Dirty Little Secrets (16 page)

Johanna is part of the 39 percent of teenagers who have sent racy messages via text and part of the 20 percent who has sent nude photos.
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The largely held assumption is that our teenagers are in a whole new world when it comes to sex, and regarding technology, that is absolutely true. The current generation is the first one to have so much immediate technology at their fingertips. Flirting looks different now. Bullying and rumors have a new weapon.

Parents and school officials are scared, and our often frantic concern about kids being exposed too early to sex through technology makes some sense. According to Child Trends Databank, the proportion of children with home access to computers has steadily increased to more than 90 percent as of 2009, and 93 percent use the Internet. According to a 2009 survey of eight- to eighteen-yearolds, 36 percent had a computer in their bedroom, and 71 percent of them also had a television in their bedroom.
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We know that porn is readily available to most Web viewers. One need only click the button that says “yes” to the question that reads, “Are you 18 years or older?”

As part of this fear, a number of states have criminalized the sending and sharing of nude photos, like the ones Johanna sends, hitting teenagers with child pornography and sex offender charges. As of this writing, at least twelve states have introduced legislation to prohibit or deter sexting. State laws range from minor dings on a juvenile record to child pornography convictions. Each state controls the severity of its laws about sexting, and school officials and parents of girls who’ve had their pictures distributed bring the most charges.
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The question is, What really happens to girls who use this sort of technology?

Media concerns itself, of course, with the sensationalized, fear-inducing stories, such as the one about Jesse Logan, the eighteen-year-old Ohio girl who hung herself after a nude photo of her had been disseminated throughout her school. The tragic story quickly segued into one about the necessity of criminalizing the kids who dispersed the photo and about holding the schools accountable. In a
Today
show interview with Jesse’s mother and the Internet expert Parry Aftab, Aftab noted that we need to enforce these laws “in order to keep our children alive.”
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Hope Witsell, a thirteen-year-old in Florida, killed herself after a topless photo of her was sent around her high school and the high school in a neighboring town. She sent the photo after pressure to do so from a boy she had a crush on.
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Really, though, the harm didn’t originate with the sexting, which is how Witsell’s and Logan’s cases were presented. It came from the girls’ peers, who bullied them. The photos were just tools of a much greater harm, which is rarely addressed as seriously: slut shaming.

In January 2009, six teenagers faced child pornography charges for taking photos of themselves and being in possession of the photos. Three fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls from their high school in Pennsylvania had sent seminude photos to the three sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. School officials seized the phones and reported them to the police, leading to the charges.
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In Florida, a sixteen-year-old girl and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Phillip Albert, were charged with possession of child pornography. Albert, who is now twenty, sent a nude photo of his ex-girlfriend to seventy people out of anger after a fight with her. He was sentenced with child pornography charges and required to go on the public sex offender’s list. He was kicked out of school, he struggles to find a job, and he can’t even live with his father because his father lives near a high school, something Phillip is no longer allowed to do.
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But is sexting really worthy of such extreme policing? There has been much hesitating and changing minds in the courts, which suggests that we might be overreacting, typical of people’s fears surrounding teenagers and sex.

Let’s take a look at the data. In the 2008 study “Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies,” by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, researchers found that risky behavior online was generally in cahoots with risky behavior offline. Those who engaged in sexual acts away from their phones and the Internet tended to do so on their phones and the Internet as well. Indeed, almost half of sexually active teens tend to be involved in sexting and cybersex as well.
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Turned around, though, the statistics change. Sexting and sexual Internet activity does not seem to lead to real-life sexual activity among those who don’t already engage in it. Regardless of all the increased access to sex online, teen sex rates haven’t skyrocketed. In fact, they’ve lowered some during the past decade.

In my mind, we are missing the point regarding
what
to panic about. The issue isn’t the “dicey mix of teenagers’ age-old sexual curiosity, notoriously bad judgment and modern love of electronic sharing,” as Riva Richmond called it in a
New York Times
article.
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One could argue, in fact, that sexting is not only safe but also keeps kids safer than if they were having real-life sex.

No, the issue is that many girls—you guessed it, loose girls—use sexting and cybersex to try to feel wanted, and just like when they use male attention and sex in similar ways in real life, they don’t get what they’re after. When I asked the girls I interviewed why they sexted, their answers all pointed to a desire for connection. Amelia said, “It makes what is basically impossible to me possible, which is a hot guy liking me and wanting me in all ways.”

“All ways?” I asked.

“Well, sexually, I guess,” she said.

Amelia uses sexting and cybersex to pick up boys she likes who she meets in school or online, but is too shy to speak to in person. She contacts them and is immediately flirtatious. Within one or two exchanges, she starts in on the dirty talk. She engages in this way with them obsessively, and if they stop responding, or reject her in any way, she feels crushed.

Mariah has regularly had cybersex since she was in the eighth grade. When she discovered sexting, she started doing that regularly, too. Like the majority of females who report having sexted, she initially felt pressured to do so by the boys with whom she was texting. Over time, though, she grew to like the easy attention. Sexting and cybersex have pretty straightforward scripts, too, which only made it easier for her.

