Showing posts with label Sexting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sexting. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Just calm the f%^& down!


Wow, I just ran across this new article about sexting and I was surprised to see that the great sexting debate might not be some fleeting, momentary, absurd moral panic. It appears to be an absurd moral panic that has some staying power.

Apparently some polling data is showing that a larger number of older teens (16, 17) are doing sexting than their worried parents might have thought.

Now it remains to be seen if more anti-sexting laws will be pushed once again.

But where is the great surprise in all this? And quite frankly, I scratch my head over the sort of outrage and paranoia this is inspiring. I mean, let's see now...teenagers, kids going through puberty, are going to start experimenting with sex and exploring their sexuality. Who da thunk it? You know what? If you got anywhere close to a passing grade in high school biology class, you would think this sort of behavior was perfectly normal and expected.

Or perhaps the the kids of the folks in those morality groups like the Family Research Council or the Culture and Media Institute or the Parents Television Council might not be doing anything like this. You know, those people who have their kids sign the virginity contracts (and whose kids are having sex and getting pregnant at the exact same rate as all other teenagers who don't sign the contract and don't go to alcohol-free dances where you're supposed to stand at least a foot away from your partner and leave room for Jesus).

But, then again, who ever got pregnant from a "sext" message? Or caught a social disease from one? There are quite a number of other statistics on the sexual behavior of "these kids today," and they are also more likely to be engaging in safe sex activities than ever before. If a teenager is going to be having sex today, it is more likely that they will be using condoms than ever before. And, again, if sexual experimentation merely involves the cell phone, you don't even need to be worried about a leaky condom or a missed birth control pill.
So, with all the risky ways teenagers can explore their sexuality, texting might actually be the safest and best alternative.

And, of course, if today's parents, those creaky old squares, are giving too much static, junior can always remind them that grandma dropped acid and had sex with three guys at Woodstock.

Friday, April 10, 2009

A Cool Culture Wars lineup takes shape for 4/16/09



Don't forget to tune in to the April 16th episode of WSPC Culture Wars! Our lineup of guests will include Firebrand Literary Agency founder Nadia Cornier. She will talk with us about kids' publishing and cultural controversies.

After our past episodes discussing those randy, sexting teens, we'll take a look at how the very big business of children's and Young Adult (YA) publishing deals with the tough issues of sex, sexuality, and all things controversial in a world of paranoid adults and extremely worldly kids.

You deffinitely don't want to miss it!!!

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

New podcasts of Culture Wars shows!

Be sure and check out http://culturewars.libsyn.com/ for more episodes of WSPC Culture Wars, including Paul Levinson's discussion of "sexting," Jennifer B. White talking about the publishing industry, PR, and the beginning writer, and Jeff Yang and Parry Shen talking about Asian American superheroes and comic books.

If you haven't been browsing the links over on the right side of the screen recently, be sure and check out Paul Levinson's blog post about sexting for more really great points about the issue, or click right here.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

Comparing "Sexting" to Child Porn is Ludicrous

Check out this latest article about how a budding new moral panic, the teenage cell phone phenomenon of “sexting” is about to turn into the next salvo on free speech and expression in America.

The ACLU, to its credit, is at least taking on this Pennsylvania county’s paranoid and destructive attempt at prosecuting teenage girls who sent provocative pictures of themselves to their boyfriends over the cell phone. And this prosecution is taking place despite the fact that THE TYPES OF PICTURES SENT BY THE GIRLS ARE NOT CLASSIFIED AS ILLEGAL IN PENNSYLVANIA!!!!!!!! So what the &^$%ing %#&* happened to equal protection under the law?

What happened is the latest case in the ages-old social phenomenon of the moral panic. A moral panic usually ensues when some strange and unusual event, some aberant occurrence is suddenly blown out of proportion (most easily by the mass media) and cast as a pernicious crisis threatening all of society. Sexting is just the latest moral panic, right after the scientifically baseless media violence hysteria, the steroid paranoia, the violent video game hysteria, the Satanic heavy metal hysteria, the comic book moral panic of the 1950s, the Red Scare, and all the way back to the colonial witch trials.

Sexting, as so perfectly argued by Fordham Professor Paul Levinson on today’s Culture Wars radio show, is not child pornography. It is not created under the same circumstances and it is in no way an equivalent of child pornography. Child pornography is the victimization of children, the videotaping or photography of children against their will by a pornographer, for distribution and sale. Sexting is teenagers voluntarily taking pictures of themselves and controlling those pictures by distributing them to friends and boyfriends. It is sexual experimentation and rebellion by kids at an age when every generation of teenagers had been rebellious, when they have experimented with sex and sexuality. Comparing sexting to child pornography is ludicrous.

But sexting is also a wonderful boon to various groups of censorious crackpots and control freaks like the Parents Television Council (check out their web page where they bemoan the creeping immoral menace of sexting) and the rest of their meddling ilk who use this as an opportunity to push for more intrusive laws and regulations that control private behavior. And just be sure and take a look at the part of the Pennsylvania sexting article that describes some of the punishment the authorities want meted out to these girls. A forced “re-education” program? RE-EDUCATION?? The Soviet Union used to have re-education programs in the Siberian gulags!!!

So don’t believe for a microsecond that all the moral watchdogs and media crusader groups are as appalled and saddened and outraged by sexting as they claim. These folks are happy as can be every time they imagine another kid “sexting” a picture of herself. The more kids sexting, the better, they must no doubt be gushing in their most private moments. Every such incident is just more ammunition for these parasites to launch their assaults on free expression and civil liberties.