New Media and Grainy Teenage Titties

In 2004, the NY Times Magazine ran an article called “Friends, Friends With Benefits and the Benefits of the Local Mall.”  To this day it might remain the most singularly on point piece of journalism about adolescent sexuality in an increasingly “connected” world; in 2004, it had only been one or two years that every teen growing up in an upper-middle suburban bubble had been assumed to be armed with their own cell phone at all times.  The magnitude of high speed internet in every home was only just beginning to settle in.  The majority of these homes still had family-shared desktops rather than a 1:1 laptop to person ratio.  IPhone was a dev’s wet dream in the making, Blackberries were called PDAs and were only spotted in the grip of fingers crowned with a bristled banker’s tuft of salt & pepper knuckle hair.  (Ew.)

Adult obsession/terror with teenage sexuality is hardly novel, but in retrospect, the emerging “hook-up” culture simmering only five years ago seems maybe even a little modest.  When last month, a 15 year old girl was indicted on felony child porn charges for sending nude photos of herself to her classmates via cell phone, clueless old bags everywhere were swooning and moaning like a southern belle.  Kids today, etc.  I, too, was unsettled thinking about what it is to be sexy in the eyes of young women now, who from my perspective seem increasingly willing to volunteer themselves for all the work of a porn star without any of the pay.

But I’m always reticent to endorse any hand-wringing over “kids these days,” as the myth of spiraling social decline always has a way of generating discussion that’s more defeatist than constructive.  What we know about sex is specific to the climate and circumstances we spent our most formative years inside of, so I’m not entirely sure that just because I managed to lose my virginity before everyone had a sidekick, there’s any great case I’ve been blessed with a more “healthy” sexuality.  Especially when our attitudes about sexuality are changing faster than they ever have, whining about any sort of “moral decay” only seems masturbatory, not to mention irrelevant.

Sex seems to be the favorite site where cultural criticism believes it is always reinventing the wheel, but let’s just pause for a moment to consider how many “sexual revolutions” have actually revolved in only the last hundred years; the Victorian era into the Jazz Age into the Femme Fatale into the “Liberated Woman” into the Girl Gone Wild.  These self-congratulatory “revolutions” are better read as constant revisions and deliberate separations from old sexual mores; you know, all the old people bitch about how all the young people like to fuck in totally ~*crazy*~, immoral, destructive ways.  This is liberalism’s most dopey flaw: chronic ahistoricism.  As new media and technology become increasingly pervasive in our lives, we need to be careful not to approach adolescent sexuality like a bunch of crotchety old luddites.  If there’s one thing young people don’t care about, it’s that in your day you had to press the number 2 three times before you could type the letter F into your “sext messages.”

So instead of coming to the resounding conclusion that feminism has failed and our mothers knew better than we did (a-la Ariel Levy), how can we approach the intersections of new media/social networking and developing sexuality constructively?  What if we reserve judgment on a teenage girl sending 2 megapixel titty shots to her “friend with benefits” for a moment—even if her naive representation of adult sexuality is informed almost entirely by the sex industry, will that degrade her own experience or knowledge of her own potential for pleasure?  Is it possible that what she’s doing isn’t necessarily destructive, but instead just part of a more explicit courting ritual than we’re used to?  Or is that just weak sauce?

Additionally, how do race and class backgrounds factor in here, and how are the ways we are talking about “good” and “bad” sexuality shifting?   Access and engagement with new media has sharply increased among white, upper middle class youth, sorta leaving everyone else in the dust.  What does that increased visibility to a very specific population mean for young women in general?  Stigmatized and dangerous sexuality has historically been inextricably linked to marginalized populations—will that change?  And how?  Will those mechanisms be sublimated elsewhere?

These are important questions to challenge ourselves on, because this is the direction that intimacy is taking, so whichever it is—the “for better” or the “for worse”—is an irrelevant question.  In the last year, texting alone among teens has increased 100%.  And more significantly, while the ‘blogosphere’ may ostensibly where the boys are (because we pay them more mind), it’s actually young girls who are far more proficient and prolific in their use of social networking utilities and creating media content online (see Pew again).  Our private spheres are shrinking, and for the many adolescent girls who are sexually maturing quite literally on a stage for the whole world to see, the repercussions of that socially can be real and traumatic.  Understanding the way to build positive engagements with sex and new media is becoming absolutely crucial, and to move forward here, old moralizing debates might need to be put to bed.

Ok, so we’ve got a pornified culture, unmitigated access, and no way to turn it off—how much does it matter anymore if Dov Charney is being innovative or odious if he’s here to stay?  And how to we make sure nobody grows up to think the perfect girlfriend is as dimensional as an American Apparel billboard?

ETA: As a side note, I see a substantial connection between hitting a girl who photographed herself with felony child porn charges, and last year’s alarmingly aggressive obscenity charges over internet content which have found Max Hardcore with 46 months in prison–specifically by willfully misinterpreting, abusing, and applying written statute for the purpose of regulating human sexuality.  Consent is consent is consent, even if it grosses you the fuck out.  Something to consider.  And be terrified of.