The internet is responsible for your daughter being an amoral slut, apparently

[Grimmlok]

(^^LOL)


Remember that Hilaire Belloc cautionary tale - Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes? I used to love it as a child when telling lies was one of the naughtiest things you could do: Matilda ended up getting burned to death.

These days, however, everything has changed and it’s the truths that children tell that make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes.

A couple of years ago, my daughter Francesca, then aged 13, told me about a party she had been to one Saturday night. (first off, why is a 13 year old going to parties?)

In the course of the evening, she came upon one of her friends, also aged 13, performing oral sex on a boy in the garden. The boy was standing and videoing the event on his mobile phone.

My daughter, in whom the feisty gene has always found strong expression, pulled her friend off the boy, knocked the phone out of his hand and slapped him round the face.

I apologise for shocking you, but then there are a number of things shocking about this event: the casual nature in which such an intimate act is performed in public, the young age of the participants and last, but by no means least, the fact that it is being filmed.

This not only signals the boy’s disassociation from the physical experience, it also indicates his intention to replay the event and, no doubt, to share his triumph with his friends as one might brandish a trophy above one’s head for all to see.

Nor was this the only such event on this particular evening. I am no prude, but Francesca painted a picture of Bacchanalia that certainly made me gasp.

That week at school, when conducting a post mortem of their weekend as teenagers do (and always have done), the girls at her then school (she’s since moved), a private girls’ school in London, exclaimed: ‘Hurrah, now we’re more slutty than Slutney’, the affectionate nickname of another school.

Call me old-fashioned, but when I was a gal, sluttishness was not a condition one aspired to.
That year, they were all dressing in Hooters T-shirts (the uniform of the well-endowed waitresses of a U.S. restaurant chain whose slogan ‘delightfully tacky yet unrefined’ sums up its approach) and buttock-skimming shorts.

They looked, as girls so often do, far older than their 13 years and not unlike the Playboy Bunnies who incensed a generation of feminists. (Interestingly, clothing depicting the distinctive Playboy bunny is highly popular now among teenage girls.)

When one considers our society, it’s no surprise that our children have lost all sense of modesty.

Not only do social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo encourage teens to share information about themselves; but when they are not taking their clothes off, their role models are spilling their guts about their ‘private’ lives all over the pages of every national newspaper, magazine and on television.

We have an immoderate interest in the private lives of perfect strangers. Pop stars such as Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears expose the car crash that is their life for all to see.
Jordan, who won fame by revealing her breasts, has a documentary series where she and her husband, Peter Andre, discuss their sex life (or lack of it) in intimate detail.
The Osbournes revealed all for our entertainment in their television series. Was this extraordinary exposure responsible in part for the subsequent drug and alcohol abuse of the two of their children who participated? One can’t help feeling it might have been. Their third child, Amy, wisely chose to stay out of the limelight.
Whatever its exponents may say, reality television has a lot to answer for. I have been a documentary film-maker for more than two decades and am well aware of the power of the medium.
Today’s teenagers are starring in the reality show of their own lives and doing all they can to make it as dramatic as possible.

Where before mistakes we made when young - excessive drinking, acts of promiscuity - were quietly forgotten, now they are recorded and broadcast on the internet for all to see.

From happy slapping to amateur sex videos (Paris Hilton rose to fame when a shamelessly intimate video of her and her boyfriend found its way on to the internet, a reality TV show followed, and the rest, as they say, is history).

Do these girls even know what feminism is?

The sexualisation of our young is ubiquitous: boys caught cheating on their girlfriends on mobile phones, ritual humiliation and worse by YouTube (In February 2008, a gang of London teenagers aged 14-16 drugged and raped a woman in front of her children and then posted the film of the attack, videoed on a mobile phone, on YouTube), television programmes like Sex And The City with man-eating Samantha as the living embodiment of casual libidinous sex, all provide the back projection to our children’s lives.

Instant fame is all. In today’s celebrity culture, no one cares how you made your name, as long as you’ve made it; there’s no distinction between fame and notoriety.

Do you really want things that you’ve done when drunk to be plastered all over the internet?
These images are like puppies; they’re not just for Christmas, they’re for life.

Would the 13-year-old girl administering oral sex in a London garden have done so if she’d fully considered the possible repercussions of the video the boy was taking of her?

Once broadcast on the internet the images would have become available not merely to the boy’s friends, but to the whole world; to paedophiles and to prospective employers in the future.

