From a long piece in the Atlantic by Hana Rosin about high school kids sexting:
Studies on high-school kids’ general attitudes about sexting turn up what you’d expect—that is, the practice inspires a maddening, ancient, crude double standard. Researchers from the University of Michigan recently surveyed a few dozen teenagers in urban areas. Boys reported receiving sexts from girls “I know I can get it from” and said that sexting is “common only for girls with slut reputations.” But the boys also said that girls who don’t sext are “stuck up” or “prude.”
The boys themselves, on the other hand, were largely immune from criticism, whether they sexted or not.
Sometimes in Louisa County, between interviews, I hung out with a group of 15-year-old boys who went to the library after school. They seemed like good kids who studied, played football, and occasionally got into fights, but no more than most boys. They’d watch videos of rappers from the area and talk about rumors in the rap world, like the one that the Chicago rapper Chief Keef, a rival of D.C.’s Shy Glizzy, had gotten a middle-school girl pregnant. They’d order and split a pizza to pass the time while waiting for their parents to leave work and pick them up. I started to think of them as the high school’s Greek chorus because, while I recognized much of what they said as 15-year-old-boy swagger—designed to impress me and each other, and not necessarily true—they still channeled the local sentiment. This is how one of them described his game to me: “A lot of girls, they stubborn, so you gotta work on them. You say, ‘I’m trying to get serious with you.’ You call them beautiful. You say, ‘You know I love you.’ You think about it at night, and then you wake up in the morning and you got a picture in your phone.”
“You wake up a happy man,” his friend said.
“Yeah, a new man.”
“Yeah, I’m the man.”
How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.
“Super thots.”
“You can’t love those thots!”
“That’s right, you can’t love those hos.”
“Girls in Louisa are easy.”
We’re doomed. Doomed. Boys hate girls no matter what the girls do, and boys grow up to be men who hate women.
We’re doomed.
I swear, the teenage het scene is *worse* than before, meaning specifically sometime around the 1970s. Yeah, I know. The olds are always whingeing about kids these days. Our olds in the 60s and 70s howled about it. The difference though is that women had to put up with *less* shit from their peers (still a lot, but less than this), nobody was depilating pubic hair, what women wanted in sex was actually important. (Guys worried about it, did what they could, which was usually hopeless, but there was a willingness to learn. These days it sounds more like, “What? No blowjob on the first date?” Followed by, “What a prude.”)
Honestly, am I crazy? Has my memory evaporated? Or are the crazies the people who think this garbage is normal? This is Victorian times with smaller underwear and shorter words.
quixote, and what were the teenagers like around the 1970s in your area?
In my school, we had a self-imposed segregation. Girls stuck together, boys stuck together, the mixing was cautious and very limited. Both groups engaged separately in most activities. Boys were playing football, fighting, cursing every second word (that was cool!), and sometimes smoking cigarettes; girls never did any of these, they had their own games and passtimes. No sitting together in the classroom – out of the question, only for punishment!
When now my daughter brings home stories from her school, what still amazes me most is the amount of mixing – yes, the sheer amount of things they do together with the boys. I think also that it’s a change for the better: not all aspects of the sweet 70s were that rosy in the small corner of the world where I live!
(I don’t know about sexting though: so far she has never mentioned it. I try not to think too much of what she is really doing when spending hours with her mobile.)
IM gonna leave this here.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/neo-victorianism-campus_810871.html
Tangentially related. It seems that if conservatives and liberals are both concerned over the state of affairs in young peoples sex lives then there is hope for doing something about it. Perhaps we can all get together and bring back some Victorian era delaying of gratification virtue into the culture.
All that sexting is destroying the fabric that underpins society in Saudi Arabia.
Back in the early days of the Web the established media was out to bring the new competitor under control and preferably regulated out of existence. Time magazine had a ridiculous cover story ‘cyberporn’ based on a junk research paper by an undergrad at CMU that was quickly exposed as fraud.
At the time Dworkin and MacKinnon had managed to bully pro-porn voices out of feminism and the Web was very much under attack from the left and right. There were demands for a censorship mechanism. Which rather oddly folk allowed me to help design which is how PICS ended up with the feature where everyone could choose their own censorship scheme.
Back then people used to think I was joking when I told them that my inspiration came from Flesh Gordon where Ming the Merciless attempts to destroy society with a ‘sex ray’. It really wasn’t a joke. If you want to effect social change then you need powerful levers and sex is one of the most powerful. Most of the early feminists were pro-porn for the reason that putting women on a pedestal was merely the first step to putting them in a cage.
The introduction of mass media has been followed by prudery in every country. Right now India is going through its Comstock phase. Victorian ‘moral’ values were the aberration in British culture bracketed by the Hell Fire clubs and the 80’s dogging craze. The prudery ends when the media is democratized.
I think that Ophelia’s point wasn’t “Oh, sexting is awful,” it was that boys are actively encouraging girls to do it, and then when they do so, the boys reward them with disdain. Which is amazingly stupid from an op/psych perspective, as well as just basic human decency. If this is the base state of gender relationships in the country, then the real thing we need to fight isn’t prudery OR being sex-positive — it’s that we’re still stuck with the same frigging double standard we’ve had since the middle ages.
Perhaps that standard is based upon something immutable, something to do with the human nature of gender differences and this is all an experiment against that reality.
Okay, so I don’t usually use the bible to illustrate a point, but sometimes it hits the mark.
