Toxic Men in Teen Shows

I recently finished writing an entry of “Top 10 TV Bad Boys” for Instagram and this blog. It’s been a blast. I shouldn’t have been surprised that the words flowed easily for me on this one; I love a bad boy. Some of my favorite characters in all of TV are pretty quintessential bad boys, from the likes of Damon Salvatore and Dean Winchester to Don Draper and the Devil.

But in the process of writing this, I started to wonder just why it was that we — that I — love a bad boy so much.

I came to many conclusions, but at the base, there’s a fantasy that below all that trauma and all those problems, there is something deeper, something that only the right girl can access. I have recently been rewatching “The Vampire Diaries,” a show that made a massive impact on my teen self, but I haven’t seen once I became an adult. Watching it now, a few things have really stood out to me.

Damon Salvatore is incredibly toxic and terrifying, and yet, the story is built to make teen girls love him. It was built to make me love him. Elena is displayed as the one thing that can bring back humanity to this creature who has lost sight of what’s right and wrong. She’s the light in his darkness, the one thing that can pull him back from the edge. She’s the one person who he can open up to, and be vulnerable with.

Here’s the thing: that is incredibly toxic.

It’s the bill of goods that gets consistently sold to young women over and over again when they are told to love the bad boy. No wonder young women get sucked into relationships with cruel alcoholics, withholding narcissists, and abusive creeps. Nearly every TV show they’ve ever watched has told them to love these men, has given them the fantasy that they’ll be the one girl who can fix him.

Bringing it back to Damon Salvatore, my level of horror at his behavior early in the series is incalculably higher than when I watched the first time. When I watched at age fifteen, I made excuses for him. I wanted to see the good. Me, and a lot of my friends.

And that is so often made out to be the fault of teenage girls, as though they are simply and inexplicably drawn to toxic behavior. As if the writers didn’t know, the casting directors, the actual directors and producers and showrunners, didn’t know that this character was going to be alluring. His whole point is to be the sexy dark side, with beautiful blue eyes, a chiseled jawline, and a sexualized body.

Everything in these stories is built to make us love the Damon Salvatores, the Christian Greys, and yet, somehow, it is the teen girls watching and reading and internalizing this media who still get blamed. “Fangirls,” people say, and roll their eyes. As if this isn’t systematic and insidious behavior that conditions young women to excuse the horrible and abusive behavior of men throughout their lives.

And on the subject of Fifty Shades of Grey, it just shows that the socialization to excuse abuse follows us into adulthood. Women are still eating up the story of an abuser couched in the romance of wealth, attractiveness, and a fantasy of being “special.”

Obviously some abusers are incredibly charming and handsome; they lure you in with promises and that perfect fantasy. And that’s important to show in media. But the difference comes when the show itself acknowledges that the behavior is toxic and abusive. Not lampshading like in The Vampire Diaries when Caroline, the victim of Damon’s rape and both mental and physical abuse, calls out the burgeoning relationship between Damon and Elena. We are supposed to be momentarily uncomfortable, but then get excited when we finally get to the kissing. We’re supposed to feel the electricity between these two, and be convinced that Damon can be better for Elena.

And while it turns out he can be, that doesn’t mean everything else gets erased. Of course, these are characters. We give license to characters more than we do to real people, and that’s okay. Sometimes that’s even good. They’re vampires, with impulses and urges more intense than our. All right. Maybe Damon does get to be redeemable — though I’m not sure that’s true.

But the problem really is that we feed these stories to young women right as their romantic and sexual identities are being created and first explored. Right as they hit puberty, they are bombarded with these same archetypes and characters, and told to love them. Then, they are not only given every reason to love and forgive these abusive characters, but are then shamed by society at large for doing exactly what they media they’re consuming asked them to do.

A bad boy doesn’t have to be an abuser. A charming, even semi-problematic Dean Winchester or Lucifer Morningstar comes to mind. One is the literal devil, and he is far better on relationships, consent, and healthy behavior than Christian Grey or Damon Salvatore. I’m all for a bad boy, but when it crosses the line into abuse, it’s frightening. Because everything in their medium often tells us to love them, to shrug off the horrors they inflict, and get lost in those dreamy eyes.

Maybe these characters, these charming and somewhat paradoxically redeemable abusers can still be somewhere in our media, but let’s get them out of teen shows.