So You’re 18 Today … Now What?
By Annabelle Baughton
While it has been several years since I turned 18, I still remember it well. It was a general election year, and as an avid student campaigner, I was excited about my first voting experience. (It was, of course, a letdown when the Tories won). However, voting was not the only thing on my mind. An aspiring actress at the time, I was constantly aware of a single situation that came to dominate conversations with my friends. Now that I was 18, it was legal to sexualise me. Though, that isn’t to say it hadn’t happened before.
Like many teenage girls before me, I had been relentlessly sexualised since the age of 11, when I put on a school uniform for the first time. It was also a situation we were aware of when we became 16: legal to have sex. Many debates were had over the legality vs morality of 16-year-olds having sex with adults (mainly adult men), but that was a debate confined to the realms of personal choice.
What stayed me, so much so that I was ‘joking’ about it on the phone to one of my best friends on the morning of my birthday, was that were I to be cast in a TV show now, they could legally film me naked and air it, whereas the day before it would have been illegal.
It is a truth somewhat expressed in desperate attempts to garner some understanding, again in situations of legality vs morality, that the change from 17 to 18 does not a mature adult make. Indeed, as stated many a time, the brain does not stop developing until one is 25. Before my 18th birthday, I had felt somewhat safe in the scant protection that being a minor can afford; now, I had nothing. In a minute, I was an adult grown, and though my mind had not caught up, I felt I was more vulnerable than ever to certain types of predation and exploitation.
This was an issue I felt could be most clearly exhibited in Season 5, Episode 6 of Game of Thrones. Filmed in 2014, the year Sophie Turner (actress, Sansa Stark) turned 18; the episode contained a brutal rape scene — the character’s first sexual experience. Only a year younger than Sophie, I was horrified — though unsurprised — while watching the scene. It is a problem in media, usually written by men, that women are made victims of sexual assault to trigger character development or plot lines. This was nothing new. However, what concerned me most was that Turner was freshly 18. To me, beyond the scene feeling lazy, it felt exploitative. Like D&D had been waiting for her to turn 18.
Before 17, when thinking about the possibility of being nude on screen, my thoughts had mainly been preoccupied with the potential embarrassment of my family seeing it. Now, I counted down the days when any character I played could be predated upon because of ‘female’ and ‘plot’.
In the years since, nude and NSFW scenes have improved, in no small part due to the introduction of intimacy co-ordinators on set. Indeed, while performing a veritable pornocopia, Bridgerton’s actors seem to have had safer and more positive experiences.
On the other hand, the Euphoria set experience seems to have become one of constantly pushing back against unnecessary nudity or being overwhelmed by the enormous opportunity and therefore not feeling empowered enough to do so. This difference is demonstrated by the difference between statements given by Sydney Sweeney and Chloe Cherry. While Sweeney praises Levinson for allowing her to flag scenes with gratuitous nude scenes, Cherry mentions that she was supposed to be fully nude on her first day on the job and was uncomfortable but didn’t feel she could say anything. She praises her male co-worker Tyler Chase, for advocating for her. I feel for her. In front of the camera and under pressure, I also would have been the Cherry rather than the Sweeney.
I am not an actress, having given up that aspiration some time ago for a more behind the scenes role. In some ways, I feel it was in part due to my fears of being used. Hats off to the actresses that feel empowered while doing it. You’re stronger than me.
