Sex Education, Hollywood Style: Gender, Sexuality and Identity in The Girl Next Door

In lieu of abstract, here is the first paragraph of the article: Commentators as diverse as Henry Giroux (1989; 1994; 1997; 2002), David Buckingham (2003), Cameron McCarthy (1998; 1999) and Peter McLaren (1994; 1995) have contributed towards an understanding of how popular cultural texts such as films, television, music and magazines help to shape young people’s worlds, and how they exist as pedagogical sites where youth learn about the world. The respected ethnographer and cultural theorist Paul Willis, for example, argued some time ago that popular culture is a more significant, penetrating cultural force in young people’s lives than schooling: The field of education ... will be further marginalised in most young people’s experience by common (i.e. popular) culture. In so far as the educational practitioners are still predicated on traditional liberal humanist lines and on the assumed superiority of high art, they will become almost totally irrelevant to the real energies and interests of most young people and have no part in their identity formation. Common culture will, increasingly, undertake, in its own ways, the roles that education has vacated. (Willis 1990, p.147) More recently still, Nadine Dolby has claimed that popular culture is not simply fluff that can be dismissed as irrelevant and insignificant; on the contrary, ‘it has the capacity to intervene in the most critical issues and to shape public opinion’ (Dolby 2003, p.259)