by James A. Bacon
When I was raising my oldest offspring, now about 30 years old, a public awareness campaign would ask, “It’s 11 o’clock. Do you know where your children are?” Parents don’t seem nearly as worried where their children are these days — odds are, they’re at home. A better picture is, what are they doing?
Nancy Jo Sales, author of “American Girls,” knows. She spent two-and-a-half years investigating the online lives of teenagers, especially girls. And it’s not a pretty picture. Yes, even here in the Eden of Virginia, far from the Sodoms of California and Gamorrahs of New York City, it’s very disturbing indeed. Apparently, an entire generation of our youth has followed the path blazed by disgraced New York politician Anthony Weiner.
From the book review in the Wall Street Journal:
It turns out that one of the main uses teens make of their phones is to watch, wield and circulate naked pictures of themselves. Perhaps surprisingly, the most commonly shared pornographic images are not of the girls themselves but “dick pics,” self-portraits of the penises of teenaged boys. Texting a photo of one’s genitals would seem to be an off-road perversion, not to the taste of any boy but the odd flasher. In fact, the stories Ms. Sales presents, whether of humiliation or triumph, often turn on a plot point involving such pictures.
“Do they think we want that? Because we don’t,” Sally, a 17-year-old in Boca Raton, tells Ms. Sales. So why do boys do it? One in James City County, Va., explains: “I send them my dick, so they’ll show me something of theirs.” This is a full economy: While a nude photo of a guy is practically worthless, a nude photo of a girl can be used as currency, traded with friends for marijuana or liquor — that’s “lq” in text speak.
“If you don’t send them nudes, they say you’re a prude,” says Casssy, another Floridian teen, says of boys.
“Lord of the Flies” depicted the descent into barbarism of teenage boys marooned on a desert island with no adult rules or guidance. Beelzebub has left the island and now lives in our homes. Smart phones enable girls and boys to interact in ways that their parents could never imagine — entirely out of view. Teenagers are obsessed with sex and peer status; they always have been, and always will be. In the past adults exercised some control and reined in those instincts. Now it’s much harder to. Even if we were of a mind to spy on our their communications, our kids are more tech savvy than us, they’re willing to devote their every waking moment to thwarting us, and they will assuredly develop a work-around to anything we concoct.
Where this trend will lead us, I do not know. I just hope that my 17-year-old doesn’t do any of this stuff. Meanwhile, my wife and I will go back to watching the Victorian morals on display in “Downton Abbey.”
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