Tracy Clark-Flory writes that anywhere from one-fifth to one-third of teens and young adults have sent X-rated pics of themselves to a boyfriend or girlfriend, even though there's a good chance the nudie shots will end up being distributed much more widely. And Clark-Flory is just mildly perturbed about one aspect of that:
Last month, I wrote about a handful of teenagers being punished for sharing pornographic self-portraits taken with their cellphones, and suggested that "sexting," as it's now being called, is more common than one might think. Now, there is proof: An online poll has found that 20 percent of teens and 33 percent of young adults age 20 to 26 have sent or posted online nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves.
A total of 1,280 teens and young adults responded to the survey, which was commissioned by CosmoGirl.com and the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy. The majority of these "sexting" teens intend the X-rated offering for a boyfriend or girlfriend, who they will spend forever and ever with -- but, what do you know, they often end up being shared with others. "A third of teen boys and 40 percent of young men say they've seen nude or semi-nude images sent to someone else; about a quarter of teen girls and young adult women have," the poll found. Most teens and young adults understand that sharing nudie pics can have "serious negative consequences," but 22 percent think everyone should just chillax because it's "no big deal."Even more common than pornographic photos, are sexually suggestive text messages: 39 percent of teens and 59 percent of young adults report having sent them. And, generally, about a quarter of teens and young adults report being "more forward" in their digital lives.
As someone who came of age during the Internet boom, and who falls within the survey's "young adult" category, these findings are utterly predictable. For young adults, technology can offer a means of intimacy or performance, or both. For teenagers, the Web -- namely, Google searches, chat rooms and free porn -- offers a comfortable and familiar channel for sexual experimentation; for them, it offers what a girl holding a mirror between her legs once did. Of course, when teens start sharing pornographic photos of themselves, some legitimate dangers are introduced -- and that's the only part I find seriously concerning. [Emphasis added: EM]. (As for young women sharing racy photos with their boyfriends, we should be as concerned about that as we are about any other aspect of what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms.)
So, according to Clark-Flory, taking X-rated pictures of yourself or writing pornographic text-messages isn't any big deal--except when a teen shares those pictures, when some "legitimate dangers" are introduced (and Clark-Flory doesn't discuss what those may be; is she concerned about child sexual predators or stalkers, or just worried that the teen in question might eventually lose a "Playboy" deal?). As adult dating behavior, though, it's fine and dandy; apparently sending nude photos of oneself to one's boyfriend or girlfriend is a legitimate gift--and hey, it's cheaper than flowers.
Meanwhile, the idea that there's any value in such virtues as modesty, chastity, or restraint is scorned--why shouldn't our teens be encouraged to behave like porn stars, prostitutes, gigolos, and others who sell themselves for sex? Sex may not be all that a valuable commodity, after all, but it's still worth a little, and if an X-rated camera phone image and a couple of lines of pornographic text saves your son or daughter the price of a meal out or movie tickets or some similar teenage dating gift--well, in this economy, so much the better.
'Cause there's no reason, other than "oogedy-boogedy," to object to any of this on moral (as opposed to vague "safety") grounds. Maybe we should push for nude shots in high school yearbooks, a la Thomas More's Utopian bride strategy, to facilitate the dating process.
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Kids today with their heavy petting and rock-and-roll music and drive-in theaters with who know what going on.
Not like in my day when we married them off at 13 before they had time to get into all this mess...
While it may seem extreme to some to label this stuff "porn," consider what happened to me about a year ago.
A young girl sent me still pictures of her... better left unsaid. I believe she thought she was sending these pics to a different number. They had "wokka-wokka" sound files and everything. The reason I'm pretty sure it was a young girl was a) the nature of the picture--an unpleasant close-up of something better left unmentioned, taken at an angle one could only label "self" and b) one of the pictures was of a local schoolbus in which she added a sound file that said, very sweetly, "you missed the bus!" It sounded like a VERY young girl, maybe 12 or 13.
If she was sending those to a boy she was enamored of, I think I've come to the conclusion that I can safely say that this sort of thing is, yes...UNPRECEDENTED and a new low point in the history of human relations.
My teen and pre-teen sons have been bugging me for cell phones. They are not getting them.
Yes, it WAS amateur porn. When I told the anecdote at the beauty shop, even those jaded ladies, who hear everything, had their mouths hanging open. "Ohmigod, I better check Madison's/Taylor's/Colton's/Afton's phone!"
I deleted those picture files immediately, as I was totally freaked out. Perhaps I should have done something different, but I went with the gut. I think it's sad that so many girls are growing up with no natural discretion or sense of privacy or mystery, in the best sense of those words. Sad, indeed.
Teens are having sex? Srsly?
Look, the main issue is that these pictures WILL be widely distributed. And then the girl will, naturally, be shocked and horrified when every young boy of her acquaintance, nay, every boy she passes in the hallway plus plenty of the girls, have seen these pictures. This will serve as an extremely hard lesson that her honor is, in fact, worth something.
This sort of thing happens in the military as well. Privacy is scarce in the barracks, and impossible on deployments. And the young woman in question is always horrified and emotionally scarred. It's basically not a good thing to learn the hard way. I don't know how easy it would be to convince a naive teenager of that, seeing as how the military women in question were all in their twenties.
Yeah, I grew up juuust too late for this, heard the rumbles from the kids I left in high school when I went off to college - there's actually a pretty significant distinction between the kids that are, say, 23 and younger now and those just older - we grew up with the internet, but they spent their adolescence with broadband and cheap digital cameras, and they do the internet-identity thing more naturallly.
As for what it means? It means that porn is like any other art form, like poetry or watercolors or comedy: a few respected professionals make a living from it, a larger group pursues it as a hobby (and occasionally get "discovered" as pros), and even among the less committed masses, it's completely unremarkable to have produced a work or two at some point in your life, most likely sometime in your school days. 'Course, unlike amateur poetry, people actually enjoy amateur porn, so hey.
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