The APA evidence suggests that television shows like Gossip Girl contribute to that.

That’s what I mean by maybe we’re paying too much for “entertainment.”

Teen girls are not “stupid” but they (and the boys and authority figures) do blame themselves according to the statistics about dating violence. The APA says they blame themselves because of entertainment like Gossip Girl that blur the boundaries.

What if they’re not wrong?

‘Gossip Girl’ is a series of books which has been popular for many years with an older generation of teenagers. It has always touched on subjects that interest teenagers; fashion, sex, money, drink and drugs. All the characters in these stories drink, smoke and have sex (under age) as many teenagers do in many books, films and tv programmes. . This series does not advocate rape at all and it appears to me that you have entirely missed the point. Many people claim that both trainspotting and junk glamourise drugs to teens but they still do not go out and get heorine addictions because of this. No teenagers are going to start raping each other as a result of this programme, as most are intelligent enough to see it for what it is, a simple glamourisation of teenage life.

Its sad to see that once again teenagers are tagged with an idiot sign, yes they are sometimes easily influenced but dont you think that scenes such as these might help them to relate to the stronger and more moral characters?

Besides, Dan punches Chuck and Serena yells at him for doing what he did, which shows that rape/harassment ISN’T ok.

Also, I don’t think the show aims to educate or even inform viewers about issues such as rape. Its only aim, from what I can gather, is to entertain. And that it does, at least in my opinion.

Having watched several episodes I just don’t think that’s the intention. If it is, I think they are failing.

It’s not me who thinks she deserved it for wanting to be pretty – that’s how I think the producer’s presented it with their foreshadowing.

Serena doesn’t come off as smart, she comes off as a whore who slept with her best friend’s boyfriend. “Whores deserve to be raped,” that’s what I think the message was.

It will be interesting to see where the show goes. But, knowing that teenagers often react to life by playing out what they see their television heroes do – so far I think Gossip Girl is going to cost us more than we want to pay.

Come back often and tell all your friends. There’s a lot of these issues out there that we can discuss.

I do, however, want to respectfully disagree with your post. I recently watched the Pilot episode of Gossip Girl the other day, and I actually came away feeling quite differently from you. In the scene in which the freshman in question, Jenny, first enters the party, she is not the only girl wearing a pretty dress: every girl attending the party is wearing a semi-formal, pretty dress. By your logic, if it was only because Jenny was wearing a pretty dress, then every girl at that party should have been a target. However, this is not the case: the rapist in question, Chuck, goes for Jenny because she’s a Freshman, and as a Freshman, she is “fresh” and naive: she doesn’t know better than to stay away from someone like Chuck.

You could, of course, argue that, well, it’s only at this party, where all the girls are dressed in skimpy dresses, that they need to watch out – therefore it’s still the skimpy dress that endangers them and puts them at fault. Why should a girl have to be on the lookout? However, I don’t think that that’s what Gossip Girl was trying to depict. Earlier, Chuck attempts to rape one of the main characters, Serena, while she is dressed more conservatively in street clothes. Serena comes off as a smart girl, and even she must deal with this. I believe that in both cases, what the potential victim was wearing was not the issue – it was Chuck and his motives (and, speaking more broadly, men and their motives) that was the problem. In both cases, I was rooting for the girls to fight Chuck off, which I believe the directors wanted us to feel. In both cases, Chuck does not succeed in attempting to rape the girls; in fact, he gets beat up both times. One of his best friends denounces him. True, he does not face legal consequences for his actions, but we don’t know that he won’t in future episodes.

I appreciated your point about how the confusing sequence of sex/rape scenes in the episode. It’s true, I didn’t think of it that way. Honestly, it’s artistically a great scene, juxtaposing these physically similar but emotionally different scenes at once. To me, rather than trying to confuse the audience into mistaking rape for consensual sex, I felt that it was trying to highlight the difference. The emotions in either scenes were so different, and oftentimes, this difference in emotion is the only thing that distinguishes between consensual sex and rape. Like the scenes showed, just because there are bodies coming together doesn’t mean that it’s the same act.

You do bring up an interesting point that, all in all, this is what Gossip Girl shows. You’re right, the fact that these scenes get shown on a glamorous-looking show does create the problem of glamorizing these sorts of crimes. However, again, I really don’t feel that that’s what Gossip Girl is about. Girls dish the dirt through cell phones and online journals and men rape young girls at parties all the time – and unfortunately, these girls don’t always have an omniscient camera to report what happened. I think that Gossip Girl is about taking reality, satirizing it a bit (in how it portrays gossip in a technologically-steeped society), and showing, ultimately, a little bit of what life is really like today. That, I think, is what makes Gossip Girl such a compelling show to watch – it resonates with what people see and experience (but don’t always admit) all the time. By putting it on TV, I feel that yes, it runs the risk of legitimizing problems, but more importantly, it brings these problems to the attention of a large audience so that these issues don’t keep getting covered up and ignored.