Fem Speak

Texting, sexting, and pornography, oh my!

The media continues to sound the alarm over the phenomenon of kids “sexting,” using their cell phones to share nude photos of themselves.  CosmoGirl shocked the nation by releasing a survey claiming that 1 in 5 teenagers has sent someone a nude or semi-nude photo.  What the sensationalized news stories don’t bother to explain is that the huge majority of these photos were sent only to a boyfriend or girlfriend.  (Whether that person kept the photo private is another story.) 

 

Journalists also fail to emphasize a more startling phenomenon:  Although nearly all teens could be photographing themselves in sexy poses and sending those photos to friends, fully 80% of them choose not to.

 

Nor do they mention that teenagers are more chaste than their adult counterparts; over 1/3 of young adults have sent such texts of themselves.  Think about your own youth and the kids you knew.  Wouldn’t our generation have made the same mistakes if we had access to the same technology?  Unfortunately for today’s teens, the consequences of sexually frivolous behavior are much stronger today than they were a generation ago.

 

In the past, episodes of “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine” were treated as childish blunders and the children protected, as much as possible, from further embarrassment.  But when the show-and-tell involves electronic media, authorities go into cyber-cop mode and charge teenage girls with “child pornography” for pictures the girls made of themselves.  The girls in the pictures are often expelled from school or extracurricular activities, and risk ending up on sex offender registries.  In other words, the laws meant to protect young people are now being turned against them.

 

In Pennsylvania, three 14- and 15-year-old girls were charged with manufacturing and disseminating child pornography.  Three 16- and 17-year-old boys were charged with possession.  Police Captain George Saranko told the Associated Press the charges were filed to send a strong message to other minors.  Is this really about protecting kids, or is it about punishing them for being sexual?

 

The implications are enormous.  If kids can now be criminalized for taking pictures, pedophiles and child pornographers have an easy out.  By having the child push the button, the pedophile makes the child an accomplice in the crime.  Now such creeps can rightly tell children “You could go to jail if anyone finds out about these pictures.”

 

Kids do need protection from real child pornographers.  They may also need protection from their own poor decisions.  Verizon Wireless is beginning to get on board with the idea, providing usage controls that allow parents to limit to text messaging during school hours and at night, and block certain numbers.  Smaller companies like Firefly go further, allowing parents to set up a phone that will only communicate with designated numbers.  Cell phones without cameras are also available, though they often lack other essential features.  Concerned parents can also opt to block texting from the child’s cell phone altogether.

 

All in all, sexting is probably among the lesser dangers teenagers face today.  With very real specters like sexually transmitted diseases and drug addiction lurking in every high school, some teens perceive sexting as a safe way to experiment with sex, risk, and bodily autonomy.  After all, nobody ever got pregnant or contracted HIV over the telephone.

 

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Jeannie Babb

 

 

 

 

 

 

Free the Guppy

Dutch court should let 13-year-old set sail

Last week, busy-bodies in the Netherlands stepped in to prevent Dutch teen Laura Dekker from becoming the youngest person to sail around the world solo. The Utrecht District court ordered Dekker to undergo two months of psychiatric evaluation, calling the plan “undeniably daring and risky.”

Of course the trip is daring and risky. Isn’t that the point? If circumnavigating the globe in a 26-foot sailboat were a walk in the park, other teens would be doing it. Currently the title for youngest person to sail round the world belongs to 17-year-old Mike Perham of Britain.

The trip takes two years. The court-ordered guardianship and evaluation will, at least, delay Laura beyond her fourteenth birthday, pushing her ETA beyond age sixteen. If she is allowed to set sail at the end of the evaluation period, it will not be the same voyage. Not only will Laura be older, she will also be forced by the seasons to take a different route than the one she has been plotting for three years.

It is admirable that a sea-faring nation like the Netherlands is more concerned with child safety than having another of its citizens listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. The question, then, is whether the state’s meddling is justified.

Laura Dekker did not merely wake up one morning and decide to sail around the world. The girl was born on a boat, and spent four years sailing the world with her parents. She began sailing solo at age six. At the age of 11, she crossed the Atlantic solo, spending seven weeks alone.

Isolation is the primary concern touted by those who want to stop Laura Dekker. Professor Micha de Winter of Utrecht University (not directly involved with the case) touted the guardianship and psychological evaluation as a wise decision. “It’s a big risk and an experiment with a child in which you don’t know what the results could be.” Winter indicated two years alone at sea could damage her physical and emotional development.

Winter’s view presumes that Laura would have no contact with the outside world, as if she would sail for two years without ever seeing or speaking to another human. Actually Laura plotted the journey to stick with busy shipping lanes. The need to reprovision the ship will necessitate many stops over the two-year period, and we do live in the electronic age. One can easily imagine a media following, a blog, and a plethora of satellite calls and emails.

For a generation that worries incessantly about children’s text messages and peer relationships, we are quick to overlook the value of solitude and hard work. We enjoy adventure movies where a young person faces off nature with no real preparation, but when a well-trained young person wants to undertake an epic voyage she has spent three years planning, we cry “Parental neglect!” and try to ground the sailor.

