"I Think We Should Have Sex"

I unfortunately could not find a youtube clip of the storyline I'm about to talk about, but if you have Netflix access- you're in luck! The content I'm going to discuss comes from the teen drama, and a current, personal binge-watching favorite of mine, Friday Night Lights.  The episode is titled, "I Think We Should Have Sex," and for those of you with Netflix access, it's episode 17 in the first season.

The episode focuses on two main leads: Julie Taylor and Matt Saracen. Julie Taylor is the daughter of the head football coach at Dillon High School, the state championship winning football team and to make things more complicated, Matt Saracen is the starting Quarterback. At this point in the show, Matt and Julie are exclusively dating each other and are starting to discuss their future relationship and intimacy.

Here's a little Youtube video I did find of Matt and Julie, just to illustrate how much all the show's fans love their relationship (there are an estimated 100 more just like this):

Back to the storyline- the episode begins with Julie telling Matt that she thinks they should have sex. Matt, a bit taken by surprise, agrees and throughout the episode we watch him buy condoms (yay Matt!), talk to his fellow football players and peers about sex, how to prepare and what to do etc. Meanwhile, Julie's mom sees Matt buying condoms at the local grocery store and a lot of discussions about sex ensue for Julie. This is where one of Maura Kelly's virginity loss narratives and sexual scripts comes into play.

Julie and her Parents 

Kelly writes about virginity loss narratives and sexual scripts in her 2010 essay "Virginity Loss Narratives in 'Teen Drama' Television Programs." For the sake of length, I'm only going to talk about the scripts I saw in this particular episode right now. In regard to Julie's parents, the Abstinence Script, specifically the Dangers of Sex, is utilized. This is evidenced by how Julie's mom stresses that sex has many dangers (both emotional and physical), how Julie is only 15 years old, and how sex is something that is very special. This last one kind of makes me want to code Julie's parents' narrative as Virginity as a Gift, because Kelly discussed how this script takes place when virginity is seen as special and something to hold on to until the time is right, but I think Dangers of Sex is more prominent. This however, is only one script that contributes to this particular storyline.

Matt and Julie 

Another script, arguably the most important script, occurs between Matt and Julie themselves. At the end of the episode, Matt and Julie meet up to finally have sex. But while they are kissing and getting intimate, Julie is so clearly uncomfortable that Matt finally says, "you know what? Let's not do this." While Julie protests a bit, Matt says that it is totally fine and the audience watches as a weight is almost visibly lifted off of Julie's shoulders. Kelly would have coded this as the Abstinence Script, Pleasure of virginity because it "portrayed [a] male who agreed to wait because their female partners were not ready for sex" (pp. 484, 2010). So, while Julie may have seemed to want to lose her virginity arguably because it felt like a rite of passage and it seemed appropriate, which both fall under the Management Script, the ultimate narrative portrayed was abstinence out of respect for each others' needs. The Management Script portrays virginity loss as "part of the process of growing up" (Kelly, 2010), which is evident in Julie's thought process in the show.

Matt and the Football Team 

A third, and small, narrative portrayed was pressure from Matt's fellow players and peers to have sex and lose virginity. This could be coded as The Urgency Script, the need to lose virginity because it is seen as stigmatized and negative (Kelly, 2010). Matt, however, did not succumb to this pressure and maintained an attitude of respect towards Julie throughout the episode and utilized responsible behavior in regard to sex by buying condoms and putting a lot of thought into being responsible. Again, can I just say, yay Matt?!

This brings me to my final discussion point: While I saw the last narrative of Matt's peers pressuring him to have sex as a small part of the storyline, would, say, a teenage football player who probably more easily identifies with Matt's peers see it as small? Or would they have seen this as the prominent message of the episode, therefore leaving the episode with an entirely different message about sex and sexual scripts than what I understood from the episode. This raises interesting questions and work for the future research in this field. How much does identifying with the character utilizing a certain sexual script impact a viewer's beliefs about sex. Does it matter at all? Or are adolescents capable of discerning the main and most prominent scripts apart from minor scripts that may come from more similar characters to themselves? I think this would be a very interesting topic for future research in this field and if I had to predict, with very little grounding in prior research, this could have a substantial impact on sexual scripts, viewers' beliefs, and behaviors.


References:

• Kelly, M.(2010). Virginity loss narratives in “teen drama” television programs.  Journal of Sex Research, 47(5), 479A489. doi: 10.1080/00224490903132044