Teenagers

“Sexting,” where kids trade X-rated pictures via text message, has made headlines recently after a rash of cases in which child pornography charges have been brought not against dangerous pedophiles but hormonally haywire teenagers — potentially leaving them branded  sex offenders for life. Just last week, there came news that a middle-school boy in Falmouth, Mass., might face child porn charges for sending a naughty photo of his 13-year-old girlfriend to five buddies, who are also being investigated. There’s been plenty of outrage to go around: Some parents are angry to see teens criminalized for simply being sexual, while others find the raunchy shots pornographic, another blinking neon sign of moral decay in a “Girls Gone Wild” era. In both cases, it amounts to a tug of war between teenagers’ entitled sense of sexual autonomy and society’s desire to protect them.

It’s rather stunning that in the same age of the Pussycat Dolls, Disney starlets’ sexy photo scandals, Slut-o-ween costumes for kids and preteen push-up bras and thongs, teenagers are being charged with child porn possession for having photographs of their own naked bodies. That noise you hear? It’s the grating sound of cultural dissonance.

According to these recent interpretations of the law, a curious teenage girl who embarks on an “Our Bodies, Ourselves” journey of vaginal self-discovery, and simply replaces a hand mirror with a digital camera, is a kiddie pornographer. The same goes for the boy who memorializes his raging boner or the post-pubescent girl who takes test shots of herself practicing the porn star poses she has studied online. Theoretically, this is true regardless of whether they share the pictures with anyone, and if they do share them, they could be additionally charged with peddling child porn.

There are plenty of examples of the moral and legal gray areas created as technology broadens our behaviors: cyber-cheating, MySpace bullying, online gossip, upskirting, employers’ Web snooping. When it comes to “sexting,” though, the potentially damaging implications — for child pornography law, free speech and kids’ sexuality — are abundant. And it’s not going away any time soon. A recent online poll found that 20 percent of teens have shared nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves, the majority with a boyfriend or girlfriend. (Sure, voluntary polls tend to be self-selecting, but the results seem obvious, maybe even understated.) Teens will, as they always have, experiment with their sexuality. But at a time when free hardcore porn is ubiquitous, technology is cheap and the Internet is a comfortable channel for expression and experimentation, is it really any surprise that this is a generation of amateur pornographers?

It certainly isn’t to 20-somethings like myself who came of age during the Internet’s youth. By the time I was 14, I had seen my share of online porn and late-night HBO and made frequent use of the phrase “U wanna cyber?” in early AOL chat rooms. In high school in Berkeley, Calif., at least two student sex tapes were rumored to be making the rounds. I didn’t have a cellphone camera or a webcam, thank god — though I did have a Polaroid camera, which, to be sure, my longtime boyfriend and I toyed around with.

This is all part of how kids initiate themselves into our sexual culture long before they actually have sex. At one time, that meant a boy would flip through his father’s stash of Playboys and a girl would try on her mother’s ample bra. For me, it meant privately mimicking the stripper moves I had seen on TV and having online chats with people who occasionally turned out to be aging pervs. It was the best way I knew to try on, test out and confirm my femininity without actually having sex. (And that’s having been raised by hippie parents who compared the spiritual magic of sex to “two star systems colliding in outer space.”)

That sexual rite of passage remains, but today’s teens have an entirely different notion of privacy than past generations. They grew up in the exhibitionistic Web culture of LiveJournal, YouTube and MySpace. They’ve seen girls on TV playfully jiggling their breasts for plastic beads, “Real World” cast members boldly screwing in front of cameras, Britney flashing her bald lady parts. These days, why would a girl be concerned about her silly topless snapshot circulating around school?

