Never Have I Ever

It occurs to me that one of the best ways one has of understanding that he has outlived his time here on earth is to watch one of the many Netflix flicks geared toward teen audiences. 

Take the series Never Have I Ever, for example. In this coming of age love story, the young daughter in an immigrant family from India spends her sophomore year in high school investigating the various ways in which she might manage to trespass against the traditions and morals of her native culture, not to mention my own native culture, and ultimately, sooner rather than later, lose her virginity. 

Having sex as soon as possible is depicted as something quite normal for the average American female teen--and that's because it probably is. See? That's how out of touch I am. I'm actually sitting here feeling scandalized by a plot element that has become nothing more than perfectly common, a no-brainer. Of course the 15 year old lead female's most pressing quandary is how to get laid before the end of the month.

You see, when I was a young teen, we kind of thought more about how soon we should try to hold a girl's hand. Something like that would of course lead to going steady and getting engaged and getting married, so it was kind of a big deal. 

The general attitude in this series, and in all these sorts of series and movies, is not just that anything goes, but that anything and everything is both generally quite okay and generally recommended; and I can't decide whether this is a faithful representation of culture as it is among the young, or whether it is a stealthy sort of social conditioning from the halls of Hollywood. Is this life imitating art or is it art imitating life? 

That said, I am enjoying Never Have I Ever, which strikes me as kind of cute and funny once one blocks out nagging voice of the generation gap (or is it two generation gaps by now?).