Body Count, Kaamila Lall

The keyword I chose is Blunt, Adolescents as young as 12 are experimenting and abusing weed. Through my comic I have shown a young student experiencing exposure to a blunt and how students do peer pressure other students into smoking. Not only does this student get peer pressured to smoke but also gets judged by the students that don’t smoke blunts. Stoltz AD, Sanders BD. Cigar and Marijuana Use: Their Relationship in Teens. The Journal of School Nursing. 2000;16(4):28-35. doi:10.1177/105984050001600404 C. (2019). Define Blunt. Urban dictionary. https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blunt

Body Count

Kaamila Lall

Body count or bodies is a term used by adolescents to convey their sexual partners. I find that this word can be very detrimental to how youth portray their sexual partners as body counts are usually used about death in wars, pandemics, genocides, and many more. This term separates the person they are being intimate with from their actual physical body. Although not as common, this is a violent metaphor that can also be related to the number of people a person has killed. Due to the popularity of TikTok youth starting at the pre-adolescence age, they hear this term, which is then brought into schools and social groups. Since this has been circulating on TikTok it has become a big social media trend where people are asking strangers and their classmates in school for their body count numbers. The term is yet another aspect in the lives of youth to perpetuate gender stereotypes in the context of sex. In this case, when a girl or woman has a large “body count” she is seen in a negative light and is used to shame her; however, when a boy or man has the same number or greater, other boys applaud him for his ‘conquest’. This is yet another way to continue the age-old view that heterosexual men can conquer women. In the non-academic video shared below, we can see that in a high school, when boys share that their “body count” is zero, they are laughed at, giving male youth unrealistic pressure to “perform” in a certain way. Upon further research of the term, I came across a video where a group of women and men seemingly in their early twenties titled “Why men can have high body counts and women can’t”. The first question asked by the men directed towards the women was, “would you like a guy that is seasoned” throughout the video, the man asking the question was referring to the woman's sexual partners as meat, for example saying words such as raw, medium rare, and well done. When adolescents view this content, it is automatically absorbed without much

critical thought. Not only is the term creating a separation between flesh and person, but it also allows people to compare people to meat. This term overall has a very negative effect on impressionable adolescents because it does not allow them to understand the relationships that can create with others if that is what they desire. As well, it gives them a false sense of what sex is. Concerning Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi, we can see how much adolescents strive to fit in such as the many times Marjane changed depending on where she lived. In this case, youth can reach content from around the world every day, resulting in youth wanting to fit into the online trends. There is an underlying pressure for youth to have intercourse with as many “bodies” as possible to add a tick to their running list. About Inside Lives by Margot Waddell, we can infer from the text that even unborn children are able to bring their experiences throughout their lives without consciously knowing. This means that adolescents being surrounded by this term will stay with them in their subconscious and affect the way they see intimacy in their formative years. This can help explain why adolescents seem to be growing up faster than they had in the past. They are constantly surrounded by sexrelated content at younger ages that are not healthy ways to talk about sex. Regarding health, the question of consent and sexual health is very important when discussing this term. When the majority of education they are provided about sexual health is from their phones and other youth, they are being subjected to the falsity of sexual activity. To conclude, the term “body count” is very harmful to building relations with others, romantically and otherwise.

Non Academic Resource: https://www.tiktok.com/@billcosbypremiumsnap/video/7128923232387829038?is_copy _url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&q=body%20count&t=1667761001360

Academic Resource: