She's Too Young

When I finished watching this movie, and began to write my review, I stared at a blank screen for about an hour. All I could say after watching this movie was “wow.” This Lifetime movie, Shes Too Young, explains it all in the title. It’s the story of a 14-year-old girl named Hannah. Hannah is in high school and comes from a great family. She has a father and mother who love her so much and take pride in her for always telling the truth. She plays the cello and has always excelled in school, getting straight A’s and being the perfect child. But that all changed. She began hanging out with two of the school’s most popular girls.

Dawn and Becca become bad influences on Hannah. They introduce her to Nick, their schools “stud,” the boy that everyone wants to be with. One thing leads to another and Hannah loses her virginity to Nick, at the age of 14. But when Hannah refuses to have a three-some with Nick and two others, she soon learns that he’s not the great guy she thought he was. As if that wasn’t enough for Hannah, she soon finds out her friend Dawn has syphilis, whom also has had sexual encounters with Nick in the past.

Dawn’s contradiction of Syphilis spreads school-wide. Students are asked to get tested and the parents are notified. Hannah soon finds on she too has this contagious disease. As if that was wasn’t enough to make her proud parents not so proud anymore, the story line gets worse. But I will end my movie overview here. You will just have to watch to find out the rest.
Along with have a shocking storyline, this movie made me aware and see up close what girls like Hannah go through each and every day in this world. Hannah went from being the straight A student to a girl who just wanted to “experiment” with her sexuality. Hannah does what a lot of teens girls would do. They take their chance to become “popular” and engage in sexual activities, without being informed about the dangers of sexual intercourse. Being a young women myself, and student just like Hannah was before she got into trouble, I remember back in high-school when I had sexual education. I used to think to myself, “that can’t happen to me.” But that’s what all girls think, girls that are the straight A students, girls like Hannah, girls like me.
During this movie, a lot of themes came to my attention. The first theme was the need of self-change. The article “Girls, Schooling, and the Discourse of Self-Change” came to my attention when I was watching this movie. It goes back to that “first-time” at prom that you always hear about in movies. Hannah was a virgin and all of her friends were not. She wanted to experience that “first-time” and when Nick came along and told her everything she wanted to in order to get in her pants, she believed it, and went along with it. As women, we feel the need to be loved and be told that we are beautiful. As a young girl who never experienced love or been on a date, this was the first time that her identity as a young women came into play. It was the first time a boy told her she was beautiful, she was perfect and that he liked her a lot.

Another theme was came along with this movie I feel goes back to last week’s discussion on girls and popular culture. If it wasn’t for the media, young girls like Hannah, Becca and Dawn wouldn’t know everything they knew in this movie. But as young girls more and more each day are being exposed to the media by various outlets such as movies and magazines, they are learning about love, sex and as a women what their “role” is in these relationships. As parents, sometimes it is hard to stop these things from happening, such as in the case of Hannah. Her parents were great parents and grew her up to be the bright, smart, young girl that she was. But they weren’t there when the boy talked her into having sex or drinking alcohol, but she saw her friends doing it, she saw it in movies, and she felt that this was her role as a female.

Being young women myself, I look back at my education and remember my sex education classes. But what I remember of these classes are being shown pictures of STD’s and the extreme. And by being exposed to the extreme of these situations is when you think, “this can’t happen to me.” I think the movie She’s Too Young is a great movie to show young girls experiencing this time in their life. It puts things into perspective and it really put this feeling in my mind, although I have already experienced high school, and my first love. But by showing this movie to young girls like Hannah, it could show them that this can happen to anyone.

Danielle Kaye