Amazing teens can do amazing things. We cheer our young Olympians without asking too many questions about their education, because we realize that their experiences are a different kind of education. We listen to young music phenoms without worrying too much if they miss some of the ordinary experiences of youth, because we recognize that they are allowed to experience the extraordinary.

Laura Dekker is an amazing young woman with a very big dream. I applaud her parents for getting behind that dream, and I look forward to following her journey.

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Jeannie Babb

Horton hears a he-cession

Who the economy hits harder

Have you heard the latest buzz? Some writers and commentators are now calling the recession a “he-cession.” The new word, coined somewhere out on the blogosphere, incites fear and trembling in the masses because now the recession is actually affecting, well, men.

Times Online ran a headline: “Women are victors in ‘mancession.’” Women may not feel so victorious while enduring lower wages, shift cuts, and job loss, plus carrying a heavier share at home. Charlie Gibson touts the “he-cession” on ABC, serving up caricatures of women who just cannot respect their unemployed, apron-wearing Mr. Mom husbands.

Even Georgia Labor Commissioner Michael Thurmond is falling for the hype. Thurmond released a white paper titled “Georgia Men Hit Hardest by Recession” in which he asserts that job loss is more devastating to men than to women. This long-held assumption implies that men’s work is important, while women’s employment is merely frivolous – perhaps an avenue to get out of the house, or to earn a little money for nail polish.

In reality, women’s jobs are extremely important. In fact, 40 percent of women are the sole breadwinners for themselves or their families. Many women value their careers and identify themselves by their profession. Job loss is a major crisis, often on a par with divorce. To pretend that only men are deeply affected is ridiculous and inaccurate.

Worse yet, Michael Thurmond actually uses the term “he-cession” as if it were a real word. Thurmond’s grammar teacher must be rolling in her grave. Surely she taught him about Latin roots. Perhaps she would like to remind him that “recession” consists of the Latin prefix “re” (back) and the root “cedere” (to go) and therefore refers to moving backward. If “he-cession” had any meaning at all, it would mean that “he” is moving on, not backward.

Reading Thurmond’s white paper, something bothers me a lot more than the painful etymology of the newly coined word. If the recession has become a “he-cession” now that the lay-offs are skewed toward males – what was it in September 2008 when the data showed women were losing their jobs twice as fast as men? We never heard dire warnings about a “she-cession.” In fact, the talking heads on TV and the Internet rarely mention women’s unemployment. If they bring up unemployed women at all, it is to utter scathing remarks about “welfare moms.”

The reason men have lost more jobs, is that men had more jobs to lose. 73% of men were part of the workforce before the recession, compared to less than 60% of women. According to the Center for American Progress, 20.6% of working-age women were already living in poverty at the outset of the recession, compared to 14% of men.

Thus, saying that “the recession hits men harder” is like saying, “The recession hit the rich harder than the poor, because the rich are the ones who had money to lose.” Even during the so-called “he-cession,” men still outnumber women in the workforce, and especially in managerial positions.

On average, women who do have jobs are paid 20% less than men with the same positions. The fact that women can be paid less for doing the same work actually increases male job losses, since cut-backs target higher-paid employees. Women are also more likely to be underemployed, working part-time jobs without health insurance.

There is no new thing called a “he-cession.” The severe economic downturn affects us all. If a quirky new buzzword is needed, maybe “we-cession” would be more appropriate.

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Jeannie Babb

The Solution To The Gay Marriage Issue

by Pat Gundry

Historically, marriage has been many different things. The only thing it has consistently been is a more or less personal relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman.

It has usually been a secular legal agreement between the marriage partners, or between two families.

Not until relatively recently, as time goes, has it been considered a religious ceremony, with vows made before God.

Therein lies the problem, and the solution.

If we allow marriage to be a legal agreement for the purpose of protecting the persons involved and any children they might have, and their property, then the solution is to require marriage to, again, be, first and foremost, a legal agreement with certain minimum requirements set forth to qualify for entering into the agreement.

If we create a basic marriage contract that all must agree to in order to have the legal protection of marriage, we could eliminate the present conflict about whether people of the same gender should be allowed to marry.

If persons desiring to have the legal protections of marriage could simply go to a courthouse and prove their identities, meet reasonable and minimum requirements set forth for everyone, and sign the marriage document, the problem is solved.

And, if those persons desire to have a religious marriage ceremony, of any kind whatsoever, they are free to do that also.

Or, if the marrying parties want to create their own invention for an auxiliary marriage ceremony, they are free to do that.

Let those who want to marry women marry them, and those who want to marry men marry them.

And, this seems to be lost on the majority of opponents to gay marriage, inter gendered people should be free to marry whomever they wish without having to choose a gender and then be restricted in their choice of a marriage partner to a declared opposite gendered partner.

Gender is on a continuum, all the way from what we might think of as totally male to what we might think of as totally female. Many people think they are one or the other gender when they are actually a mixture to one degree or another.

Insisting that we must know the gender of a person and then restrict them to what we may erroneously think of as the opposite gender is forcing individuals to comply with a very out of date understanding of what gender is.

Allowing all adults to choose who they want to marry, not asking them if they are one gender or another, allowing that to be private, as it should be, will solve not only the problem of the gay marriage issue, but that of discriminating against and invading the privacy of inter gendered people.