Sexting Hysteria
Posted By jss on February 11, 2009
I have news for the national media and for law enforcement: when more than 20 percent of teen-agers have sent nude or semi-nude photos of themselves and/or lascivious notes to others via their cell phones, it is not a “fad” or a “mania” or even a “new trend,” as it has been variously described in just the last few months. It has been going on for years, for as long as teen-agers have had cell phones with cameras and texting capabilities. You might have just picked up on the word “sexting,” but it has been in use since at least 2005.
Not surprisingly, more people in their 20s do it than do kids in their teens. I know I wrote about this last month …
Sexting and Sexual Networking …
But the hysterical and infectious drive to stem sexting among teens and to put it on the level of child pornography has accelerated in just a few weeks. We have had sexting arrests from Cape Cod to Seattle. We have lawsuits, proposed legislation, at least a few damaged or interrupted careers for … what?
Nothing has actually changed except that the kind of adults who do not engage in sexting, themselves, found out that teen-agers were doing it.
The teen pregnancy rate did not suddenly rocket, nor did the age at which teens are having sex plummet. Teens are not getting venereal diseases in increased numbers. In none of the sexting cases, in fact, have any photos or messages been directly associated with an actual act of sex.
Teen-agers fumbling with their sexuality and technology is not something that should scare anyone into legislation, and schools shouldn’t be overreacting either. Parents? This is a teachable moment, perhaps, for you and for your (underage) kids. Because anything you can get on the Internet, you can get on a cell phone.
See this article from Jan. 30, Reuters:
So let’s be … adults … about this, eh? I don’t currently have a nude photo of the SMC on my phone, but I could; and vice versa.
Not surprisingly, domain names such as sexting.com and mysexting.com have been snapped up; but so far, they’re just placeholders. I doubt it will be very long before a site launches that is devoted entirely to personal cell phone camera porn. If such a place already exists, someone point it out to me and I’ll give you a cookie.
"Into Temptation" is a usually-but-not-always safe-for-work forum about evolving social-sexual networks and how they have changed and are changing lives. It will also loosely chronicle the research, writing and publication, I hope in 2011, of a book by the same name.
We are bemused by the whole sexting phenomenon, but we are worried by the child pornography charges that are being levelled at some underage teens that send nude photos of themseleves. Child porn laws are designed to prevent adults from taking sexual advantage of kids and young teens, but common sense should dicate that teens sexting other teens does not fall under that category.
Charging anyone with distributing or possessing child pornography in cases where the sender is underage and the receiver is underage and/or did not request the images in the first place is insane. I can easily imagine an underage girl sending images to a teacher, or any adult … and then turning the adult in?
Common sense, for the moment, seems to be out the window. Hysteria, and not the good kind.
Oh, and hanks for stopping by.
My man has a ridiculous amount of weird pics of my pussy on his cell phone – shaved, hairy, on the table, upskirt, his hand grabbing it, on and on. Thank goodness I’m 36.
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