Media Matters: Youth Negotiating Relationships in Popular Culture

In the formative years of adolescence, young people face a wide range of social and personal pressures that impact their well-being and personal development. Issues surrounding their educational journey, friendships, family, and intimate relationships all contribute to the complexities of transitioning into adulthood. These challenges shape young people’s self-perception, particularly as they navigate societal expectations that often produce uncertainty and stress. Coupled with these challenges, media plays a powerful role in shaping how young people understand themselves and their place within the world. This analysis considers how media representations construct ideas about intimacy, sexuality, and relationships by presenting certain behaviours and dynamics as desirable, expected, or normal. These portrayals frequently rely on romanticized tropes that simplify complex human experiences into widely circulated and readily internalized narratives. Commonly, these portrayals emphasize conventional ideals such as heterosexual romance, emotional intensity, and stereotypical gender roles, which present to be normative or aspirational. While media primarily aims to entertain and inform, these portrayals can obscure the realities of healthy and respectful relationships, particularly during adolescence when identities and beliefs are still developing.

The following discussion analyzes two widely recognized examples: Britney Spears’ (2003) song Toxic and the teen film Superbad (Mottola, 2007). Despite their difference in genre and format, both are emblematic of early 2000s popular culture that continue to shape contemporary understandings of gender roles, desire, and relationships. Their continued relevance is further amplified by the expansion of digital platforms, where older media is readily accessible and circulated among today’s youth, potentially reinforcing outdated and restrictive relational scripts. Together, these influential media examples offer insight into how popular culture can socialize youth into narrow relational scripts. Their sustained cultural relevance makes them valuable for examining how media contributes to the social construction of relational norms during adolescence. By analyzing these pieces, this paper aims to encourage a more critical reflection on the relational messages that media reinforces and how it may limit youth subjectivities and possibilities.

Within popular music culture, Britney Spears’ song Toxic has become an iconic and widely recognized track that resonates across multiple generations. The song’s popularity and catchy beat have made it appealing, especially for younger audiences. In the context of relationships, Toxic portrays love as being dangerously addictive, with lyrics like: “with the taste of your lips, I’m on a ride – you’re toxic, I’m slippin’ under” (Spears, 2003). This representation implies that romantic attraction can be both exhilarating and destructive, which suggests that emotional intensity and toxicity can coexist within intimate relationships. Such media representations like this are harmful for youth because they are in the early stages of understanding and negotiating cultural expectations in romantic relationships. By framing love as a source of pleasure and harm, the song poses the risk of normalizing instability, which may blur the distinction between healthy excitement and emotional harm for younger individuals. The lyrics “I’m addicted to you, don’t you know that you’re toxic” (Spears, 2003) do something similar by reinforcing the notion that love is meant to feel consuming and destabilizing. These messages influence young listeners to equate love with intensity and volatility, which ultimately sets unrealistic expectations about the nature and dynamics of intimate relationships.

While Toxic is presented through a heteronormative lens, it also reflects and reinforces conventional gender stereotypes. The song centers on a female character who is casted as being irresistibly drawn to a male figure who symbolizes danger and seduction, which echoes the dominant narrative where women are viewed as “helpless” or “naive” in their attraction to “bad boys” (or boys in general). In doing so, the song upholds its limited and stereotypical constructs of gendered desire, while excluding diverse relational experiences. For example, forms of love that fall outside of heterosexual romance, such as platonic bonds or queer relationships are entirely absent, which ultimately contributes to a constrained and exclusionary representation of intimacy that privileges heteronormativity and emotionally intense romantic ideals.

Ultimately, Toxic glamorizes a model of romantic attachment that is grounded in instability and risk. Although not all youth will directly identify with its themes, songs like Toxic can significantly influence how young people conceptualize love and intimacy. When emotional turbulence is framed as a sign of true love or passion, it can become more difficult to recognize and value the qualities of a healthy relationship. This reinforcement of narrow and exclusionary understandings of relationships and intimacy is not confined to the music industry, as it also appears in popular teen films like Superbad (Mottola, 2007). In this film, portrayals of adolescent relationships often prioritize sexual conquest over emotional connection, which socializes how youth construct ideas of intimacy. This representation also puts young people at risk of overlooking essential qualities such as mutual respect, communication, and consent.

A central theme in Superbad is the fixation of the male protagonists on losing their virginity before they graduate high school, which is presented as essential to reinforce their social status and to affirm their masculinity. While the film is comedic and relatable for some, it also highlights the social pressures that teenagers, particularly young men face in relation to sex and relationships. This is exemplified when Seth, one of the main characters says, “We gotta get laid. That’s what’s gonna make us men” (Mottola, 2007), which draws upon stereotypical notions of masculinity that parallel sexual experience with adulthood and legitimacy.