In her book, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women And The Rise Of Raunch Culture, Ariel Levy writes about the American experience, where many a young girl’s dream seems to be the desire to dance around a pole or cheer while others do.

She says that feminist terms such as liberation and empowerment, that used to describe women’s fight for equality, have been perverted.

Now the freedom to be sexually provocative or promiscuous is not enough - now it can mean the freedom to be an exhibitionist.

During the same summer as the party my daughter had told me about, she casually mentioned at a lunch gathering of family and friends how another of her friends allowed boys to ‘touch them up’.

There was a sharp, shocked intake of breath around the table; the casual use of language and the public mention of such an act astonished us.

Although many of us might have engaged in such activities at a similar age, none of us could have imagined discussing it in front of our parents let alone in front of our parents’ friends.

So how much are the parents to blame?

It is precisely this erosion of the boundaries of privacy and the absence of taboo that is so shocking about today’s teenagers. Modern technology allows children access to images and information we, as children, could scarcely have imagined.

You want to see a naked girl? Click on to the internet. You want to hear exactly what your friend got up to the night before? Log on to Facebook. Not only will their boasts tell you that they are recovering from the excesses of the night before, there’ll be the pictures to prove it.

In today’s world of fast information and access to all areas, too many - particularly the young - are having to up the stakes to chase their particular dragon and get the high they crave.

Sometimes, they’re so busy creating drama and tension in the movie of their own lives that they’ve forgotten to be human beings.

A video I was told about shows how far things have gone: a dying woman lay inert on a street while a man urinated on her, saying as he did so: ‘This is a YouTube moment.’

When I was young, secretly looking up the word penis in the dictionary and sniggering was how we got our thrills. This is small beer for today’s children: the girls especially, who, where once they might have struck a pose in front of mirrors in the privacy of their own bedrooms, now exhibit themselves scantily clad in hookers’ poses in photo albums on social networking sites.

There’s something about the one step removal into cyber space that allows people to behave even more outrageously than they might in person. Now

Perhaps it’s the freedom or lack of boundaries they’ve learned from virtual reality that give them permission to behave with such frightening lack of inhibition in person. That and the demon drink, for today’s teenage girls drink in a way we rarely did.

So how much are the parents to blame? Those of us who grew up in the Sixties and Seventies will do almost anything to appear ‘cool’ to our children; we certainly don’t wish to come across as some sort of Mary Whitehouse scandalised by today’s youth.
Nor do we wish to appear as joyless, men-hating feminists, although many of us remember that we fought hard for the right to do as men have always done.

One can’t help but wonder what happened to feminism and its lessons. On the one hand, girls drink like men; on the other they dress in a manner that invites sexual objectification. Do these young girls even know what feminism is?

‘The problem is that teenagers have rejected the values of the previous era and to reject the values of the Sixties or Seventies, which was very laissez faire, you have to go very far,’ says Dr Pat Spungin, psychologist and founder of parenting website raisingkids.co.uk.

The bar has unquestionably been raised. Where will it end? In bizarre fetishism or S&M as teens strive to outdo each other?

The lessons learned are confusing ones; girls feel they have the right to get drunk and sleep around, but certain attitudes never change.

According to a sample group of 17-year-olds I spoke to, there is an enormous double standard between the sexes. Boys treat sex as being a sign of ‘laddishness’ and masculinity, they say; promiscuous behaviour on their part is an achievement.

Girls, on the other hand, are caught between a rock and a hard place.

‘Boys demand that they go further before they are ready; if they do, they’ll quickly be labelled as sluts, and gain a reputation as an easy target, so that drunk boys will seek them expecting that they’ll be easy to get off with,’ says one.

‘If they don’t, they’ll be labelled as frigid and become instantaneously unattractive; most boys won’t bother investing time and energy flirting with a girl if they think there is little prospect of pulling.’

‘Girls I know often get drunk and allow themselves to be touched up at bus stops or up against walls,’ says my daughter, Francesca.

Many of her classmates, she says, have been sleeping with their boyfriends since the age of 14 or 15.

Peer pressure has always been a persistent factor of teenage life. The stakes are higher now and teenagers, not surprisingly, have become even more competitive and paranoid. They may often find themselves in situations they are not equipped to deal with.

The internet personae that children create turn them into avatars - an online persona - in their own lives and diminish their empathy for each other. It becomes hard to tell what is real and what isn’t.

