New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens ‘It’s Gay To Smoke’

A delightful satire at The Onion of PSA’s aimed at teens AND of homophobia.

Boys will be boys and girls will be … child pornographers?

From a post at the American Civil Liberties Union Blog, explaining that the DA views sexting boys as “being boys” and sexting girls as “felons”:

Only the girls who appeared in the photos were threatened with child porn charges. If the DA did in fact regard these photos as pornographic, why not file distribution charges against the boys? A clue may be found in their argument before the 3rd Circuit. In narrating the case, their attorney explained how, after the girls were photographed, “high school boys did as high school boys will do, and traded the photos among themselves.” Ultimately, that’s what this case comes down to: one man’s view on how a young woman should conduct herself. The boys who traded the photos bear no responsibility and require no re-education.

First US federal case about sexting

Court asked to allow prosecution for “sexting”

I am eagerly awaiting the decision on this case (info and documents from ACLU) from a federal court of appeals that is hearing arguments today.

What’s fascinating about it is that there is no federal legal precedent, to my knowledge, establishing whether pictures that only show female breasts or a bra, without any sex act occurring, can be legally considered child pornography. State prosecutors have been charging teens as though it does qualify.

In US v Knox (1994), a US supreme court decided that a “lascivious” (this is the legal definition) focus on a minor’s clothed genitals was enough for a picture to qualify as child pornography.

Attorney Larry Walters: Some rational comments on sexting

Some excellent quotations from attorney Larry Walters in this in-depth interview: When Sex and Cell Phones Collide: Inside the Prosecution of a Teen Sexting Case, touching on a number of key points absent in most mainstream media coverage of sexting:

1. Sexting is normal for teens. It’s not a trend, a plague, a disease, or a shocking deviant act.

The idea that teens and kids would be creating child pornography themselves and distributing it by cell phone was never contemplated at the time [child pornography] laws were originally passed. Now, with the influx of technology, we have kids doing things that they were not doing before – creating content, creating pictures, and sending pictures – and, frankly, allowing that technology to be a part of their lives to the extent where it’s even a part of their sex lives. Kids in our current culture allow technology to infiltrate everything they do. They express themselves, whether it’s anger, love, hate, or intimacy, through technology.

2. Teens have few legal rights and protections, especially in schools.

Students are losing constitutional rights – the right to privacy and their expectation of privacy on school grounds. Their cell phones are  getting seized more often and inspected,  and these pictures are being found. School officials think nothing of saying, “Give me that cell phone,” and paging through it. The courts aren’t doing much about it. Every once in a while you’ll have a brave judge that will stand up and say, “That’s wrong.” The information is coming to light more often as those constitutional rights are being whittled away.

3. Charging a teen with producing child pornography is unnecessary and unfair, even if you want to use the legal system to address a case of nonconsensual sexting.

A lot of this is a problem with prosecutorial discretion and simple humanity. There are statutes like disorderly conduct, harassment, and stalking – catch-all provisions that police officers and prosecutors always use when they don’t what to charge somebody with when there’s a new behavior at issue. There’s an annoying communication law in Florida. Certainly, there are numerous other options out there for law enforcement.

4. Teens are expected to meet unrealistic ideals for sexual behavior.

I think we’re holding kids to a higher standard for similar behavior than we do adults. When adults send pictures of themselves engaged in sexual activity to each other – a common thing – there’s no crime committed, it’s commonplace, it’s enjoyable and everybody goes on. Kids do exactly the same thing with other kids – they have the same desires and the same erotic feelings – but they’re held to a higher standard. All of a sudden, it’s this horrible crime. It strikes me as odd that we’re holding kids to a higher standard than adults.

Terri Senft / Teens and the “Attention Economy”

An in-progress article from Terri Senft analyzing youth online practices as a part of a marketplace of “attention.”

She argues that teens using myspace and the like to document their lives is part of:

a larger cultural preoccupation with what self-help gurus are calling “Brand You.” Many wonder why a teen would build an image-shrine to himself on the net. They might as well wonder why he wouldn’t, given the cultural messages teens routinely receive, given the near-daily demand for them to ‘look good on paper.’

She goes on to suggest that generating such online fame and identity is already a part of existing circuits of capital–users work as content generators, which generates profit for the owners of social network sites.

But, she points out, pursuing celebrity can also be a way to seek self-determination, especially since adolescents have few other avenues to pursue it:

Stars don’t accumulate capital because they get attention; they accumulate capital because they have managed to turn themselves from citizens to corporations. This morphing is crucial when we consider the lure of celebrity for teens who feel themselves limited in their sense of agency. Even a cursory examination of the news displays that the only kids who count as people, rather than property, are those who have managed to somehow establish themselves as corporate entities: child celebrities, athletes, and so on. Why wouldn’t someone want to emulate that model, which seems (on the surface at least) to generate just capital, but self-determination?

She warns that economies of attention can be “just as volatile, corrupt, sexist, ageist and counter-democratic as old-fashioned capitalism.”

