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Teenage boys boast about their sexual exploits (with photos, on the internet, because it's 2012). Teenage girls are incredibly cruel to one another. Media repo
by jordanb 14y ago
Teenage boys boast about their sexual exploits (with photos, on the internet, because it's 2012). Teenage girls are incredibly cruel to one another.
Media reports it because it fits an existing narrative about "technology and culture."
Back when I was in high school, it didn't take pictures on the internet to ruin a girl's reputation. All it took was some boasting followed by a lot of gossip. It sounds like the "technology" aspect of this is that the standards of evidence have gone up for a boy to defend his boast.
- rayiner 14y agoA thousand years ago, angry aggressive teenagers beat each other up with sticks. Today, they join gangs and shoot each other. But that doesn't mean the increased destructive power yielded technology doesn't make the problem more worrisome than it was before.
- tptacek 14y agoI suspect it takes a degree of willfulness not to see the distinction between a rumor campaign and an explicit photography.
- jordanb 14y agoI'm not sure what you mean by 'willfullness,' Thomas. My point is that this is the modern incarnation of an extremely old set of teenage behaviors. The teenage girl who becomes subject of a rumor campaign has always been devastated by it.
- lotso 14y agoSure, but I think the results of the modern incarnation are much worse and perhaps, longer lasting.
- dailyrorschach 14y agoThis is true, it's the modern form of these old behaviors. But that doesn't mean that their amplification effect isn't worse. Now videos and photos are actually seen by people, without your permission, by your friends, teachers, principals, parents, etc. It would seem to me to only increase the level of trauma. It's one thing to tell your parents that the kids at school said X, it's another to have your parents called and shown a photo or told a video exists. My girlfriend and I were video tapped in high school, this was around 2003 I want to say, so luckily it wasn't super easily broadcast, but still made the rounds in her high school. Thankfully the acts committed weren't completely revelatory for either of us, but it definitely hurt her greatly. I can only imagine what would have happened had the video shown more, or the audience distribution wider. What ended up happening was the video destroyed, the student reprimanded. In our case it was friends playing a prank too far, but in many others its done with malicious intent and broadcasted to the greatest number of people to enhance that harm.
- tptacek 14y agoStrong disagree that worldwide publication of a revealing photograph is comparable to a whispering campaign.
- ryusage 14y agoI think his point is more that the phenomenon we're seeing here is something that's happened forever, and we've really never "solved". The cause is exactly the same, and the effects are similar in nature. They're just dramatically amplified now by technology.
- jordanb 14y agoThank you, that was my point. I admit that I wasn't thinking about the potential for the photos to live forever but also feel that 1) in all probability they won't live forever, at least not on the public, searchable internet given that they're illegal 2) If the article's purpose was to highlight that aspect then it did a poor job. My reaction to this article is that it comes across as a continuation of a lazy, facile media narrative about technology and culture and kids that began with Geraldo Rivera, BBSes and Dungeons and Dragons.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- cschmidt 14y agoPhotos on the internet tend to have a long life. I think it is the permanence of these photos and videos that make it worse. In the old days you could just go to college and leave your high school life behind. Now Google is forever.
- tluyben2 14y agoThis is the problem I think; you simply don't want your new employer to find pics of you passed out naked or worse. One of my friends from highschool was very promiscuis then; she slept with just about everyone and was always drunk / naked at parties. She had sex in public places. She would've been on the internet these days in pics/vids. Now she is a very highly paid manager and has a family; I don't think that would work that way if her boss found pics and videos of her smeared all over the web, not to mention her boy friend whom she met years after this when she cleaned up her act. Sure everyone knew who she was and what she did, but taking picture? You needed some kind of big machine for that and, worse, you needed to find some photographer outlet to develop it who did NOT know her, her parents, you, your parents. That was not that simple in my town. And polaroid? We never heard of that until much later; I never saw one unless it was in US tv shows.
- jordanb 14y agoThis is a good point and one I hadn't considered in my first post. The difference between now and then, being that now this stuff doesn't go away. OTOH I think if there are any photos on the internet that will go away it's these, if for no other reason, because they're illegal.
- steferson 14y agoUnfortunately, something being illegal doesn't make it stop being shared around the internet, specially photos.
- ryusage 14y agoTrue, they may not disappear completely, but they definitely get filtered out over time. And imagine you're 25 years old and someone wants to bring up old, explicit photos of you at age 15...they would immediately open themselves up to some very serious criminal charges. So I would agree that these are likely to more or less fade away into the recesses of the internet.
- pdonis 14y agoTeenage boys boast about their sexual exploits (with photos, on the internet, because it's 2012). Teenage girls are incredibly cruel to one another. Exactly; and this is not news, it's been going on for as long as there have been people. The article doesn't even talk about the real lesson here: be careful who you trust. If you can't trust someone not to secretly record you having sex and then posting the video on Facebook, then you shouldn't be having sex with them. The lesson has always been the same, and there have always been people who don't learn it until it's too late. Edit: I should make clear that I am not trying to exonerate the teenage boys; quite the contrary. To allow someone to make an explicit video of you without your knowledge and post it on Facebook is naive; but to make and post the video is malicious and cruel. The girls need to be reminded of the lesson; but the boys need to be shamed and punished.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago> If you can't trust someone not to secretly record you having sex and then posting the video on Facebook, then you shouldn't be having sex with them. People are awful at assessing risk; why the assumption that teenagers will be any better? Your advice is sound, but it's also along the lines of "Don't have sex, and you'll be safe!" It's not practical.
- pdonis 14y agoI've seen this argument before, and I don't buy it. First of all, you're mis-stating the rule: the rule is not "don't have sex", it's "don't have sex until you know enough about the other person's character to be reasonably sure you can trust them with something that intimate". Second, if people are that bad at assessing risk, that's all the more reason to err on the side of safety. But most importantly, choices have consequences, including the choice to have sex with someone who isn't worth that kind of trust; you can say it's not practical to avoid that (I don't agree, but that's another argument), but saying that doesn't change the consequences of the choice. If you trust someone who doesn't deserve it, you're going to get hurt: that's a fact of life. No amount of social engineering is going to "fix" this fact of life.
- mnicole 14y ago
- enoch_r 14y agoDo you think it's implausible that having nude photographs distributed to one's entire school is far more traumatizing than gossip?