“Skins,” an inferior and crass teen dramedy from MTV, has little nudity and no explicit sex scenes.But it has struck a nerve with its portrayal of a world where teens attach as much emotional value to sex as to skateboarding.
“Skins,” a remake of a British hit, follows a group of high school students who seem to spend most of their free time hooking up, going to parties and doing drugs.
If that weren’t bad enough, their parents and teachers are incompetent fools. It’s “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” meets “Red Shoe Diaries.”
In the 12 days since its premiere, conservatives and liberals alike have blasted “Skins,” a remake of a British hit, as irresponsible, heaping upon it scorn and moral outrage.
Why is the show so objectionable?
Some social scientists and family-values folks say it distorts real life, twists human sexuality, and will have a pernicious effect on kids.
But maybe it doesn’t twist things? Maybe it’s shocking precisely because it’s accurate? A “rude awakening” to oblivious parents, as one 14-year-old “Skins” fan from Texas puts it?
Or maybe adults are enraged because the series reminds us that we’ve all been complicit in creating a hyper-sexual consumer culture in which all things, including our bodies , and now, our children, are reduced to commodities
Conservative watchdog organization the Parents Television Council says “Skins” doesn’t just show a pornographic culture, it is itself a form of child pornography.
“The fact that they have minors in these highly sexualized, highly eroticized … situations is particularly disturbing,” says PTC communications director Melissa Henson.
Henson says she was shocked by a scene in the pilot that had one of the boys, Tony, asking his girlfriend Michelle, to have sex with his friend Stanley because Stanley was still a virgin.
“The message that it sends is that girls have no value beyond sex,” says Henson.
“Skins” is the creation of British writer-producer Bryan Elsley, 49, and his son, Jamie Brittain, 25, who drew on his own experience as a teen.
Elsley anticipated the controversy in a phone interview on the eve of the show’s MTV premiere.
“People keep saying there’s a lot of nudity. Well, our cast is never naked,” he said. “It’s actually a very traditional, old-fashioned narrative.”
Elsley said he tries to keep the show real by consulting teen writers, who suggest plotlines from their own lives.
MTV seems undaunted that eight sponsors have pulled out of the show, including GM, Taco Bell, and H&R Block. A spokesman said Wednesday that the network fully supports Elsley.
Is “Skins” really a window into the teenage world?
Teens who watch the drama agree it’s exaggerated, but some, such as two 14-year-old fans from Texas contacted through one of the show’s Facebook pages, insist that it does reflect teenage lives.
“Kids in all the other TV shows seem so innocent,” says one, a ninth grader at a private school in Arlington, Texas. “And that’s how parents see us. (“Skins” is) a lot more … truthful.”
Her classmate says she and her mother have been watching “Skins” together. “Usually we end up having a serious conversation after,” she says.
An older viewer said she was struck by how the attitude of teens toward sex has changed. Janna Manjelievskaia, 22, a senior at Temple University who has only been out of high school for four years, says teens today become sexualized far earlier.
“They are not scared of authority anymore. They are not scared of parents or teachers anymore,” she says.
She worries that teens learn about sex more from hard-core porn _ so readily available online _ than from their parents or peers.
“For so many boys, it’s their first exposure to sex,” she says, “and it defines the sort of thing they expect from girls.”
Sabitha Pillai-Friedman, director of the Institute for Sex Therapy in Wynnewood, Pa., says the attitude of the kids in “Skins” isn’t an expression of sexual freedom but of a “schizophrenic attitude” toward sex.
There is no “comprehensive sex education” in schools, she says. “The attitude is to teach abstinence only.”
Parents reinforce that denial, says Pillai-Friedman, “so sexuality is often seen as something bad: something you sneak around to do.
“On the one hand, we don’t teach our children anything about sexuality,” she says. “Then we bombard them with these images of nudity and sexuality” in advertising and the media.
Deprived of a positive view of sex “as a normal part of life,” teens never learn “the emotional aspect of sex,” Pillai-Friedman says.
They see sex as a mechanical activity, like riding a skateboard.