Strange Lessons in Sex and Power from ‘Saved By the Bell’

Was there ever a more adorable high school girl than Saved by the Bell’s Kelly Kapowski?

Say her name out loud and see if that pow in the middle doesn’t knock you right out. Do you remember how she would run her hands through her long, glossy brown hair, or bury them in the pockets of her high-waisted floral denim shorts while shrugging her volleyball shoulders? Do you remember how her Keds flexed as she rose up on tippy-toes to plant an innocent but meaningful kiss on the cheek of Zack Morris, the only boy at Bayside High who ever had a real chance with her?

Saved by the Bell (SBTB), which ran from 1989 to 1993, was the aesthetic and cultural paragon for the preteen audience of its time. It originally aired on NBC at the end of the Saturday-morning cartoon block, but it had a more impactful second life in syndication. That’s how it came into my orbit: endless reruns on school-day afternoons, when I was old enough to recognize that it was poorly written and cheaply made but still powerless against its sunny appeal. A fever dream of Fiorucci and Billabong apparel, SBTB presented the high school experience to which America then aspired: a peaceable kingdom where jocks and nerds studied side by side. Its characters were archetypes: Zack, the charming huckster; Kelly, his prom-queen love interest; Lisa, the brat; Jessie, the overachiever; Slater, the beefcake; and Screech, the dweeb. Though (or because) they were one-dimensional, these characters are seared into my memory, and none more deeply than Bayside’s own Romeo and Juliet, Zack and Kelly.

I was a precocious child; there’s a photograph of me on my third birthday at Disney World, gazing lustily at the big-head Pinocchio costume. But Zack Morris, played by Mark-Paul Gosselaar, awakened a more acute desire in me. Because heterosexual romance is ubiquitous in mainstream media, it’s perhaps unusual that I, as a straight woman, can pinpoint this defining moment of identification. But I swear, Zack Morris was how I knew I liked boys. He was cheeky, enterprising, earnest, and romantic—not to mention blond, high-cheekboned, athletic, and great-looking in a windbreaker. And because Kelly Kapowski (played by Tiffani Amber Thiessen, who has since dropped the Amber) was the object of Zack’s desire, I understood that she represented the epitome of feminine charm: sweet, chipper, accommodating, and great-looking in a miniskirt. Zack, Kelly, and their giddy mutual attraction gave me a model for romance before I knew I was looking for one.

As an adult, I’ve often returned to the show for its comforting depiction of adolescent innocence. But during a recent rewatch, with eyes sharpened by the #MeToo movement, I was shaken to my core. I realized that, in every story line where Zack and Kelly are broken up, Kelly dates adult men—often ones who have unambiguous power over her. As a preteen viewer, I’d absorbed this dynamic as totally normal because it was embedded in the show’s wholesome package.

Let’s be clear: SBTB is a totally bonkers world lacking both consequences and continuity, as Chuck Klosterman argues in “Being Zack Morris,” an essay from Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs. Most of the goings-on at Bayside High are, to put it mildly, implausible. Nevertheless, the show has a consistent moral code that privileges loyalty, honesty, and accountability, and this gives the whole enterprise an edifying thrust. Wrongdoers are punished; lessons are learned. Whatever stunt Zack pulls, he always ends up coming clean.

Even within this wholesome universe, Kelly’s own virtue is relentlessly emphasized. Hardworking and tender, she calls herself a “goody-goody.” She isn’t naive, though, because that word implies some existing iniquity of which she’s unaware, and SBTB is, crucially, a sexless universe. It left heavy topics like periods, pregnancy, and date rape to other shows, freeing up its characters to experiment without the risk of real-world repercussions.

I never expected my high school to resemble Bayside any more than I expected my body to resemble Barbie’s.

