Lookin’ for love in all the wrong places

posted at 6:15 pm on May 7, 2009 by Pundette
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It’s teen sex day in the news. Bristol Palin is in NYC giving abstinence talks. (Many of the kids aren’t buying it, saying she’s a “hypocrite,” “it’s unrealistic,” and “she’s doing this because her mom is making her.”) Carrie Prejean and Bristol, and what constitutes “adulthood,” are hot topics on the Corner (starting here), sparked by this article.

And the Washington Post carried a story about the local sexting pandemic:

In Fairfax County, a teenage boy sent out a text message asking girls to send photos of their breasts. Word got out at his high school, police said, and when authorities tracked the teen down, they discovered a cache of naked images on his phone. . . .

“He thought it was a mischievous, fun game, without realizing he was asking these girls to commit a crime and he was committing a crime,” said Sgt. Bill Fulton of the Fairfax Police Department. . . .

In Fairfax, Commonwealth’s Attorney Raymond F. Morrogh said his office is handling a case in which school resource officers charged a 12-year-old and a 14-year-old who were sending naked images and video. But Morrogh described most sexting as “juvenile bad judgment” and said he is “not keen on lumping school kids in with child pornographers.”

Said Detective Darryl Wells: “It’s not just high school and middle school. It’s now getting into elementary school as well.”

I don’t imagine this is news to anyone. What intrigues me is that children, and girls in particular, seem to have lost that sense of self-protective modesty which (I think) comes naturally to children and kicks in as they approach adolescence, if it hasn’t already.

The most natural thing in the world for a girl to do if someone bursts in on her while she’s dressing is to cover herself up. But these girls seem to have lost that instinct. In fact, they seem compelled to do the opposite, being ready, willing, and eager to bare it all for an audience. All the better if there’s a camera around.

Skip Press, ahead of the curve given the Carrie Prejean story, wrote about the costs to women and girls who pose nude in Keep Your Clothes on, Ladies (Big Hollywood, April 19, 09). I quoted him here but it’s worth repeating:

I love seeing a beautiful nude woman, but preferably if she’s someone I’m in love with, and we’re alone. If she were mine, I wouldn’t particularly want her displaying it all for the world to see. I wouldn’t hold it against her, I guess, but in my years of experience of knowing people involved in media nudity, the end result is usually far different than what they expected. When you become an object in people’s minds, you’re a commodity, the kind of thing that often ends up in a trash dump.

Ultimately, people only give you the respect you demand and deserve. I wonder what would happen if the majority of women simply stopped taking their clothes off except for men who loved and treasured them? How different of a world would it be?

He’s a hopeless romantic.

But children using and abusing each other via sexting (or worse) is another level of sad. RS McCain has written extensively about this issue (see the gazillion links).

How did kids become so desensitized and sexualized? The following study confirms what we already knew intuitively:

Watching grown-up TV ‘makes children more likely to have underage sex’

Children who watch television shows for adults are much more likely to become sexually active in their early teens, a new study shows.

The younger they are exposed to post-watershed programmes, researchers say, the sooner they will have sex – and the probability increases the more they watch. . . .

Children between six and eight years old who watched grown-up shows were likely to have sex earlier than those who watched less adult-targeted material, they found.

For every hour the youngest group of children watched adult programmes over the two sample days, the chance that they would have sex during early adolescence increased by 33 per cent.

Dr Hernan Delgado, who led the U.S. research team, said: ‘Television and movies are among the leading sources of information about sex and relationships for adolescents. [emphasis added]

‘Our research shows that their sexual attitudes and expectations are influenced much earlier in life.’

The researchers, at the Children’s Hospital in Boston, Massachussetts, urged parents to ban television from bedrooms, restrict viewing to no more than one to two hours a day, and to watch and talk about the shows with their children.

Study co-author Dr David Bickham said: ‘Children learn from media, and when they watch media with sexual references and innuendos, our research suggests they are more likely to engage in sexual activity earlier in life.’

He warned: ‘Children have neither the life experience nor the brain development to fully differentiate between a reality they are moving toward and a fiction meant solely to entertain.

Television, movies, explicit music, and the dark side of the internet have wormed their way into the family, and in between kids and their parents. Not only are children learning a new social norm (sex is just another recreational activity); in addition, this weakened connection to their parents makes kids more vulnerable to those who would use them instead of love them. Because whether they know it or not, they’re looking for love and acceptance.

Miss Lopez writes:

I can’t help but think that a 17-year-old girl who has a healthy relationship with a parent or someone else who commands respect wouldn’t have a photo like that taken.

Agreed. I would amend that to “a healthy, loving relationship with both parents” as far as this is humanly possible. Rule One of parenting is to keep them close. Rule Two is to know when to let go. Tricky.

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