In real life, Mariah is still a virgin. She says she doesn’t act the same way in person as she does via text and Internet, so boys don’t realize the things she knows about sex. I asked Mariah what she felt she knew about sex, and she said, “Just that boys like it when girls act like sluts.” Mariah doesn’t connect her sexting and cybersex behavior with her own sexual arousal: the two hold completely different purposes. One is to get male attention, and the other is something private and personal, unrelated to how she might act under a boy’s watch.

The danger here is not necessarily that girls are victims of predatory males. It’s that they are victims of very narrow definitions of sexual desirability, and in many ways, sexting is one more way girls wind up viewing sexual behavior as completely removed from their own desires. Girls believe that a girl’s desirability comes not from her personality or her coolness or how fun she is. It comes from her ability to fit into a male-defined stereotype of a sexually willing girl.

A recent national survey by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that girls age 14–17 tend to describe themselves on social media sites as “fun,” “funny,” and “social,” and they downplay the idea that they might be smart or ambitious, or otherwise less appealing to boys and popular cliques.
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Pornography sets a similar standard. Readers may be surprised to hear that lots of adolescent girls watch porn. There are no reliable statistics for this, of course, because girls are hard-pressed to admit it, but anecdotally, in my work and interviews with women and girls, about half have admitted to watching porn, some of them even watching regularly, as teens.

As with sexting and cybersex, there is no solid scientific evidence that exposure to pornography leads to widespread or predictable negative psychological effects, so again, we need to be careful where we put our energy regarding concerns about such exposure. In my experience working with teenage girls, they watched pornography partially because it turned them on and was an exciting avenue for masturbation, and partially because they wanted to know how to have sex.

The problem here is that girls think they are learning about sex, but really they’re learning what men want. Shaved vaginas, asses in the air, facials—these are all male fantasies, not sex defined by females. Like Mariah noted, boys like girls who act like sluts. Porn just reinforces that. As Judith Levine writes, “In my opinion, the problem with sexual information on the Net is not that there is too much of it but that too little of it is any good”—and she wrote that in 2002.
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Almost a decade later, we can say that’s changed some. There are a number of excellent websites intended to provide real information about real sex to teenagers (see the appendix for a list of these), sites that give teenagers answers to real concerns, and that don’t exist for titillation.

And, then, there are the social sites—Facebook being the most influential. This is where hundreds of thousands of girls post pictures of themselves in bikinis or underwear to get attention from men. One guy wrote on the website
Facebook Horror Stories
, “Dear cute girls of Facebook, thank you for posting almost naked pictures of yourselves. I no longer need to look at porn since I have hundreds of photos of you in bikinis to whack off to. Thank you for inserting yourself into my spank bank.”
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This guy has caught on to the wave of loose girls looking for attention. Facebook has become an easy way for a loose girl to act out.

Cate has a bunch of photos of herself in her underwear in her album on Facebook. Every time she posts a new one, she told me, at least a couple guys who have been out of touch contact her again. It makes her feel good to know people think of her. I asked her what she thinks they contact her for. “I think that’s pretty obvious,” she said. “They just want to have sex with me. But it still makes me feel good.”

“Good, as in worthwhile?” I asked.

“Exactly,” she said.

Jennifer sends certain Facebook friends seminude photos when she feels like she’s lost their attention.

“It works like a charm,” she told me.

There are some real concerns about older men soliciting teenage girls via Facebook. A few cases have been reported, such as one about a thirty-four-year-old man in North Carolina who had a sexual relationship with a minor after getting to know her on Facebook, or the twenty-seven-year-old Pennsylvania man who changed his relationship status to “Engaged” to a fourteen-year-old girl (the joke in all the headlines was that there was no “statutory rape” relationship option).
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But while these men are clearly predatory, simply posting sexy photos to Facebook isn’t necessarily dangerous, at least not in that way. Just like with sexting, the harm is mostly related to what the poster is hoping to get from having those photos up, and then what she actually gets. She gets attention for her body, of course. But what does that attention really mean about her? Of course, it means nothing. Having a nice body—or even just having a female body, which is all a girl really needs to get some male attention—doesn’t take a girl very far in life.

Studies have made clear that most of what teenagers do on the Web can be considered positive. Most have a “full-time intimate community” they communicate with online—whether through instant messaging, Facebook, MySpace, or other sites—and they don’t do much more than that. When they do, they seek information or experiment with digital media production, such as figuring out how to accomplish something on their own. A study done by the MacArthur Foundation determined that, although it may look like kids are wasting their time online, they are actually building technological skills and literacy, something needed to succeed in our modern world.
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Researchers have also found that Internet and cell phone communication leads to greater self-disclosure, which builds closer, more intimate relationships with friends.
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This is another reason that websites providing real, frank information about sex—and an opportunity for questions—are so valuable. Where talking to parents is important, such a conversation can be embarrassing, for both parties. Even the most self-assured parents would be fooling themselves if they thought their teens were telling and asking them everything. We can think of resources online, and the self-disclosing conversations among peers, as bolsters to the support and education parents and schools can provide.

Parents will get nowhere, however, if their fears turn into what teenagers perceive as violations of privacy. Blocking their Internet usage, checking up on their computers, and wrangling passwords from their teens will only lead teenagers to tell even less, and the more open the lines of communication are between teenagers and adults concerning sex-related issues, the better.

Meanwhile, Johanna continues to send dirty texts, but she won’t send any more photos. She told me that at some point she realized it was degrading.