October 29th, 2008 |
Culture,
People
Wow… how cool is it to be alive today. We have totally become The Jetsons… complete with ubiquitous video chat and wireless devices to control anything we desire. All we need now is flying cars and we have officially reached some of the more romantic and historic notions of what a “future” would look like. Children born in the 80ss have literally lived through the beginning of probably the most fundamental change in human society since… fire? It is not unexpected then that this has had a profound effect on the socialization methods of a generation of adolescents who have grown up on a diet of Instant Message, Chat Rooms, Internet Porn and Social Networks. Throw in a national media increasingly tween focused with roll models like Juno, Jamie Lynn and Miley Cyrus and… WHALAA… we got sex people.
Almost 40 years ago this country experienced a sexual revolution brought on by two major factors. The first was a rapid dissemination of information about sex with Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s earthshattering report on the true status of American sex. Our history as a nation is steeped in strict puritan ethics and Kinsey realized that the regular college student’s average knowledge of sex amounted to mostly myths and gossip. Homosexuality and fetishes were largely dismissed as being small and evil groups hiding in the most decadent of urban centers. When Kinsey released his books on modern sexuality they couldn’t sell fast enough. People were hungry for information about something so obviously integral in their daily lives and what they found was that your suburban neighbor was just as likely to be masturbating about interracial sex as you were to be gay. It wasn’t just the deviants anymore. 20 years later flower children from across the socio-economic plane would flock together to places like Woodstock to engage in our first full on sexual revolution.
The second was The Pill, a peice of technology that would fundamentally alter how, when and why we have sex in the modern world. If a woman is burdened with the risk of pregnancy certainly this will reduce her willingness to enter into a spontaneous session of coitus. If Kinsey’s information was the validation we needed to morally change our public attitude to sex… the pill was the piece of technology that allowed us to act on it.
Fast forward to today.
Social networking has taken over our lives. We are more connected to the people around us than ever before. Not counting the traditional methods of calling and and emailing (snail mail..what?) if you want to get in touch with someone you could text them, instant message them, private message them, poke them, or maybe post on their wall. Besides the two behemoths that respectively have memberships much larger than most countries there are countless number of smaller more niche chat and social networks that operate in the many millions of users logging on every minute. This kind of mass communication again is unprecedented in human history and has happened literally within the last five years.
The interesting thing about online communication is how much it can embolden you. Under the guise of usernames, screennames and carefully groomed profile pages the worlds youth have been given the ultimate tools to craft their own personal identity. I won’t even go into the psychological implications of being constantly required to actually produce an identity but I’m sure its significant. It doesn’t matter because online you are whoever you want to be and well… most of them just want to be… “Sexy.”
So welcome to the second sexual revolution. Kids as young as 11 and 12 are signing on with their own computers and witnessing the GRAPHIC sexual nature of the internet and frankly most “teen” friendly sites aren’t much better. Give them a webcam, a digi cam and a camera phone and add this together with the messages already sent to kids from the mainstream media and you get a very raunchy hormonal brew.
But what’s to do about a culture where children suddenly have the means to completely explore sexuality. Untethered by traditional boundaries kids will no doubt test the limits of this subject, which obviously raises a lot of moral issues that were not present before. If a teen website allows only members ages 13-23 that means they technically endorse a cyber “friendship” between anyone within that age range. Once that relationship is validated whats to stop those relationships from progressing.
A high school in Gloucester Massachussets recently made the national news because of its 17 pregancies at one time, the majority of the girls under the age of 16. The kicker in this story was that most of the girls actually planned to get pregnant. This would technically mean that some of the fathers are guilty of statutory rape (one as old as 24).
But isn’t the point of those laws to protect the innocence of our youth??? Because it seems to me that our innocence is already long gone.
So here we are… Jetsons indeed. Except in our version its a dual income household for George and Jane. Judy is locked in her room stripping on webcam and Elroy is in his room masturbating to space porn. What an interesting future indeed.
Written by Zac |
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