Easy A and the Issues it Addresses

Have you seen Easy A? It is one of my favorite movies! In case you haven’t seen it let me give you the basic plot: Easy A is about a high school girl named Olive Penderghast, who told a little white lie to her best friend about losing her virginity. Unfortunately, someone in the bathroom overheard and soon the whole school knows about Olive and her [fictional] college guy getting it on. After the rumor circulates, Olive admits to her gay friend in confidence that it is a lie, and he asks if she might pretend to have sex with him since he is being bullied for being queer and the school already thinks that she has lost her virginity. Olive decides to help him out, and soon other outcast guys are asking Olive to do the same for them to advance their social standing. As Olive helps these guys out by pretending to have sex with them, she develops a promiscuous reputation around school and is consequently shunned by her classmates.

As I watched this movie recently, I couldn’t help but think to myself how perfectly this movie exemplifies some of the concepts we have talked about in class: 1) the sexual double standard and 2) how young adults misperceive the social norm.

In the film, Olive helps outcast guys achieve better social standing at school through pretending to have sex with them. The irony is that as Olive “sleeps” with more and more guys, she further degrades her own social standing, hence highlighting how Sex as Masculinity and the Good Girls Code come into conflict. While men are supposed to get with many women and have lots of sex, women are supposed to be monogamous and sexual gatekeepers (Kim, Sorsoli, Collins, Zylbergold, Schooler, & Tolman, 2007). When women are not sexual gatekeepers, there are real life consequences, which are depicted in the movie. Generally, one is socially punished by being given demeaning titles like “slut” and “whore”. Additionally, people tend to avoid associating with “sluts” or “whores” - for fear that associating with a “slut” or “whore” could encourage others to label you the same thing.

Additionally, this movie depicts how young adults misperceive the social norm. A study we read in class stated that “students believed that their peers were more sexually permissive than was actually the case” (Chia & Gunter, 2006) and Easy A revolves around this concept. No one in this movie is as sexually active as their peers think they are – it is all an illusion. Olive pretends to have lost her virginity when talking to her girl friend Rhiannon, and then helps others “lose their virginity” as well. However, nobody actually loses his or her virginity in this movie. Everyone is just trying to fit in, and they are under the impression that losing your virginity makes you cool in high school… The problem is that for guys it is clear that virginity loss equals status, but for girls it is more complicated. For girls there is a fine line between having had sex, and having had too much sex - which Olive seems to cross.

The movie makes me reflect on high school. People are just trying to fit in and along the way people lose their virginity or make mistakes or make things up to fit in. Why should we be judged by others – and why is judgment so prevalent? In my high school people were labeled “sluts” or “whores” and people with these labels were shunned… but why do we feel the need to judge people for their sex lives? And why do we feel the need to compare, and to fit in with what everyone else is doing? What if someones loses her virginity when she is not ready just so she can “fit in” because she thinks everyone is doing it? What if someone commits suicide because no one will talk to the school “slut”? There are a great number of negative consequences for females that could result from the sexual double standard and misperceiving the social norm. Something needs to change...

Trailer for Easy A

Works Cited

Chia, S. C. & Gunther, A. C. (2006). How media contribute to misperceptions of social norms about sex. From Mass Communication & Society. 9(3), 301-320.

Kim, J.,  Sorsoli, C. L., Collins, K., Zylbergold, B., Schooler, D., & Tolman, D. (2007). From Sex to Sexuality: Exposing the Heterosexual Script on Primetime Network Television. Journal of Sex Research, 44, 145-157.