‘The sex lives of college girls’. A case study about sexual consent communication in teen shows

Abstract

Within debates about sexual violence one concept has increasingly moved to the fore - sexual consent. As consent is closely tied to power dynamics within heteronormative discourses, its negotiation depends on the people involved and how they communicate, define, and experience sexual consent. Moreover, previous research suggests that adolescents tend to get information about certain facets of sexuality from television. Hence, this case study aims to analyse how sexual consent communication is depicted in teen shows, in particular, in the show ‘The Sex Lives Of College Girls’ (HBO Max, 2021). In the scope of content analysis, this research applies a codebook by Jozkowski et al. (2016) to analyse 28 scenes of 10 episodes of the show. The most common consent and refusal communication cues were implicit verbal and explicit nonverbal cues.