Is Sexting Like Spin the Bottle?

I’ve read a lot about  Sexting lately. Sexting, in case you ity, didn’t already know, is sending sexual messages and/or photos through the cell phone. It’s a growing trend among teens and it’s easy to see how easily it could all go wrong.

First, there’s the nudity aspect, which is sure to freak out parents, but teens getting naked, it’s nothing new. I was reading something at Switched today that mentioned a  piece in the National Post quoting Professor Peter Cumming from York University, in Toronto who feels that Sexting is along the same lines as Spin the Bottle.

When I was growing up in rural Northern California, kids did something called “Going In the Barn.” (I was pretty prudish – I so was not going in the barn with anybody.) I’m not going to go into detail, but it had to do with peeping some nudity, and this was back in the mid-to-late 70s. Kids are curious. Couple that with the hormonal drive of your average adolescent and really Sexting makes a sort of disturbing sense.

The biggest problem that I can see with it comes into play when the photos are shared. Someone breaks up with somebody or a phone gets stolen or even borrowed and that’s when something personal and private can become very, very public. And were you aware that some of these kids are being prosecuted as child pornographers?  There’s even the risk of having to register as a sex offender, which I feel is both extreme and nuts.

I’m not saying that I’m cool with Sexting. What I am saying is that kids are kids and sometimes they do stupid and destructive things. And sometimes these destructive things are hormonally driven.  Kids have always had the potential for the stupid and the destructive. Kids today are not necessarily worse than the kids that we grew up with.

Amy Hasinoff, a doctoral candidate from the University of Illinois, feels society is using Sexting as another way to label young girls as bad.

…Ms. Hasinoff argues that just as the courts are missing the point by failing to distinguish between nudity and child pornography, the media are likewise doing more harm than good by portraying a girl’s sexual self-expression as an invitation for sexual harassment.

Harassment, she said, could involve the non-consensual distribution of a private photo by a disgruntled ex-boyfriend, for example.

“The media and society seem to talk about girls as sexually naive and innocent,” she said. “Then as soon as they become active, we deem them as deviant and blame them.”

There’s only so much we can do to protect our kids. Nobody likes to think about their kids having sex or expressing themselves in a sexual way. It’s uncomfortable and in opposition to what we want for our babies, but the reality of is that kids grow up. And they sometimes get naked.

Teach your child to love and respect him or herself. That’s really all you can do, because you can’t be with them 24/7 and one thing you can count on is that sometimes they are going to screw up, but eventually they will be grown-ups and their children will find something new and even more shocking to get self-destructive with.