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.

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?

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)

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.

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?

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!”?

From a law review by Stephen Smith (2008, Jail for Juvenile Child Pornographers? A Reply to Professor Leary, 15 Va. J. Soc. Pol’y & Law) concluding that prosecutors should only pursue charges against teens for consensual sexting if it aids catching adult sexual offenders:

We need not celebrate what some might describe as the “sexual liberation” of teenagers. If we really want to help children (and we should), we should not pursue prosecution-based strategies that are likely to do minors more harm than good. We should instead concentrate our efforts, as a society, on dealing with the many sexual predators and other dangerous criminals in our midst – and, so far as the criminal law is concerned, leave the Romeos and Juliets of the world alone, even if their love happens to be memorialized in forms less appealing than iambic pentameter.

What does it mean to be “against the sexual liberation of teenagers” but for “leaving Romeo and Juliet alone”?

An Arizona couple is suing Walmart after a film developer reported their bath-time photos to authorities. From ABC:

For A.J. and Lisa Demaree, the photos they snapped of their young daughters were innocent and sweet.

But after a photo developer at Walmart thought otherwise, the Demarees found themselves in a yearlong battle to prove they were not child pornographers.  …

The Peoria, Ariz., couple had their home searched by police and worse, their children — then ages 18 months, 4 and 5 — were taken from them for more than month. Their names were placed on a sex offender registry for a time, and Lisa Demaree was suspended from her school job for a year. The couple said they have spent $75,000 on legal bills. …

“These photos were never intended for anyone to see except for family members,” Treon said. “Perversion is in the eye of the viewer.”

Eventually, a judge threw out charges against the Demarees, but now they’re going on the legal offensive by suing the state, the city and Walmart for their role in what they call a “nightmare.”

ABC News Video.

More commentary at: Wall Street Journal Law Blog

1. Failure to keep adequate records

Reading through a new law review (.doc in draft) on sexting, I came across this:

Under federal law, moreover, any person who “produces” sexually explicit images, including “lascivious exhibition of the genitals or pubic area” is required to maintain certain detailed records and to keep his or her home available for FBI inspections.

Indeed, the relevant part of the US Code does make it clear that one must keep meticulous records of the performers in any sexually explicit images or videos that one creates, since that producer must:

(1) ascertain, by examination of an identification document containing such information, the performer’s name and date of birth, and require the performer to provide such other indicia of his or her identity as may be prescribed by regulations;
(2) ascertain any name, other than the performer’s present and correct name, ever used by the performer including maiden name, alias, nickname, stage, or professional name; and

So far, I am unaware of any sexting charges that have used this part of the law. But couldn’t young adults who take sexually explicit photos or videos of themselves, even if they are 18 and over, be prosecuted under this law if they don’t keep a photocopy of their partner’s birth certificate?

2. Pandering

The article also explains that a prohibition on offering or requesting child pornography was also recently found to be constitutional:

The Williams case held that “offers to provide or requests to obtain child pornography are categorically excluded from the First Amendment,” thus upholding 18 U.S.C. § 2252A(a)(3)(B) (punishing anyone who “advertises, promotes, presents, distributes, or solicits” child pornography). So under Williams, a text message that says “Hey! Check my hot nude pics on Facebook! C U L8er” could put a teen in prison for 5 to 20 years.

In short, there is a separate law for discussing the exchange of child pornography, even between teens. It is illegal for a teenager to ask another teenager (even politely, without harassing him or her) for sexually explicit photos.

The new administration seems to be still pushing abstinence over education. A new series of TV PSA’s depicts kids (75% girls, of course) telling parents: “tell me you want me to  wait to have sex.” Wait until when? Until they’re married, of course. Because, as the campaign slogan explains: “success comes to kids who wait to have sex.” Why? Because people who wait “have a better chance at success, whether that means getting an education, having a career, or just being happy.”

Since 95% of people do have non-marital sex, and research consistently demonstrates that abstinence programs are “ineffective, unethical, and poor public health,” why promote such an impossible and counter-productive goal? Are these PSA’s just a politically viable facade for a hidden comprehensive sex education agenda?

Not quite. Though the campaign promotes abstinence until marriage, it does have some information for those 95% of people who won’t get there. Under the section “Dealing with Risky Behaviors and Other Challenges” the birth control information chart cites only the “typical use” failure rate (15% for condoms) and not the “consistent and correct use” failure rate (2%). Why not launch a PSA campaign to make “typical” use more “correct and consistent”? And really, why bother with this section at all–how many teens would ask for help getting condoms or birth control after a parent makes it clear that the only thing they approve of is “waiting”?

The site devotes a few sentences to parents of queer kids (or, um kids who might be, err, “experiencing difficulties with gender identity or sexual orientation“), who should keep in mind, “Accepting your son or daughter can help lead to strong, life-affirming relationships in the future.” But the rest of the campaign makes it pretty clear that gay kids, who can’t ever get married, will never be successful or happy.

via Feministe and Salon.