(Blog post inspired by this article, one is a string of many, about ‘sexting’ teens)
Teen sex sensationalism is popular in the media. Sometimes it is the stuff of urban legend (Take for example “rainbow parties” where teen girls each wear a different color lipstick and all give blowjob to the boys in order to leave different colored rings on the cock. This never happened. If you don’t believe me, get a bunch of lipstick and try doing it on your fingers) and sometimes it was one things blown out of proportion. Teens are having cyber sex! They’re doing it on the computer and on the phone! They’re sending dirty pictures to one another!
Part of this is a gap in technology. When I was a teen, I spent an inordinate amount of time on this archaic type of software known as AOL Instant Messenger. I had tampered with IRC based chat and held an ICQ account as well, but we all knew that AIM was the place to be. It was the Myspace of my generation. Most of the time I used it for massive group chats with my fellow “Honors” and “Adavanced Placement” classmates. The night before a major term paper we would all gather together in a giant chat room and plot out the work together. It was a form of group think that made us infinitely more effective. It always seemed to work out better for me than any other type of study group in person did.
As I was busy seeking out new and improved software and pioneering early forms of social networking, my parents had no idea what “chatting” was. Their only exposure to the notion had clearly been news articles about the dreaded chatroom, a deadly swamp full of evil predators, with no purpose other than corruption. I never read an article about fifteen year olds who would gather at 7PM the night before a paper was due to pool resources. My generation has always been around computers. There are probably parts of my brains that are differently developped to understand a digital language that aren’t active in people that have come before me. They are finely developped muscles. It must have been terrifying for our authority figures to realize that we had gone beyong a youthful lingo, style, or trend. We had an entirely new language and there was no guidebook to translate it.
This is not to say I was an angelic scientist by any means. I had what was technically “cyber sex” from time to time. My notion of this was really undevelopped. Looking back on it now, it was flirting and sexual discussion rather than real and true “cyber sex.” I never masturbated along to what I saw on the screen, but I was captivated. I could talk about sex without worrying about a blush. I could have banter with a boy who could not physically touch me in any way shape or form. I felt so safe in my curiousity behind a screen and a locked door. It’s a shame that this type of exploration was never embraced. When we have digital sex, we have safe sex. There is zero risk of pregnancy, zero risk of disease, zero risk of even coming home late for curfew.
Technology has advanced even more in the past ten years. Chatting through AIM is a thing of the past. You don’t need to clutter your desktop with a bulky application, they’re readily available inside your internet browser. Audio, visual, and video are just a part of life. I have a computer the size of a cigarette case I carry with me everywhere. Our collective sexual curiousity is no more or less than it ever was, we just have fancier tools. As always, the grownups just don’t understand.
Actually, that’s an understatement. It’s not the grownups don’t understand and sit around on the porch yelling that we should get off their lawn and realize that when they were our age they had to walk five miles in the snow uphill everyday, it’s that they are charging teens with felonies. It happens a lot. I abhor seeing the many news articles about 16 year old girls registering as sex offenders for snapping nude photos of themselves and sharing them with a boyfriend. It hasn’t just happened once or twice, it is happening more and more often. Not only is it a waste of resources, a misuse of laws designed to protect children, it is fear and ignorance being used to ruin lives. A 16 year old girl who shows her breasts to her 16 year old boyfriend in the back seat of a car behind the malt shop is a time honored and expected ritual of our culture. There it is, live and in person, hot and heavy, seconds away from moving from one base to the next and we roll our eyes at those teenage hormones. A quick poorly-lit snapshot of those same breasts and she’s never going to be able to live within 50 miles of the nearest school (or whatever the new regulation is for sex offenders).
This isn’t the first time I’ve ranted about the futility of these endeavors. This is about the fifth time I’ve written on this same topic because it keeps happening. We keep expanding the borders on what we consider to be a sex offense and increasing the repercussions. This isn’t just a “letter of the law versus the spirit of the law” type of situation. Just because someone is on a sex offender registry does not mean that they are a sex offender. They may be a bad decision maker, a horny teen, a drunken bachelor party-goer, or someone that really needed to pee when no restroom was available. We are sentencing people to a life of living under freeway overpasses because there is nowhere for them to live within their city limits. They can’t leave because that becomes a violation of their parole. Their photos and addresses are available on the internet, but there is no actual description of their crimes. I would love to see a stastic on suicide for this because it seems to me that we’re sentencing some people to death because they used their iPhone to take nude pictures of another.
At the end of the day, what have we gained from any of this? After we pay for the trials, the jailing, the GPS monitoring, the wages of parole officers, the cost of the classes where young teens are put in the same room as adult rapists because they’re all ‘sex offenders’ and we have no separate protocol in place for the many issues that accompany these ‘crimes.’ Could our tax dollars be used more wisely?
Being born before 1990 is a gift. If you had been given this technology when you were a teenager, would you be wearing an organge jumpsuit too?
2 Comments
February 4, 2010 at 5:09 am
I was with you up tell the last line. This stuff has been going on long before today’s technology. The grandmother who to a picture of tender moment of her new born grandson being bathed in sink by his mother. She took the roll of film (that chemical stuff before digital) to the one hour fotomat (just dated myself) and when she came back she was arrested for child porn. It seem that the boy’s penis got in the picture, go figure he wash being washed.
What get me, is people being shocked that teens have sex. It not like we put large groups 13 to 19 years olds in the same building for long periods of time … oh yes we do it call High School. What really gets my goat is that we don’t inform the poor kids what the rules are. I don’t remember in High School sex ed./Health class being informed about laws that effect my sexually actives. Yes I am old enough to actually have a class where teachers talk about birth control methods and stds. This coincided with the opening days of Aids. No free love for me … Frack. If you go ask any High Schooler what stationary rape is they tell you that if you both are under 18 your golden. Go ask Genarlow Wilson about that little fallacy. Every state has their own set of laws. Ever High Schooler should have a class in laws the directly effect, also they should have a class in balances a check book and how to fill out a 1040, but that for another discussion.
One last thing. Politicians love making laws, but they don’t seem to get around to clean out the arcane laws still on the books. More then (6) unwed women in (1) house is a house of ill repute. That’s on the books in at least one state.
August 16, 2010 at 4:44 pm
It was 1994 when I first had cybersex, I was 14, was the person on the other end really a girl? or a 40 year old man? It doesnt matter now. The bandwidth was so low it wouldve took a half an hour to receive a picture,, but no one had a digital cam back then and scanners for your photos were very expensive. I too (for my first time anyways) didnt touch myself and just talked and said I was.
The american govt has enslaved its own people for decades now. This is just another way of them fueling their money machine.
Another thing on sex and law,, how come I (and no one else) didnt have a problem with dating mature women when i was a kid, but its so wrong for an older male to date young girls? Young girls wouldnt even date me when I was a kid, not that I want to ever date teens myself, but Im glad I found women who did! Cause young girls were sickening always being slaved around by their parents.