Vicious Hormones

In a large majority of the teen films we have watched, sex plays an important role.
In Heathers- a jock tries to have sex with Veronica but she refuses, and the next day a rumour goes around that Veronica had wild sex with hin.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer- Buffy and Angel have an intimate night of sex and everything seems to go right. The next day Angel has returned to his evil vampire ways and acts as if "last night mean nothing". Buffy is left with tears.
In Battle Royale- a group of teenagers must kill each other off and only one survives or they all die. Sexual thoughts are absent , but as we all know teenagers (especially guys) always have sex on their mind. This is elaborated to the point where one guy asks a girl to have sex with him before they die. Ofcourse, the girl refuses and kills him.
In the film O- Odin becomes agressive during sex out of jealousy. Later the girls have a talk about his agressiveness and Desi's friend warns her of such agressive men.
In Hostel- the young men backpackers are lured in to a hostel of torture. They are persuaded by a number of beautiful hot foreign women that "want" to have sex with them. They ofcourse accept and later face the consequences of this decision.

In Ginger Snaps however, the role of women sexuality is expanded and in return portrays feminism and breaks the traditional binary of men/women regarding sex. When Ginger is about to have sex with the horny Jason, he realizes that she is being very controlling and dominating. He says to her " hey take it easy- who's the guy here?". Ginger pauses and her werewolf instincts kick in as she starts biting Jason due to that remark. Ginger turning in to a werewolf during her period implies the vicious women hormones as taking over Ginger. She becomes more vicious, sexual and a feminist with masculine traits that overpower the men in the film. Ginger is no longer vulnerable, looked at as eye-candy, or naive. Instead, Ginger is the opposite- As Michelle and Abert elaborate in their blogs.

I want to adress the role of the parents in this particular film. The parents of Ginger and Brigette brush the surface of their problems and never get to the core of their problems. The surface of Ginger's issues is puberty, hormonal changes, but the core is the fact that she is TURNING IN TO A WOLF. This can be looked at as a metaphor that parents never FULLY get it. In the past films we have watched, we end up complaining about the parent's uninvolvement and often blame them. We have finally viewed a film in which the mother is most involved, but it is not enough. These depictions overall reveal that parents and teenagers will never be on the same wavelength. Their worlds will never coincide. This takes us to the readings for this week:

In the article by Amy Graff, we can also conclude that parents can not fully control or understand their teenage children. Graff states that parents should monitor what their kids watch but they should also keep in mind that they will watch adult films anyway. They can talk about it with their friends, they will find a way. To those parents who believe that they can control what their kids watch- you can only do so much.