Why There’s Nothing Wrong With Sexting
Author: DavidJones // Category: Ethics, Politics, Pop Culture, Youth Culture
Please don’t declare me a witch yet for the title of this post. Earlier today I came across an article from the New York Daily News that features a professor with a view that endorses the title of this post. Below are excerpts from the article. Feel free to dissect it, tear it apart, praise it, comment on it, or do whatever you want. It definitely makes for an “interesting” read:
Is sexting the new spin-the-bottle?
At a conference this week, an associate professor at York University in Toronto defended sexting (where teens exchange nude and seminude photos of themselves over their cell phones) as a modern day “playing doctor or spin the bottle,” according to an AFP article.
The professor,Peter Cumming, presented a paper on children’s sexuality at the 78th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, reported the AFP. At the conference, held at Ottawa’s Carleton University for about 8,000 researchers from around the globe, attendees heard that youths who sexted should not face child pornography charges, according to the AFP.
In the United States, some teens have faced such charges. In one case, according to the AFP article, a Floridaboy was charged after he sent a photo…to a female classmate. Another teen, after e-mailing nude photos of his 16-year-old girlfriend to her family, was listed as a sex offender.
Whether or not sexting should warrant criminal charges will remain a hot button issue, says author and Hollywood media expert Michael Levine.
“We are in unprecedented water,” he says. “We don’t know what the consequences of this will be in 10 years, but we do now that it is much more widespread than people think.”
Levine says that sexting is “extremely widespread and common. If you ask a kid what percentage of her top ten friends sex-texts, they’ll say 100 percent,” he says.
Teens are using technology like cell phones to push the boundaries of flirtation, says Dr. Kathleen Bogle, sociology professor and author of “Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus” (New York UniversityPress).
“To teens, sexting is not some sort of pornographic exchange, but a way to communicate sexual and/or romantic interest in one of their peers,” Bogle says. “Much like spin the bottle games utilized by a previous generation, sexting is something that teens do away from the supervision of adults. However, they believe it is a normal right of passage.”
Some 20 percent of American teenagers said they had participated in sexting, according to a survey by a US family planning organization reported by the AFP.
Bogle says that sexting does not necessarily make kids more promiscuous.
“One mistake adults make is that they assume one means the other,” she says. “Even though sexting is going on, it does not necessarily follow that promiscuity is on the rise.”
Tags: Common, New York Daily News, Sexting, Statistics
May 29th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
I’ll go out on a limb here and say I do not feel that it should be made a sex crime to participate in sexting based upon the current laws. Would it be illegal for these people to be on webcams or in person displaying themselves in this fashion? or would it be illegal for them to take part in sexual activities? I think the standard laws for sex should be used for sexting. If you’re not dealing with pedifile cases or unconsenting distribution of these pictures, I really don’t see how they could be made illegal.
Morality might lead me to think differently, but we’re talking about laws not morals and we all know sometimes one has nothing to do with the other.
May 29th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I love this. Not really. I work in telecommunications and see a lot of pathetic middleaged people that do a lot of this as well. It’s an epidemic. The problem I have with this article is that those who are giving their opinions assume that the rate of promiscuity among the previous “spin the bottle” generation is ok. They assume the new generation will also be ok as long as they don’t get worse than the previous generation. This is stupid. We know that the world doesn’t necessarily care about the moral aspect of promiscuity, but there are a ton of statistics that show how poverty likes single mothers. These statistics would also reveal that the majority of abortions are due to promiscuity (not the tragic rape cases that the liberal media puts in the forefront). The real issue is not sexting. It is promiscuity in general. As for the kid who is now a registered sex offender, that kind of stinks for him. If I were that judge, I might would have warned him first, but I can’t feel too sorry for him in his actions. The bottom line is this: sexting has given parents something other than promiscuity to focus on. That’s the real stupidity here. Parents don’t have the guts to lay down standards for their kids, so they get their authority fix by being outraged by “sexting.” This is just a distraction to the real problem.
May 31st, 2009 at 8:55 am
The CBS Sunday morning news had a story about sexting and the consequences this morning. One of the guys interviewed made a great observation. He said what teens don’t realize is that when they send explicit pics of themselves through technology, it becomes a “cyber tatoo” which is difficult to ever remove.
I would encourage all parents and teen leaders to google this story and share it with their teens because it showed a couple young people who are listed as sex offenders and having difficulty moving beyond a simple text message they sent in high school
June 4th, 2009 at 1:18 pm
I agree with the author of the referenced article that most of the teens that do these things are not thinking in terms of porn or pedophilia. When I was in high school, girls gave their boyfriends provocative pictures of themselves as gifts and took pictures of themselves flashing their bras at slumber parties. The differences I see between then and now are that: a)it was easier to get rid of pictures ten years ago because we could destroyed the picture and the negatives and b) it’s much easier to hit “send” on a cellphone than it is to make copies. I honestly feel that teens would think twice about some of their actions if their parents would talk to (not lecture or yell at) them.