1Corintians 13:11 “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
So what do you expect to hear from a homogeneous group of 15 year old boys? Yes, their attitudes are reprehensible, but I would bet that many of them, will grow up to be decent, empathetic and thoughtful adults. While it does take some men longer than others (I didn’t consider myself a feminist until age 40), many eventually get there. The important goal, in my mind, is how do we encourage the progress of those that need it them most.
Had to read the whole article after I started. The boys attitude is really disturbing. It sort of rings true with the attitudes I grew up with in the pre-cameraphone days, the sort of thought processes common to the more popular crowd. The simple reality is that crowd will always be looking for some sorting mechanism and the more arbitrary and bullshit it all is the better because that makes it easier to control. It’s instinctive and I think has parallels with some of the ways religion props itself up as well. I keep wanting to think that those ideas are niche ones but the niggling thought that I’m wrong on that is growing into a depressing certainty.
I don’t think teenagers finding their way is helped much by adults running around acting like the sky is falling though. I’m pretty sure I don’t want anyone to ever be charged with a sex crime for taking a picture of themselves no matter their age. It’s the betrayal I’d be happy to see having some consequences in the same way I’d like to see consequences if someone stole a journal/diary from me and spread it all over. And the courts are probably not the right place to end up without something else complicating things. The prosecutor’s statement about teenagers inciting the prurient interests of predators around the country with these images sounds unfomfortably similar to the faux rationale for slut shaming. How does some other asshole’s personal problems when he or she looks at pictures of you that are otherwise not harming anyone turn into you going to jail?
Sheesh, there are a million people around here more knowledgeable about Feminism 101 around here than I am, but even I know the answer to that what. Maybe it’s Feminism 01.
Sure, there may have been advantages to ancient patriarchal cultures that treated women as men’s property and exerted heavy control over women’s sexuality. But those advantages? Long gone as societies evolved. The evo-psych bs? Long disproven.
There are plenty of men out there who are delighted to discover that their new partners/girlfriends/lovers have a substantial amount of experience under their belt, as it were. This is about as culturally immutable as menses shunning or denying women the vote or any of the rest of the stupid sexist baggage that we’ve been trying to ditch for the past two hundred years.
I’m not calling you a liar, but ive had oh a hundred or so male friends over the course of my life and none of them exhibited the above ‘delight’.
Football and ‘rap.’ QED
md, nobody is “experimenting against” “immutable reality.”
First, assuming for the sake of argument that Victorian European “higomus hogamus” gender roles are “immutable reality”–which is quite a ridiculous stretch–human nature is quite plastic. That’s why, for example, we’re talking to each other by typing on keyboards attached to computers. Humans didn’t evolve to do that. But we do it.
Second, the reality we’re actually fighting here, which you seem to think is immutable, is one in which young (and not so young) males despise females whatever they do. If they have sex, they’re “hos.” If they don’t have sex, they’re prudes, or stuck-up.
You may think misogyny is immutable. I don’t.
As for the virtues of delaying gratification, which you mention in another comment–that’s actually a different conversation. But if you want to have that conversation, you should probably be aware that young people of both sexes have always had sex.
You want a return to Victorian morality? Have you any idea how common prostitution was in Victorian London?
What you want is exactly what the young boys in the OP have. A world in which males are sexually free and females aren’t. A world in which girls who “do it” are held in contempt, and girls who don’t — well, they’re held in a different kind of contempt. The “benevolent” kind where they’re not expected to know much about life beyond certain narrow boundaries, and so need to be protected, but needn’t be taken very seriously.
“If this is the base state of gender relationships in the country, then the real thing we need to fight isn’t prudery OR being sex-positive — it’s that we’re still stuck with the same frigging double standard we’ve had since the middle ages.”
That’s what I was trying to say, but better said. Ariel’s point that boys and girls do more things together is a good one. That really would be an improvement. I’m just hugely disturbed that the double standard is this horrible at this point. I guess it’s obvious they’d be using everything, including new tools, to enforce it if they’re so far into it, but it’s just gobsmackingly appalling that they’re that into it.
What’s it going to take for people to learn to stop doing that? ??
(I grew up in Cambridge, Mass., surrounded by other university kids. I thought that was normal. You can imagine how much of a shock the rest of my life was for a while there.)
We cannot do anything about this stuff so long as porn continues to be part of everyday life. Constant degradation of women is the order of the day. Women have always been in a no win position, but it seems to be even more extreme now.
Dworkin and McKinnon were RIGHT. It’s a plague that destroys women, and deranges human sexuality. There is a new movie coming out called “Pornland” based on the work of Gail Dines. Everyone ought to see it, or read the book.
Lady Mondegreen,
No, there is one acceptable role for women where they won’t get criticized (or criticized less): the girlfriend. If she’s safely owned by some male who exerts property rights over her, then she probably won’t get slut/pruded too much.
Md, I’m willing to believe that you don’t know any guys who disagree with you. It’s likely that we move in different circles. Thankfully.
For instance, I’ve heard that guys are supposed to always be bragging about their ‘conquests’ and sharing with other guys the embellished details of their sex lives. That may be true in some circles, but I’ve 52 years old, and I’ve never heard a single guy of my personal acquaintance talk about their sex lives (as opposed to women, who seem to do it all the time). So again, different circles.
But do we shame them now as much as then? Do we prize the virgins and the virginal as much as they did then as we do now? Brucegee reports that girls with vast sexual experience are much delighted over. I don’t think that was the case in thee olden days. Perhaps our removal of shame and virtuous norms, or really reversal if brucegee is correct (discovering a virginal girl must now be cause for distress in brucegee’s circles), is just playing itself out in Louisa. These boys do seem to be delighting over these girls sexual displays, if not quite so taken with them on an emotional level.