Representations like this are problematic because they offer a reductive view of teenage relationships by suggesting that male worth is tied to sexual conquest. Furthermore, the narrative takes on the assumption that all adolescents, especially heterosexual boys, are singularly driven by the pursuit of sex. This assumption reinforces allonormative and heteronormative expectations, which positions sexual activity as a defining moment of maturity during adolescence. As a result, young people whose experiences and values do not align with this expectation are marginalized. The exclusion of diverse relational orientations, including asexual, aromantic, and non-sexually active youth also contributes to a limited understanding of intimacy. This absence ultimately narrows the spectrum of relationships that are acknowledged as legitimate and meaningful within society.

Additionally, the film minimizes the importance of emotional readiness by treating nervousness about sex as a mere hurdle to overcome. In one scene, Seth, the male protagonist states, “You just gotta get drunk – you know how it goes” (Mottola, 2007), implying that alcohol functions as a tool to suppress nervousness and facilitate sexual encounters. This framing contributes to a broader cultural script in which readiness and willingness are secondary to the pursuit of sexual accomplishment. By positioning sex as both a rite of passage and a measure of maturity, Superbad promotes the idea that external validation should take precedence over self-awareness. In doing so, the film has the potential to negatively influence young audiences to prioritize sexual milestones at the expense of emotional well-being and personal agency.

Both Toxic and Superbad demonstrate the powerful role that media plays in shaping how youth come to understand intimacy, desire, and relational norms. Stuart Hall (1980) argues that media messages are encoded with particular meaning by producers and are decoded by audiences in varied ways depending on their cultural context. “The codes of encoding and decoding may not be perfectly symmetrical. The degrees of understanding and misunderstanding in the communicative exchange depend on the degrees of equivalence established between the positions of the encoder-producer and the decoder-receiver” (Hall, 1980, p. 93). This means that while media creators embed specific ideas or values into their work, audiences interpret these messages through their own social position and lived experiences. As a result, meaning is not fixed, but it is constantly negotiated through the dynamic interaction between media and their audiences. In the case of Toxic and Superbad, dominant interpretations may naturalize emotional instability or sexual conquest as acceptable or even aspirational. Hall’s model thus illustrates how contested portrayals can be received differently, depending on the viewer’s positionality.

This dynamic process of meaning-making resonates with Charles Horton Cooley’s (1964) conceptualization of the social self, which foregrounds the significance of social perception in identity formation. Cooley (1964) asserts that “a self-idea of this sort seems to have three principal elements: the imagination of our appearance to the other person; the imagination of his judgement of that appearance; and some sort of self-feeling, such as pride or mortification” (p. 152). He adds, “we are ashamed to seem evasive in the presence of a straightforward man, cowardly in the presence of a brave one, gross in the eyes of a refined on, and so on” (p. 153). This analysis illustrates how individuals internalize the judgement they anticipate from others, by often modifying their behaviour and self-concept to align with the perceived social expectations. Within the context of media consumption, this suggests that youth may adopt and reproduce restrictive portrayals of intimacy and desire, not simply due to exposure, but through a socially conditioned impulse to gain acceptance and avoid exclusion.

This perspective emphasizes that media consumption is not merely a site of passive consumption, but a space where meaning is actively constructed, contested, and reinterpreted. By portraying emotionally intense and heteronormative narratives as typical or desirable, media examples like Toxic and Superbad shape youth socialization into constrained relational frameworks that conflate emotional volatility with passion, and sexual achievement with maturity. Such representations are foundational to the social construction of gender, relationships, and sexuality. Depending on the audience’s position and critical engagement, such representations may either reinforce dominant cultural scripts that sustain stereotypes or provide openings for challenging and reimaging these norms toward greater inclusivity. Furthermore, the systematic marginalization and exclusion of diverse experiences and identities from media production contributes to a distorted and often exclusionary understanding of what constitutes as legitimate and meaningful in relationships.

Given the vast reach and influence of media, these prescribed standards are often naturalized and embedded within the interpretive frameworks young people use to make sense of themselves and the broader social world. Adolescence is a critical period for identity formation and relational development; therefore, repeated exposure to constrained portrayals can significantly affect young people’s ability to recognize, value, and express diverse expressions of love, respect, and intimacy. Only through such critical engagement can more inclusive and affirming representations emerge, which can better support healthy emotional and relational development of all youth.

Despite its limitations, media also holds significant potential to support positive social change. When creators and audiences prioritize and engage critically with representation and diversity in storytelling, media can challenge dominant ideologies, disrupt stereotypical expectations, and promote more inclusive understandings of relationships, desire, and identity. This is especially important for young people, who are in a critical stage of development and often look to media to make sense of themselves and their place in the world. By presenting more realistic and diverse depictions of intimacy and connection, media has the capacity to not only reflect social life as it is, but to reimage it differently by expanding representations of human experiences in ways that are more inclusive, equitable, and just.

References

Cooley, C. H. (1964). Human nature and the social order. Schocken Books.

Hall, S. (1980). Encoding/decoding. In S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe, & P. Willis (Eds.), Culture, media, language (1st ed., pp. 117–127). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203381182-13

Mottola, G. (Director). (2007). Superbad [Film].
Columbia Pictures.

Spears, B. (2003). Toxic [Song]. On In The Zone. Jive Records.