This is the logic of Zack and Kelly’s relationship: It bubbles with flirtation but never boils over into outright sexuality. The entire series implied that they, being the cutest guy and the prettiest girl, were meant to be together, so the only way to sustain romantic tension was through a cycle of breakups and reconciliations. (The “Will they or won’t they?” dynamism was so intense that, according to family legend, when they finally got engaged in The College Years, I was so excited I bit my older brother on the cheek.) Because Kelly was the prize beauty of Bayside, no other high school boy was good enough for her. There was nowhere for her to go but up.

I never expected my high school to resemble Bayside any more than I expected my body to resemble Barbie’s. The one similarity, though, is shocking, because it was the show’s most unsavory motif: a teen girl dating adult men. My own adolescent sex life developed in the same direction as Kelly’s, but for the opposite reason. The boys in my high school didn’t like me at all—I was too weird, too smart, and not pretty enough to make my personality bearable—but adult men didn’t seem to mind.

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Kelly’s relationships with older men were never presented as dangerous or even taboo scenarios. Instead, they were normal, fun dalliances that the entire community knew about, endorsed, and, in some cases, even helped facilitate. First there was Jeff, a sophomore at UCLA and Kelly’s boss at The Max, the burger joint where the gang hangs out. Kelly cheats on Zack with Jeff, then, two episodes later, catches Jeff cheating on her—presumably with someone his own age—when the gang sneaks into a club with fake IDs. Zack even cosigns the relationship: “You got a great girl,” he says to Jeff when they meet at Lisa’s sweet sixteen. “Treat her right.” Then they reach across Kelly’s body to shake hands as she stands there, silent and smiling.

The only hint that this relationship might be inappropriate comes when Kelly’s best friends, Lisa and Jessie, are teasing her about her new crush and Kelly says, “Come on, he’s my boss!” as if that were an impassable boundary. Obviously, it’s not: The first time they kiss is at work, right after Jeff approves her request for a night off to attend a school dance (a costume ball, where Zack and Kelly will dress as Romeo and Juliet). It’s a classic SBTB kiss, long but without tongue. Throughout the scene, Kelly’s body is tensed up, her eyes wide. You don’t know if she’s conflicted about her feelings because she has a boyfriend or if it’s genuine fear. The canned “Ooooh” from an imaginary audience signals that we should find this smooch titillating, but it’s hard to watch a sixteen-year-old get kissed by her adult boss and feel anything but queasy.

Next, there’s Johnny Dakota, a Hollywood actor scouting for a location to shoot an anti-drug ad. Initially, Johnny isn’t sold on Bayside, but then, in front of a large group that includes Principal Belding, Zack introduces Johnny to “our head cheerleader, Kelly Kapowski.” Kelly says nothing and nobody addresses her, but Johnny smiles lecherously, takes her hand, stares into her eyes, and says, “Mr. Belding, I definitely wanna shoot at Bayside.” Then they all clap and Belding gives two thumbs up. The transaction is unmistakable: Zack has pimped Kelly to the movie star on behalf of the principal, and everybody is complicit. But because SBTB is fundamentally chaste, it would’ve been incongruous for anyone to remark on it.

As with Jeff, Kelly and Johnny date openly, canoodling around the school and sharing fries at The Max (from which, with the show’s typical inconsistency, Jeff has permanently disappeared). Yet Kelly remains passive throughout the relationship. Their romance ends when Johnny passes her a joint at a party. Kelly sits, frozen, until Zack enters the room and rescues her with Belding’s signature authoritative line, “What is going on here?” Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that she said yes to dating a grown man, because she said no to drugs—the real threat in this episode. And it’s Johnny’s hypocrisy, not his ephebophilia, that gets him ousted from Bayside.

