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everything wrong with skins: a thread
big big thankyou to @sausageroIIs who inspired this thread and helped me to have this discussion and gave my thoughts more clairty <3 i love u my socialist queen xx
in short, my first question is: why did they all get away with everything? and, in short, the answer is that the characters were very well disguised middle class kids. if they had been dave from the estate who did keys every night then they would have been demonised for such
behaviours but nobody seemed to bat an eyelid because, let’s be real, nobody seems to care about what the middle class do as long as they can maintain their status. this culture is particularly damaging for working class kids who would look up to what was going on without
recognising the class imbalance, romanticising drug use because the tv didn’t show much of the consequences.
now i’m moving on to perhaps the most dangerous character in the series: cassie from gen 1. she’s portrayed as smart, funny and a little bit quirky, and (most importantly) she fits the typical western beauty standard. this makes her eating disorder storyline even more damaging
for a young audience, as she promotes ways to evade treatment for anorexia but she also becomes the type of girl that girls want to be. this is a very damaging message for young girls in particular who see copying her behaviours as a way to deal with everything.
it seems evident that a lot of cassie’s behaviour stems from her parents’ carelessness - they live in their own privileged bubble where they can rely on art for a living and can afford to not monitor her habits because the cost of her private treatment does not seem to be an
issue. just speaking from experience with mental health services, relying on the NHS is a grim reality for most teenagers and the services cassie exploits seem to cause me to feel nothing but envy for the position she’s in. and i’m fully aware that recovery is a long
process but her constant distraction methods and the weights in socks seem to do nothing but perpetuate negative messages which are all the more harmful when it’s the most vulnerable in this situation who seem to idolise her.
i’ve lost track of the amount of times as a teen i saw pro-anorexia blogs on tumblr and then saw pictures and gifs of cassie promoting these issues, when in reality it’s a condition that kills people and destroys relationships.
it’s not something to be trivialised, and whilst opening up conversations about eating disorders, skins in this case seems to have had a detrimental effect on those who are particularly vulnerable. anorexia isn’t something romantic to make into a gif with a black and white
filter and an arctic monkeys lyric, and that’s not something that i feel many people realise when cassie’s character revolved around her disorder. to conclude: whilst opening up conversations about eating disorders, skins often seems to have had a detrimental effect on those who
are particularly vulnerable.
effy stonem is probably the most ‘iconic’ skins character. if anything though, her storylines are the most dangerous: the underlying message that teenage me seemed to take away was that mental health issues were something that boys would fix, or that boys needed to fix.
effy stonem showed us that depression was rock songs and reading books; that it’s okay to be destructive and that destruction is beautiful.
freddie literally died to ‘save’ her, that was the entire purpose of his character. life isn’t this “romantic” and that’s not something that the most vulnerable teenagers would realise, yes you might relate to the struggles of a character but skins seems to do a brilliant
job of suggesting that this is the reality of life as a teenager in britain. if skins was a friend, it would be a toxic one who tries to seem ‘cool’ so that you associate yourself with it. the characters don’t seem to want to get better, or be better, and perhaps that’s because
they have their class comforts so at least they don’t have to worry about working class problems such as poverty and homelessness, which would alleviate the struggles at hand and in many ways be a wake up call for these characters to change their lifestyles.
