MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

As recent books such as Nancy Jo Sales’ American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Girls and Peggy Orenstein’s Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, teenage girls in the United States are continuing to struggle to articulate sexual agency, particularly given the complicated landscape of social media. Smart young women are often caught between a rock and a hard place—at least in terms of how they present themselves to the world— because they feel pressure to be either smart or sexy and have a hard time believing that they can be both given the role models around them. Unlike the more fraught depictions of sexuality in films like Eighth Grade and The Edge of Seventeen, some recent films such as Book Smart and television shows such as Sexual Education are challenging the victimhood depictions of female sexuality and suggesting that girls can (re)write the script of their own sexuality and agency.

I would like to focus on the film Booksmart in this essay. The film has a very positive message that challenges a restricted depiction of female sexuality by focusing on smart girls who are extremely confident and unapologetic about their intelligence and their feminist politics. Their friendship makes them impervious to bullying or ridicule. The film’s overall message becomes a bit more complicated, however, when we examine the secondary female characters in the film. This essay will argue that films like Booksmart are pushing the envelope by including diverse characters (both in terms of race and sexual orientation), but there still is an uneasiness about how smart women can navigate the culturally restrictive landscape that tells young women they can be smart or sexy, but rarely both.