On this season, we'll be exploring the moral panics, urban legends, and conspiracy theories that shape our psychology and culture and why we end up believing them.

I'm your host, Chelsea Lover-Smith, and this is American hysteria.

This rock and roll is the musical noise, symptomatic, of a decade of a decade and irresponsible use.

Police found naked photos of him at age 16 on his own cell phone and was charged with making

and possessing child pornography.

District says that that type of dancing anyway is sexually suggestive.

Absinence for young people is the only certain way to avoid sexually transmitted diseases.

In 1996, the self-aware slasher scream, hit theaters and taught American teenagers the first rule to surviving a horror movie.

Never, ever have sex. It's a running joke that the slutty girl always gets butchered first,

usually sprinting half naked through an open field, often at the tail end of a night of illicit

partying. Classic slasher movies like Halloween have their roots in an urban

legend we all heard growing up, either hunched around a campfire or at some late-night

sleepover, whispering around a collection of candles. A guy and a girl are parked on a deserted

lover's lane making out, the guy trying to convince the girl to go all the way, the radio crackles,

a hook-handed killer is on the loose, and these necking teens are vulnerable and not just to an

untimely death. Maybe you'll remember two of the major urban legends of the 2000s, rainbow

parties and sex bracelets, both of which made extreme claims about the kinds of dangerous sexual games that modern teenagers were playing.

These rumors have roots in the last 100 years, as out of World War I came this brand new social group called teenagers,

who began breaking major social boundaries and challenging

the status quo just by having fun. Since the invention of the American teenager, rumor and panic

has swirled around this reckless developmental stage as parents wrung their hands at every

changing fad, and as their sweet, innocent kids left home for dance halls, for high

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