The 1992 made-for-TV-movie Saved by the Bell: Hawaiian Style takes place during the kids’ two-week vacation to Hawaii. There, Kelly meets Brian, her grandfather’s lawyer, who hits on her right in front of her elderly relative. In a convoluted plot line involving real estate law, it turns out that Brian is a double agent, using Kelly to manipulate her grandfather. Kelly feels like a dolt when the truth comes out, but it never occurred to her or anyone else to wonder why Brian was dating her in the first place. Or rather, no one objected to the obvious reason why he was dating her. Jeff, Johnny, and Brian all commit some trespass against Kelly and the broader community, and they pay for their crimes through exposure and ostracism. But it’s never so much as suggested that dating Kelly is the original sin. In the ethical system that rules SBTB, adult men dating a girl who is at most seventeen is a morally neutral act.

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By the time I entered high school, it was similarly normal for me and my female friends to date adult men. There was some taboo associated with it, but more because we were “alt” types, courting trouble to spice up our placid suburban lives. We smoked cigarettes and did drugs, we shopped at thrift stores and record shops, we were smart girls for whom reading Lolita was a status symbol. All of those things made us unpopular among our peers, or, at least in my case, it was how I took ownership of my unpopularity. We developed a social life separate from our high school, centered around music venues and DIY party houses and the local colleges. The men we met, the men who liked us, were grungier than anyone you’d see on SBTB. They were waiters who snuck us booze at strip-mall chain restaurants, musicians who gave us guitar lessons, college-radio DJs who learned the sound of our voices from the request line. Sometimes they dated us and met our parents. Sometimes they just took our virginities in their dorm rooms or in the cars our parents let us borrow.

They were college-radio DJs who learned the sound of our voices from the request line.

Were these men predators? It’s not as if they were systematically grooming little girls, but neither were they interrogating the power imbalance. We were cute and willing and that was enough; maybe it was enough that we were willing. Plus, these men had consumed the same pop cultural products we had, the movies and TV shows and rock ’n’ roll songs that normalized adult men desiring teen girls. It was everywhere in the media landscape of the ’90s: R. Kelly and Aaliyah, Jerry Seinfeld and Shoshanna Lonstein. Woody Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, a woman thirty-five years his junior and the adopted daughter of his former girlfriend Mia Farrow, was primarily fodder for pop-culture punchlines. The Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, which brought the concept of workplace sexual harassment into the mainstream, were held in 1991, the same year Kelly dated her boss at The Max. Zack and Kelly got married in 1994’s made-for-TV movie Wedding in Las Vegas. Four years later, I learned about oral sex and kink via the Clinton impeachment.

In 1999, the summer before I started high school, I “hooked up” with a college junior. I was thirteen, in the age gap between SBTB’s target audience and its characters. My friends and I hung out at the coffee shop where he worked, and I’d had a crush on him for months. One night, he messaged me on AIM and asked if he could pick me up from my parents’ house. We drove around the neighborhood and he looked at my body, explored it with his hands and mouth. When I recall that encounter now, I feel the same visceral discomfort I did in the moment. I can’t even describe it using the vocabulary of my adult sexuality, because those words would not have been at home in my thirteen-year-old mouth. Even saying that he picked me up “from my parents’ house” feels revisionist. I didn’t think of it as “my parents’ house” when I was a kid. He picked me up from my house.

He didn’t pressure me to do anything I didn’t consent to, and he kept repeating that I had “all the power.” I tried to take it as a compliment, to tell myself that I was a sexual dynamo who could bring him to his knees from his desire for me. But what he meant, of course, was that I was thirteen, and if I told my parents or the cops, he could be charged with sexual assault. (In reality, my parents weren’t the type to press charges. But they would’ve slut-shamed me within an inch of my life.)

When he dropped me off, I didn’t feel hurt or abused. On the contrary, I felt like I had entered a new stage of maturity. I couldn’t wait to tell my friends that I’d finally “hooked up” with “my crush.” But after that night, whenever I encountered him, I would act out. I smoked herbal cigarettes in the café where he worked, protesting that he couldn’t throw me out because they weren’t tobacco. I squeezed honey on the toilet seat in the men’s bathroom. At a movie, I coincidentally sat a few rows behind him while he was on a date and spent the duration of the film throwing popcorn at his head. (Even better, the movie was American Psycho.) I acted, in other words, like the child that I was.