That’s certainly the case with 16-year-old Melissa, a student at a high school near Greensburg-Salem, who has never worried about any of the X-rated pictures she’s shared, because she cropped her face out of the photos, so “no one could identify me unless like [they] lifted up my shirt to figure it out haha,” she wrote in a message sent on the blog platform Xanga. On her profile page, a rap song with the lyrics “I jus’ wanna act like a porno flick actor” plays. It also exhibits a self-portrait she took with a cellphone camera of her reflection in a floor-length mirror; the sassy expression on her face matches the page’s background: a sexy hot pink and lime green leopard print.

Joey, an 18-year-old who graduated from a San Francisco high school last year, has gotten X-rated snapshots from girls on his phone, through e-mail and on his MySpace page since he was 15. Some were longtime girlfriends that he swapped photos with and others were girls he’d just casually met; some pictures were suggestive, others were explicit. (“How graphic do you want me to get?” he asks, cautiously. “I’ve had girls send me photos of them fingering themselves.”)

“Older adults have a short memory. There were things we did — people flashed each other and played spin the bottle,” says Elizabeth Schroeder, director of Answer, Rutgers University’s program dedicated to promoting sexuality education. “This is this generation’s way of doing that.” Heather Corinna, the 38-year-old founder of Scarleteen, a Web site that provides sex-positive education for young adults, agrees: “Before we had this media, we had video cameras, before that film cameras, before that the written word, and all throughout, public or semi-public sex, ways of proclaiming to peers that one is sexually active or available to become so,” she says.

But, clearly, there is a big difference between testifying on the wall of the boy’s bathroom about the toe-curling blow jobs the school’s head cheerleader gives and sending your buddies photographic proof. These digital offerings bring the potential for humiliation and blackmail if the photos or video get into the wrong hands — and, let’s face it, they often do. Acting as your girlfriend’s personal porno star is one thing; ending up a pedophile’s favorite child pinup is quite another.

There’s good reason to be concerned about teens being self-pornographers. But many, especially legal experts, are disturbed by the fact that a healthy horn-dog of a teenager could be grouped in the same criminal category as a clinically ill pedophile. “These cases are picturing these teenagers as both predators and victims of themselves,” says Amy Adler, a law professor at New York University who has studied child porn laws. “Child porn law was founded on a very different vision of what the major threat was.”

That major threat, of course, is supposed to be adults who produce and peddle child smut. Reed Lee, a Chicago attorney and board member of the Free Speech Coalition, says: “A law to protect victims shouldn’t send those very victims to jail.”

Typically, kiddie porn is seen as exponentially harmful because it’s more than the original sexual abuse: It allows for a reliving of the trauma every time another pervert gets ahold of the material. But “if the initial photograph was not taken as part of a traumatic episode and was, like it or not, part of a more normal teenage experience, the abuse rationale becomes harder to see,” Adler argues. Still, plenty of child pornography cases have been prosecuted where the original photo is awfully benign — for example, a family picture taken at a nudist camp that is discovered by a pedophile and then cropped to reveal only the naked kid.

But it’s tough to impress those kinds of nuances on kids, says Los Angeles criminal defense attorney Jeffrey Douglas. He once spoke to a high school class and tried to explain that, even though everyone seems to be “sexting,” it “can literally destroy your life.” The response? A boy rolled his eyes while making a grand jack-off gesture. “It’s just the bullshit that adults tell them when they come to talk to them,” he said. “It’s tragically funny.”

Douglas points out that the bungled law reveals fascinating cultural conflicts about childhood and teen sexuality. “I think the problem originates from the pathological fear that our culture, particularly the legal part of the culture, takes toward juvenile sexuality.” He has defended numerous child porn cases and says prosecutors will treat the exchange of trial evidence like “an undercover heroin deal.” Douglas says, “The fear is so enormous that it’s like you’re dealing with something radioactive. They don’t consider the context or the meaning.”

The context here is that teens are undertaking the sexploration that our porned culture at once dictates and forbids — in the same way that girls are taught that there is desirable validation in their sexuality and then are shamed for actually being sexual. Rutgers’ Elizabeth Schroeder says an example of this contradiction is that sex educators like herself have to fight an uphill battle just to get into schools, while all it takes is a click of a button and a kid can catch an episode of “G-String Divas.” She once asked a group of 12-year-old boys what they thought it meant to be a girl and the first response was: “Girls are here to give lap dances to boys.”

