Some very good news for the teenage girls being persecuted for having a sexuality in Pennsylvania—-the judge has ruled in their favor, and ordered a prosecutor to drop child pornography charges against three teenage girls who committed the “crime” of engaging in a routine sexual display for their boyfriends. And by routine, I mean laughably routine—-they showed the boys they were with and/or interested in pictures of themselves in bras, and one girl actually showed some nipple. The problem is they exposed themselves to a prosecutor who believes female sexuality should be criminalized by sending these pictures by text message on their phones.
I’ve been following the case with interest, because I find it fascinating that the mainstream media has decided to ignore the main issue—-we have a prosecutor who wants to throw your teenage daughters in jail because they’ve got boobies and boyfriends!—-in favor of the standard issue alarmist story about the scary new technology. The implication is that the advent of text messaging is turning your daughters into whores through sheer scary-newness—-they even have a nickname for sending nekkid pictures by text message, which they call “sexting”. Last year, I interviewed author Marty Klein about this weird irrationality about sex and technology, after seeing him lecture about the long history of people using sexual fears as an excuse to bash technological innovations. This actually dates back to the invention of pottery, he said, which caused a panic because people made pornographic pottery. But recent history has a number of examples, and the car was a particularly interesting example of a technology that was held accountable for the end of female virtue. However, watching recent panics over sex and technology, I tend to think that the level of panic directly correlates the the difficulty older people in a community have with adopting a technology.* Which makes sense—-the more obtuse a technology seems to you, the more likely you are to be frightened by it and imbue it with all these powers of inventive sexual perversion. But text messaging has, by and large, proven to be a technological innovation that makes automatic sense to older people, at least in my experience. A lot of savvier people I know have been amused by how adults they know that are hostile to technology jumped right into text messaging, as well as taking and sending pictures with their camera. It’s interesting to speculate why this is so, but right now I’m just interested in the fact that it is so. Because what this means is that fewer people are getting distracted by alarmist media hype about “sexting”, and realizing that the real issue is that three teenage girls were threatened with prison and being marked as pedophiles for life for engaging in behavior that we, by and large, expect from teenagers.
In fact, I had mixed emotions about learning that the nudie pic over the phone thing is becoming a standard way for kids to show off to each other and arouse each other. Like everyone else, I’m not happy that they aren’t thinking about the long-term ramifications, and my heart goes out to teenage girls who are betrayed by boys who give into the urge to score misogyny points with friends by showing off the pictures. But I’m also reminded that teenage girls seem to have a lot more moxie than girls of my generation were permitted—-half the reason I would have been scared to take such a picture would be that I’d be afraid no one would want to look at it.** I hope this reflects a growing ownership over sexuality that then translates into more responsible behaviors like condom use.