Facebook has an application called the Honesty Box, which invites you to send and receive anonymous messages to discover what people really think of you.

The application’s blurb declares triumphantly that messages cannot be removed: ‘Once you send a message, it’s forever.’ Thus has bullying moved from the playground into cyber space?

The implications of all this behaviour are far reaching. A survey about violence in teenage relationships released last month by Women’s Aid and Bliss magazine found that nearly a quarter of 14-year-old girls who responded had been pressured into engaging in sexual activity with somebody they’ve dated.

According to the survey, boys see girls as sexual commodities and one in four 16-year-olds had been hit or hurt in some other way.

Many felt it was OK to hit a girl if she’d been unfaithful. It also found that more than half of 14 and 15-year-olds have been humiliated in front of others by someone they were dating.

‘There used to be a stricter and more regulated approach to bringing up children,’ says Dr Pat Spungin.

‘Parents should take back some of the control they’ve ceded. We don’t say “no” enough, so vulnerable girls don’t have enough experience of saying “no” themselves.’

This is not to say that we should be condemning teenagers for being sexual and proposing that they take chastity vows and attend purity balls as is fashionable in parts of the U.S.

However, we do need to consider what is appropriate behaviour and to help our teens ensure that ill-considered or drunken acts which are sometimes a part of growing up won’t come back and hurt them in the future.
Some, of course, have always been sexually precocious

There have, of course, always been girls and boys who are sexually precocious.

When I was in the fifth form (Year 11) at my girls’ grammar school, I remember a classmate going to Majorca and returning to boast that she’d slept with six boys in a week. Luckily, neither she, nor they, had the pictures to prove it. These days they might well have had.

‘The girls who are most vulnerable and have the most desire to be liked are the ones who are tempted to cross these boundaries,’ says Dr Pat Spungin.
The event cited at the beginning of this article is an extreme one and by no means common to all teens’ experience. It did, however, occur.

Others will have similar stories, and it is symptomatic of a worrying tendency among our teens to live their lives in an inappropriately public arena where they reveal far more of themselves, both literally and metaphorically, than is wise.

Barack Obama recently commented on the fashion among young men for wearing their trousers low on their hips: ‘Brothers should pull up their pants. You’re walking by your mother, your grandmother, and your underwear is showing. (Some people might not want to see your underwear - I’m one of them.)’

Few would wish a return to the hypocritical constraints of life before the sexual revolution; however, the trouble with the pendulum is that it has a habit of swinging too far the other way.

Perhaps it’s time for everyone to pull up their pants and show each other a little more respect; and, since we’re supposed to be the adults, it has to start with us, with how we behave, how we draw boundaries and what we put in our newspapers and magazines and on our television screens.

* Olivia Lichtenstein is a TV producer/director and novelist. Her novel, Mrs Zhivago Of Queen’s Park, is published by Orion at £6.99.

How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX | Mail Online

Yeah.

It's called PARENTING.

Try it.



also, check out the comments to the article.. holy shit.. it's all feminists and liberal's fault, if only people had listened to hard right conservatives!!

(nevermind that conservative areas have higher instances of divorce, teen pregnancy, etc..)

[january]

Shakiiiiira, Shakiiiiiira!!!

Sorry, didn't read the article, just saw the pic *resumes reading*

[witchcurlgirl]

^^

[Sarzy]

I must say, I'm SO glad I'm not a teenager now. I agree with a lot of that article. Everything is over sexualised now.

[cmmdee]

Yeah that picture of them is insane.
And gross.
So it's Samantha's fault (SATC) that some 13 year old gave a boy head in a garden in public and let him film it?
I'm lost here...

[cynic]

...and Mom dresses like a whore to show her daughter that this is a bad thing?......

[crumpet]

I must say, I'm SO glad I'm not a teenager now. I agree with a lot of that article. Everything is over sexualised now.