ABC’s Terry Moran introduced the segment by warning, “For any parent concerned about what their teen does online, the huge popularity of the young man you’re about to meet may be deeply disturbing.” We’re then introduced to a handful of young women – all well over 18 – who think 25-year-old Deen is totally hot and, like, “the Ryan Gosling of porn.” Then reporter Cecilia Vega announces that the adult business “has now targeted and reached a new demographic: teenage girls.”

That’s right, pornographers are “targeting” your little girls with the help of young porn hunks like Deen and luring them into watching Internet smut! YouPorn must be advertising on Justin Bieber message boards now, I guess? At one point, Vega grills Deen about his teenage fans: “Are you encouraging them in any way to watch your films or read your blog?” It’s not like teenage girls would ever happen across this X-rated material because they want to watch porn — there must be some cute “boy next door” tricking them into it.

It isn’t that parents have no good reason to be concerned about their kids — male or female — using porn as sex-ed. It’s not even that the segment is a total rip-off of Amanda Hess’ piece about Deen and his female teenage fans in GOOD magazine (and it is). My real criticism is that even while reporting on teenage girls who admittedly like porn and seek it out, “Nightline” manages to make it sound like they’re being taken advantage of by porn the predator.

I would embed the video below, except ABC has disabled embedding. Maybe they distrust how their fear-mongering will be received in the the wild west of the Internet. You can find the clip here.

As is often the case with reports on the latest wild-and-crazy teen sex trend, this was all total and complete BS. The original research inspiring these proclamations had been distorted and exaggerated beyond recognition. But if you’re interested in the real story behind these salacious reports, you’re in the right place. (If you want to be titillated by tales of teenage orgies, you’ll have to look elsewhere — sorry.)

I just knew this is what would happen when I first came across the study, which was published earlier this month in the Journal of Public Health. That’s why I reached out last week to the lead researcher, Emily Rothman. I was curious: Did she worry that her findings would be misconstrued in the press to give rise to the latest teen sex panic? At the time, Rothman told me in an email that she was indeed “concerned about reporters ignoring the methodological limitations” — that’s why she tried to include all the important caveats and “frame things responsibly” in early press interviews — but, regardless, most outlets found a way to make her worry come true. The good news is that the study and its mainstream coverage offer up a useful cautionary tale.

Researchers surveyed 328 girls and young women who had visited an urban health clinic in the Boston area. The key thing here is that a study with such a minute sample size is designed to be preliminary; it’s not meant to be definitive. What’s more, the population surveyed places further limits on the findings: These are girls who have gone to a community or school-based clinic in search of services, which excludes those with access to different types of healthcare, or those who weren’t seeking care of that sort. That isn’t to disregard the potential implications of this survey for the health of this particular population, but the findings simply aren’t broadly applicable or representative. On top of all that, the participants ranged in age from 14 to 20: Perhaps you’re already aware, 20-year-olds are not teenagers — so those headlines trumpeting this as “the latest trend for teenagers” are sloppy at best and willfully misleading at worst. That’s not to mention that the difference between a 14-year-old and a 20-year-old is often — at least one should hope — profound.

These aren’t the only inconvenient details that were shamefully elided in most of the coverage. Another unexamined detail is that when the survey talks about the percentage of girls with group sex experience, it includes both those with consensual and non-consensual experiences. In other words, the 7.3 percent of participants, or “one in 13,” who report having “multiple-person sex” (MPS), as the survey refers to it, includes both voluntary sex involving three or more people and … gang rape. No matter how disturbed adults may be by the idea of a teenage girl having a kinky threesome, there is a crucial difference between her choosing it — even if intense cultural pressures are present — and it being forced on her. Much has also been made in the study coverage of the indicated influence of porn on these “group sex” experiences, but participants who had come into contact with X-rated material of any sort, in any context, even just once, over the past month were considered together. This means a 14-year-old girl who accidentally stumbled across her brother’s Playboy was grouped together with, say, a 20-year-old with a subscription to hotmoviesforher.com.

