Skins’ flesh-and-blood girls are my kind of role model

Setting an example: Skins girls Effie, right, and Pandora
12 April 2012

Skins may seem like the last place to look for role models. The E4 show, which returns for its fourth series on Thursday night, has regularly been accused of setting an atrocious example to adolescents. The sex, swearing and drugs are all casual and free-flowing: the teens go to school on a spliff, eff and blind their way through the day, before tumbling into bed for a shag.

Of course, most of its young audience are wise enough to see the show for what it is: a drugged-up, sexed-up and even more foul-mouthed version of the true teenage experience. They aren't all rushing out to copy the lifestyle it portrays. Even if they wanted to, work would get in the way.

But ignore all its ratings-chasing wild living for a minute. Skins also has one of the most positive portrayal of girls on TV. Its American rivals often play straight to gender stereotypes, giving us women who need to be rescued. But the teenage girls on Skins are tough, complex and some of the more inspiring around.

Queen of the pack is Effy Stonem, the one who all the boys drool over. But that is far from Effy's only appeal. Despite her constant look of withering scorn, she is charismatic and witty. She fights her own battles and says no to the boys. Then there are the fiery and principled Naomi and her kind-hearted girlfriend Emily, who — in contrast with the short-lived versions of Sapphic love that teen dramas usually give us — have the most successful relationship on the show.

There is the cast too, who, guest-editing Company magazine this month, proved themselves to be wise beyond their years. Their stint on Skins is short — there is a complete cull every two years — and most of them are sensibly heading off to university. And it's Perrier not pints they order; hardly a life of debauchery.

Some will say that holding up the cast or characters as role models stops short of encouraging girls to even loftier ambitions. Certainly history has many XX-chromosomed wonders we could push upon young women, in the hope that they will wish to be the next Mary Wollstonecraft or Marie Curie. But theirs is a long way from the experience of most young girls growing up.

When I was a teenager, glass-ceiling smashing Nicola Horlick seemed regularly to be foisted upon my generation as the ultimate female role model. But popping out six sprogs and working all hours in the City was a world away from my and my friends' youthful dreams. Could there have been any better way to terrify girls than to hold up Horlick as the true superwoman? I'd have preferred an Effy to a Horlick any day.

Skins also has its own subtle point to make on the subject of role models. The real reason the teenagers on the show are running riot is that those they should be looking up to, their parents and other adults, are too absorbed in their own world. Aged 15, no doubt most of us found our Aged Ps excruciatingly embarrassing. But at least someone asked where we were going before we stomped out of the house and slammed the door. In Skins, the adults seem so unaware of their children that it is small wonder the kids are no paragons of teenage virtue.

If there really is anything wrong with teenagers today, Skins suggests, we would do best to look at their seniors to find out why.

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