You've seen so-called "teen movies." They feature a "teenage" (read: twenty-something) girl and a "teenage" (see above) boy involved in some sort of romantic-but-not-quite situation. Rutgers University reports that 61.7% of teen movies feature Freddie Prinze, Jr. in some capacity, whether as the "teenage boy" or as some sort of supporting character. Attempts to satirize this genre have fallen flat, with the nonsuccess (dis-success?) of Not Another Teen Movie. A valiant attempt, but the Teen Movie Juggernaut is just too powerful, especially when it's accosted by mediocre writers on horseback. They could have learned a lesson from the Polish Army, who went after the Germans the same way. History tells us how that ended: Poland became a world superpower and defeated Stalin (this answer brought to you courtesy of the target audience for Teen Movies).

Many people -- teenage girls, mostly -- take these Teen Movies as canon, as though the Pope himself has decreed that this is how life is. Are they so deluded? Do they really believe that, in the real world, the guy gets the girl and they run off into the sunset together? I cite as an example the film Save the Last Dance, starring the perpetually angry-looking Julia Stiles and several other people whose names I don't remember and can't be bothered to look up. This film makes a mockery of life by offering exactly this scenario (of course, there's a little conflict in between, just to make us wonder how long it will be before the guy and girl get together).

Films like these are to be satirized as much as possible by audience-members. Buy tickets to these movies and make sarcastic comments throughout the show. Many years into the future, the people who went to these movies hoping to leave dripping with sap will thank you. Maybe it will be on the street, or in a grocery store, but you will have made a positive impact on their lives by helping them reject the tripe that is Teen Movies.

And yet, people still take them seriously! Ever After makes us cry, Save the Last Dance makes us weep, and Titanic makes us sniffle. (Drop Dead Gorgeous makes us laugh out loud, and rightfully so, for it is an excellent satire of this genre of film. Especially the scene where one of the beauty pageant contestants dances with Jesus. Sensational!) For those of us who live in a glass bubble, perhaps these movies offer hope. For the rest of us who've lived out there in the trenches, it's a woefully inaccurate portrayal of relations between the sexes (not those kinds of relations!), and as the curtain comes down, everyone is happy. It's like Shakespeare, except with him, there was a 50/50 chance that everyone might be dead when the curtain came down; now, that's interesting!

If there's one truth in the world, it's that nothing is sacred. Everything has the potential to be satirized. By sitting back and accepting what we're told unquestioningly, we fail to think critically about the world in which we're living. We lose the ability to analyze, to pick apart the truth from the non-truth, to discern between what is real and what we're only being told is real (a vast government conspiracy? That's not too far away, considering the power of Teen Movies). Unquestioned acceptance is one of the big problems of today's day and age; we've grown to the point that we assume that whatever we're shown is fact. Teen movies should not be taken at face value; they should be pulled apart to expose the insidious falsehoods that they peddle: everyone is not happy, and Julia Stiles is angry all the time. Only by being critical can we hope to survive in an era where we are increasingly told only one side of the story; destroying the onslaught of Teen Movies is a beginning, not just an end unto itself (though it seems like it, doesn't it? It's quite a service to mankind).