I think Senft’s analysis of attention and celebrity is useful, but I still wonder: How does this differ from the desire for popularity and social capital?

She starts off the piece with an anecdote about some teenage girls who were punished after their sleepover photos were leaked. Is she saying that they made the photos in the first place because of the demands of this “attention economy”? Since the girls did not intend to share the photos with the rest of the school, it might make more sense to argue instead that the unknown person who nonconsensually distributed photos did so to gain capital, and that such gains were unethical and misbegotten.

Second “sexting suicide” on record: When can we talk about slut-shaming?

This story is tragic: ‘Sexting’ bullying cited in teen girl’s suicide – TODAY show.

But we need to look past the shiny new label “sexting suicide” and put this in a larger context. We need to stop punishing girls for expressing their sexuality–parents, peers, and the justice system, you’re all responsible.

How can we understand this suicide, which seems so new and different, in the context of our long history of labeling some women “sluts” and “whores”? Instead of another quotation from Parry Aftab (“it’s dangerous, don’t do it”) what could Leora Tanenbaum and the hundreds of women she interviewed about being tormented as the “slut” in high school add to this conversation?

We need to think seriously about the connection between the well-established statistics of gay teen suicide and Hope Witsell’s “sexting” suicide.  Can we fight homophobia with dramatic narratives of dead gay teenagers?

What can we accomplish with stories of “sexting suicides”? Can we re-write them to raise the alarm about the unrealistic and damaging sexual standards that adolescent girls are (still) held to? Is it possible to use these stories to argue that our sexual and gender norms are deadly?

UPDATE: an excellent analysis at The Curvature. More great commentary at Sylvia Has A Problem.

Malika Saada Saar: Why the film Precious is a “fairy tale”

When girls in economically stable families are hurt by sexual violence, the protective layers of functional schools, safe neighborhoods and access to mental-health services tend to buffer them from further exploitation. For girls at the margins, sexual violence often funnels them into the criminal justice system. (washingtonpost.com)

Comments from Bitch Magazine on Miley Cyrus and sexual self-expression

I get why people are uncomfortable with acknowledging teen girl sexuality, too: the fact is that young women are often targeted for sexual assault, have fewer means to defend themselves from it because they know less about the world than adults, and are correspondingly fetishized by way too many creepy, misogynistic men. But to make the whole thing about whether teen girls should be allowed to be sexual, or whether they are Bad Girls for being sexual in ways we do not approve, places the onus on teenage girls and their sexuality. Rather than, say, predatory dudes. And that’s a problem.

It shouldn’t be a problem to assert these two things, simultaneously: first, that teenage girls are sexual, and want to express and experiment with their sexuality, and second, that their desire to express and experiment with their sexuality shouldn’t be exploited by predators. But it is, for some reason, and the end result is that we end up with role models as asexual and one-dimensional as Taylor Swift. Because a girl can’t be sexual and innocent, for whatever reason. Because we’ve constructed a worldview wherein desire and innocence can’t occupy the same space.

from: Are You There, God? It’s Me, Miley: On Privacy, Teen Sexuality, and the Miley Cyrus Twitter | Bitch Magazine.

Canadian sex workers argue that anti-prostitution laws are dangerous to women

Sex workers set to launch landmark challenge:

[A new case is] asking Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice to invalidate Criminal Code provisions that serve as Canada’s policy response to the world’s oldest profession.

They argue that prohibitions on keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution and living on the avails of the trade force them from the safety of their homes to the insecurity of the street, where they are exposed to physical and psychological violence.

But the women are battling a fortress of opposition from the federal government, as well as religious and conservative groups intervening in the case.

The intervenors contend that loosening restrictions on the sex trade would be out of step with Canadian moral values.

No one has ever succeeded in eliminating prostitution by criminalizing it, so can’t we just think about what’s best for sex workers? How is it moral to uphold laws that make sex work more unsafe for women than it needs to be?

Why do we assume sexting girls aren’t expressing their authentic desires?

An article by Leigh Goldstein in Jumpcut argues that the legal and media commentary about sexting denies youth the capacity to be subjects:

By criminalizing self-produced child pornography, our government has effectively censored minors’ right to record their sexualities or erotic identities. … Having shushed the kids, we adults gleefully expound on what they must feel: duped, misguided, ultimately regretful of having exposed and/or exploited their bodies. Exploited object? Of course, it’s the part kids were born to play. But the role of subject when it comes to discourses of desire? That remains off limits.

Goldstein also raises interesting questions that I am trying to grapple with in the chapter I am currently working on:

If ample research, especially that coming out of girls’ studies, has already documented the silencing of adolescent sexuality, why do legal and media discourses continue to participate in this silencing? And what are the possibilities for bringing together these different forms of discourse so that they better inform each other?

We’ve been hearing warnings from feminist researchers for decades that the “missing discourse of desire” in sex education for girls could lead them to have trouble saying “no” as well as saying “yes” to sex. Why haven’t I seen any feminist articles heralding sexting as: “finally, look at this, a new way that girls are expressing themselves sexually!”?