I’m not saying our assignation seemed okay to me because I saw similar scenarios play out on SBTB. I never thought, Well, Kelly dated Jeff, so I guess I’ll go with this guy. But nor did I have the sense that there was anything inherently wrong or unseemly in our mutual attraction. How could there be? As he kept reminding me, I had all the power.

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On her inevitable road to marrying Zack, Kelly made one more major detour. The single season that comprises The College Years starts off on safer ground because Kelly is eighteen. She has shed her innocent schoolgirl image, trading florals for a leather jacket and burgundy lipstick. And, as the capstone to this transformation, she dates her anthropology professor, a thirty-two-year-old divorced dad named Jeremiah Lasky.

Zack’s role in the Lasky story is complicated. On the one hand, he’s the only one to sound an alarm about this relationship, confronting Lasky in the dorm where he finds them kissing and again in the lecture hall in front of the whole class. Zack treats Lasky for what he is: a creepy professor taking advantage of a student. But Zack only cares because that student is Kelly, and he wants Kelly for himself.

In all of these scenarios, Kelly is offered up, fought for, and negotiated over, but she’s never protected. Because there is no sex in Bayside, there’s no apparent danger. But here’s the curveball: During two of the story lines where Kelly dates grown-ups, so does Zack. When the gang catches Jeff cheating at the club, they’re only there because Zack is pursuing Danielle, a student at USC. (In her defense, Zack has been lying about his age, the rascal!)

While Kelly is being used by the lawyer in Hawaii, Zack starts seeing Andrea, a college-age single mother to Jennifer, a four-year-old girl. In what’s probably the most explicit moment in the entire series, Andrea explains her situation: “Jennifer’s father was my boyfriend in high school. One night, we made a big mistake.” At a luau, Zack’s best friend Slater tries to put the kibosh on the romance, citing her age and her child. To Slater, it’s unthinkable that Zack would get serious with Andrea because that relationship has obvious and immediate implications of adulthood. Elsewhere at the same luau, Jessie and Lisa gush over Kelly’s new boyfriend (who is even older than college-age): “Brian’s gorgeous, he’s a lawyer, he’s got a yacht!”

Neither of Zack’s older girlfriends have any real power over him, and, true to his style, he’s the one chasing them. But both episodes make it clear that the teenage Zack is still just a kid. Andrea explicitly points to the age difference when she breaks up with him, saying, “I almost wrecked my life, and I’m not gonna let you do the same to yours.” Slater, Andrea, and even Zack’s mom all insist that he not rush through his adolescence. But for Kelly, girls like Kelly, and girls nothing like Kelly, being available to grown men is considered a part of adolescence.

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Growing up, I wanted to be like Kelly because she was the one Zack Morris wanted. Now that I’m grown, I know I’m nothing like her, and I was never going to be. I’ve never been defined by my prettiness or my niceness, although I’ve learned how to feel beautiful and how to be kind. I wasn’t popular in high school, I’m not accommodating, and I’m not unscathed by men’s desire. (Actually, I turned out to be more like Jessie Spano: an ambitious and outspoken feminist with curly hair who dates men that can barely keep up with her.) What I do have in common with Kelly, I wish I didn’t. If things like this happened to you when you were young, it wasn’t because you were pretty or accommodating or sophisticated or slutty or lonely; it was because you were young.

When I was a kid, SBTB’s low production values and general silliness stopped me from taking it too seriously, and, in spite of this recent reevaluation, I still love it. But I love it in the way I love my own teenage years, as memories to be laughed over and learned from, not as a time I wish I could revisit. And sometimes I still yearn for that kind of Zack-and-Kelly romance: a magnetic attraction leading, inevitably, to a happily-ever-after conclusion. But in the end, Zack and Kelly met the same tragic fate as Romeo and Juliet: They never had the chance to grow out of it, to look back on adolescence and say, “My God, that was worse than I realized.”

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