The upshot to all of the survey’s findings, as anyone who bothers to read to the end of the nine-page study will find, is that only 24 of the young women who participated in the survey reported having a “multiple-sexual partner” experience of any sort. Of that two-dozen, 43 percent “reported ever being threatened or forced” (which is to say that many of those 24 cases of “teen group sex” might actually be cases of “teen gang rape”). The researchers recognize the limitations of their survey and even warn readers, “our findings are not representative of adolescent females in the U.S.A.” and “should be considered exploratory” — but no matter, they had my colleagues at “teen group sex.”

Dr. Petra Boynton, a sex researcher and educator who is an outspoken critic of the media’s misreporting on teen sex, tells me that the unfortunate result is that it will “worry parents, mislead teachers and healthcare professionals, and probably lead to slut shaming of young women, as this kind of coverage invariably does,” she says. “All the while ignoring the role of boys at best, or presenting them as gang rapists at worst. None of which is directly helpful to the needs of young people.” That’s the thing: These sorts of stories about teen sex trends are very rarely helpful to young people, even though that is purportedly why they exist, and why we read them.

In many cases, the tendency to engage in handwringing over teen sex comes from a good place: Adults recognize the vulnerability of teens and realize how tremendously powerful sex can be — in fact, many of us are still terrified of it ourselves, on some level. This may sound odd, but when stories like this arise, I sometimes imagine those safety diagrams that you find on airplanes of the mother adjusting her own oxygen mask before putting one on her child — because even in the realm of sex, adults are better able to protect their kids once they take care of themselves. Instead of hyperventilating over the slightest suggestion of a rainbow party, jelly bracelet or group sex trend among teens, maybe we should take a moment to direct all that concern inward.

So, what is it with the schizophrenic coverage?

More than anything, the coverage of this latest finding should highlight our cultural inability to look at teen sexuality with any nuance. The narrative tendency is to swing between the extreme poles of corruption and innocence. They are either hormonal, sex-crazed maniacs or innocents in need of protection. Take, for example rainbow parties: In 2003, an episode of Oprah sparked a panic over the supposed trend among adolescents. Some two years later, the New York Times exposed it as an urban legend. Cultural panics over teen sex tend to follow the arc of a classic horror film, and perhaps we’ve reached the dénouement of the sexting scare (although, beware the false ending). The coverage of the latest research allows us to believe that we have either slayed the scary beast of teen desire or simply awoken from the nightmare of it.

This isn’t to say anything about the validity of this latest study, which found that far fewer minors are digitally sharing their naughty bits than was commonly believed (roughly one teen in 100). The results, which contradict a past survey reporting that 20 percent of teens had sexted, likely differ so dramatically because of the study’s distinct methodology: Instead of surveying teens and young adults, researchers interviewed only those under 18, and they specifically focused on material that was graphic enough to be considered child pornography and behavior that had taken place within the last year. It’s also possible that sexting has actually decreased over time, thanks in part to growing media coverage and parental concern.

What’s suspect, though, is that this finding is being treated as a revelation when the reality is that single-digit percentages have already been reported in past research on the topic. Two years ago, the Pew Research Center reported that a mere 4 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds had copped to sending a naked snapshot of themselves to someone else. However, most coverage at the time of the study’s release instead highlighted the finding that 15 percent of teens have “received sexually suggestive nude or nearly nude images of someone they know via text messaging on their cell phone.” The dominant narrative was still: Kids these days! And now, suddenly, it’s: The kids are all right! You can blame biased researchers or media fear-mongering for this inconsistency, but the underlying issue is the black-and-white view of teens and sex. The truth is that when it comes to sex, teenagers are not either-or but both — as are we all.