Matt Zeitlin: Impetuous Young Whippersnapper

This week’s episode of Gossip Girl was almost the ur-statement of the show’s odd values and depictions of age. As Phoebe Maltz so smartly observes, in the make-believe world of Gossip Girl, the teens live by super-retro sexual ethics. A girl is considered shameful is she has sex unless it’s with a steady boyfriend, when a girl is pregnant, it’s assumed by everyone that she will keep the baby. And when two of these scions of high society get together for anything more than a few months, their parents start talking about “forever” “commitment” and even start banding about antique diamond rings. Chuck, who is the avatar of total hedonism, is last seen in the episode sitting at a bar, drinking alone, as if at the age of 17, he is somehow washed up. Blair, who has committed the cardinal sin of *gasp* having sex with two classmates in somewhat quick succession, is depicted as a ruined woman who needs to flee the country.

Another interesting detail of these antique sexual mores noted was how the more promsicuous characters — Serena and Chuck — used the pill and condoms respectively, while the (more) chaste ones — Blair, Nate and Dan — were assumed to be naive about contraception. Not only did this dichotomy exist, but the use of birth control was made out to be shameful, as something that only sluts and cads would use. Apparently real, romantic love is supposed to carry some risk in Gossip World.

Interestingly enough, the most recent episode was a great example of Steven Landsburg’s “More Sex Is Safer Sex” thesis. Landsburg, an economics columnist for Slate and a professor at the University of Rochester, has written about how when people who are on the fence about having sex or being abstinent opt for abstinence, the pool of sexually active adults shrinks so that those who are promiscuous and are more likely to be diseased make up a larger portion of it. If, instead, the people who have no sex decided to do so more often, the pool would get larger and the chances that any person would have sex with a diseased partner goes down. While this sounds like a theory that only an economist could love, the research has some pretty startling results, namely that “the spread of AIDS in England could plausibly be retarded if everyone with fewer than about 2.25 partners per year were to take additional partners more frequently.”

But what, you ask, does this cool bit of trick-economics have to do with our favorite teen soap? In some sense, the source of much of the drama in Gossip Girl is that the sexual universe of Serena, Chuck, Blair, Nate and Dan is made up of two “sluts” and three people who are functionally chaste. So when Dan, Blair and Nate finally have sex, they are less likely to use protection and thus the specter of pregnancy is ever-present. Also, because the “sluts” are firmly differentiated from the chaste as far as number of partners^1, it increases the social penalty for the chaste to have sex, and when they finally do, as in Blair and Dan’s case, it is often with a “slut.” This dynamic means that the risk of STD infection becomes higher because the “sluts” who have sex with the chaste are likely to transmit a disease and the chaste, when they finally stop being abstinent and decide to start having sex among themselves, are much less likely to use protection, because only sluts use protection. If the characters in Gossip Girl acted like normal teens — kids who have sex about the same amount hang out with each other — then we wouldn’t get delicious episodes like this most recent one.

In the next edition of the Gossip Girl seminars, we’ll explore the Political Theory of Gossip Girl and how the differing sexual ethics and mores of the teens and adults give us insight into communitarian conservatism and liberal individualism. I’m not kidding.

¹ Chuck and Serena’s combined average of sexual partners is some very high number, while the other three have had an average of 1/3 partner each due to Nate having sex with Serena before the show’s time window opening.