In the (not) news today: sexting returns!
After a couple months of leaving the topic alone, some media outlets – for whatever reason – decided to poke the sleeping monster of “sexting” and extract a few hundred words-long story from it for appearance’s sake. It’s sort of like trying to make up for all these lurid stories about Tiger Woods by showing a glimmer of social conscience without abandoning the topic of sex.
Sexting, for the uninitiated who should consider themselves fortunate, is a portmanteau of “sex” and “texting.” It refers to the epidemic of young people sending sexual content, such as naked photographs, of themselves via cell phone text messaging. If you want to be technical, however, “texting” is the wrong term, because images are sent via Multimedia Messaging Service. MMS is obviously less friendly to those who like to create word mash-ups. By the way, dibs on “MMX.”
How sure are you? Seventy-five percent? That's a good figure. Pretty confident.
What led to a new story about sexting and its accompanying headlines and teases designed to scare the bejesus out of parents of children ages 12-40? An Associated Press-MTV poll. (Oh, sure. MTV is bad until it hooks up – pun intended – with the AP to issue a survey about teens sharing sexually explicit content of themselves. Then parents are all ears.)
According to the poll, more than 25 percent of Americans aged 14-24 have participated in sexting. Do you know what that means?
It means nearly 75 percent of that same group has not done so. One-fourth of a group is significant, but the story ignores seems to consider the three-fourths that doesn’t do it inconsequential.
But what really takes the cake is how the phenomenon is explained:
Research shows teenage brains are not quite mature enough to make good decisions consistently. By the mid-teens, the brain’s reward centers, the parts involved in emotional arousal, are well-developed, making teens more vulnerable to peer pressure.
There’s a 25 percent chance your teen is sexting, and it’s because he or she is stupid and immature. Are you worried now? Are you?