I agree with you about the above. Yet, one thing I can't help but notice with all this handwringing that goes on: it really isn't about the crazy casual sex in general; it's always about the crazy sexual behavior of girls. Notice whenever you see an article about immoral teen sex it is always accompanied by pictures and stories about teen girls flashing on the internet, giving blow jobs, having intercourse. I've yet to see one where anyone is despairing over the out of control sexual behavior of boys. I haven't heard of purity balls for boys either. Hmmmmmm. All these books about the pornification of our culture always focus on the sexual behavior of girls and women. you would almost think men and boys didn't even exist just from reading all this mess. Really, I don't think anyone cares, much less is appalled, by the idea of teen boys getting their dicks sucked and fucking as much as they can. The prevailing attitude seems to be that if we could just teach our girls to have more self respect they would be better gatekeepers of all sexuality, thus boys would be doing it less if we didn't give it to them (oh, the old 'giving it up' idea again). Yes, if we could just be good girls we could stop them from being bad boys. Nowhere do they address the sexism that makes sexual activity a minus for girls yet a plus for boys. Something is really off about that.

[Aella]

That's a very simplistic view. The media/popular culture/the Internet do exert an influence in our collective psyche and by extension teens' behaviour, but they're far from the only factors. There's the boundaries parents set (or not!), education, social environments and of course, each teen's individual personality.

Hey, I didn't have the Net as a teen, but I the media was saturated with sexualised images even then, and there was plenty of sex/out of control partying in my school. If I had tried to walk out of the house dressed the way some of those kids do today or partied at all hours, my mother would have kicked my ass.

[cynic]

^^yeah, but in those days, Mom wasn't worried about you reporting her to the police and her being arrested for a spanking....the world is crazy nowadays....

**pats self on back for deciding to not have children**

[NicoleWasHere]

I couldn't read the article, too busy busting my ass laughing at that pic

[crumpet]

Yeah.

It's called PARENTING.

Try it.



also, check out the comments to the article.. holy shit.. it's all feminists and liberal's fault, if only people had listened to hard right conservatives!!

(nevermind that conservative areas have higher instances of divorce, teen pregnancy, etc..)

Yeah, I also notice how people conveniently manage to blame whatever social item they happen to have a beef with (liberalism, feminism...that's a big one)while giving a pass to the things that they personally like. Seldom do they blame technology for instance. No, they like their computers and cell phones and blackberrys so technological advances couldn't have a role in this. It's like the so-called breakup of the family. That's all feminist's fault because if women would have just accepted their lesser role as a second class citizen (basically being broodmares and help mates) they wouldn't be out working and competing with men (because you know, everything is rightfully theirs by nature) instead of being home putting a hot meal on the table and teaching Susie and Bobby their ABCs. Yes, women had the audacity to think that they should have as many options as men when it comes to how to live. The nerve of it all!

Really, the nuclear family as we know it was never the norm contrary to what neocons would have you believe. It only evolved as a result of the industrial revolution as families moved to where the jobs were and away from an agriculture based lifestyle. Before that extended family systems were the norm in most places and they seem to be the best for everyone anyway. Because the nuclear family became common it got touted as the ideal, when it really never was. But i don't hear neocons blaming the auto industry and factories for tearing up the family. They don't blame the technology which has been a great equalizer between the sexes since most work these days doesn't rely on physical strength anymore. That one superior trait that men have just doesn't matter as much in day to day life as it used to thanks to good old technology and some men are pissed that they don't have the automatic advantage anymore.

[cynic]

^^....yo....mama.....it was a female that wrote the article....pull the fangs back....

[crumpet]

^^....yo....mama.....it was a female that wrote the article....pull the fangs back....

I realize that. Just because it is coming from a woman or a liberal or whatever doesn't mean it isn't sexist. I hate women like her who are so fucking stupid they've just swallowed all the rhetoric hook, line,and sinker without questioning where any of it came from. I fully realize that not all men have those archaic sexist views about women and our sexuality. I think that attitude suxks no matter where it comes from.

And my fangs are hawt!!!!!!!!

[cynic]

^^I think her views come from the fact that she is dumb as a brick......and the men I know who think women should be dragged back into the caves are a little short in the thinking department as well....those of us....of both sexes.....with brains have figured out that other than a few plumbing differences....most differences are individual and not gender based.....

....now, scratch my back and get my dinner cooked, woman....

**ducking and running like hell....zigging and zagging to avoid the sniper fire**

[crumpet]

^^I think her views come from the fact that she is dumb as a brick......and the men I know who think women should be dragged back into the caves are a little short in the thinking department as well....those of us....of both sexes.....with brains have figured out that other than a few plumbing differences....most differences are individual and not gender based.....

....now, scratch my back and get my dinner cooked, woman....

**ducking and running like hell....zigging and zagging to avoid the sniper fire**

Ramen Noodles and a pack of nabs comin' right up big daddy!