiosity/deviancy of a young girl serves as a refreshingly realistic insight into a girl’s psyche and since her actions are often still (pop-)culturally determined, it also serves as a reflection on society and the general modern mechanisms of growing up.
A more complex characterization and their delicate content have lately made some (especially indie) teen movies more widely relevant, but this should not take away their social role in addressing youth-specific topics.

The integral (Slovenian) version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!