Tiny Tight Teen (2019)

Is the word ‘teen’ or ‘teenager’ ever okay to use in pornography? We cannot deny that ‘teen’ or ‘teenager’ is a broad and traditionally popular category in the pornography industry. Whilst actors referred to as “teen” are all legally old enough to film pornography and viewers are all aware of the fiction, it’s wrong to sexually objectify those at the point of transition from children to adults. In particular, when we focus on the words used to describe teenagers in pornographic titles, we can notice that they are even more strange, provocative and violent than the terms used to describe adults in porn. This was the starting point of my research: the pattern of how the pornography industry describes teenagers and its inherent paradox.     School uniform is uniquely paradoxical. It stands as a symbol of teenage life, but it is also used sexually by adults and is even a visual medium in which teenagers express their sexual desires. They might, for example, shorten their skirt or tighten the shirts, etc. Whilst a school uniform may simply appeared checkered at a distance, when we get up close we can see that those checks are constructed from a limited lexical field used to describe teenagers in the pornography industry: the most commonly used terms associated with teenagers are ‘tiny’, ‘tight’, ‘petite’, ‘extra small’. This duplicity illustrates the conflict and hypocrisy of our image of both teenagers and their school uniforms.