Sexting: another reason I’m glad I’m not the parent of a teenager today
Technology marches on, and teenagers are in the vanguard.
With the ubiquity of cell phones that take pictures that can almost instantaneously be sent to friends, coupled with the driving force of sex in newly-pubescent bodies, we have a recipe for the disaster that can result from the practice known as “sexting.”
I may be behind the times, not having a teenager myself at this point, and having raised mine in the dinosaur days before people commonly had cell phones. But this news story alerted me to the fact that it’s not at all unusual for teenage girls to send nude or seminude photos to teenage boys in a sort of advertisement of their wares. Sometimes these pictures are then freely passed around by the proud recipients for all and sundry to ogle. In the case described in the article, the teenage girls were actually charged with child pornography for sending their own photos to three boys, who were also charged.
This seems far too Draconian, but it’s an understandable effort to stop the practice. Good luck, I say; I don’t think it will work. The temptation is too great, and the tools too readily available.
In my day—oh, do I sound old and quaint when I say that!—in my day we had neither the technology that would allow such a thing, nor the relaxation of social mores that once held it in check. The biology may have been the same, but the attitudes were not.
Yes, of course, there was a lot of fooling around even back then. But although the guys would have probably loved it if sexting had been available, the girls had not yet been taught to flaunt themselves so tartily to win attention and affection.
Make no mistake about it, either. Although young women are sexually driven in the physical sense, much more of the motivation for this sort of bold behavior comes from the need to be popular, have a boyfriend, and to ultimately be loved. Unlike what prevailed in earlier times, it is now a common perception that the way to achieve these things is to seem bold, edgy, and assertively provocative.
In the end, naive girls can get deeply hurt when they realize that boyfriends or acquaintances they trust have passed their nude photos around to share with many others, and that the girls have absolutely no control over how those photos are ultimately used.
These girls truly are clueless about what boys will do with the pictures. They are not nearly as sophisticated as they imagine.
And then the next step so often is the police get involved at the forceful insistence of parents of the girls, who wish to punish the ungallant boy. There are laws which technically cover the circumstances, but they really miss the broader points involved.
The girl becomes further embarrassed as the parents push the prosecution, witlessly.
It never occurs to the parents that they might have a teensy-weensy bit of responsibility in the matter.
Wise police officers and prosecutors tell these folks, politely, to get lost and buy a mirror.
Recently, I got a new cell phone and number. (someones old number). Shortly there after, I began receiving calls in Spanish, often demanding to know who I was. One day an image came in of a young woman in panties with her back to the camera looking over her shoulder.
Of course I took this as a sign of Gods existence.
But seriously, the image contained the text “Are you a freak?”
Oh Hell yes!, was my reply.
This banter continued until I must have given the wrong reply and she suddenly realized she was sending the images to the wrong person.
Since then, there have been no more images…dammit!
Girls step into a minefield everyday at school. The pressures to dress and act a certain way are overwhelming (as they have always been). It is parents and teachers and aunties and grannies etc. who must lovingly and unfailingly instill in their girls a certain pride/respect in self to help them resist and overcome the demands of peer pressure to participate in slutty behavior.
I agree entirely that teenage girls see sexting as a way to be “edgy” (which translates to desireable). You mention that teen hormones are what they’ve always been; I’d add that teen girls want what they’ve always wanted – to be desired by boys and loved by a boyfriend. Sadly, this generation of young women has learned to lie to themselves about this, perhaps because such motivations put them at the mercy of the powerful male sex drive and fly in the face of the popular (and perverted) notion that gender equality means that men and women are indistinguishable in all arenas.
The observation is accurate that to be edgy and bold, you have to go to the edge or a little over of what is acceptable. Which moves the edge a little bit for those who come after.
But there is pressure even at the more modest extreme as well. Many girls may have no interest in being in the raciest 20%, but do have a horror of dressing in the least-fashionable 20% either. They don’t want to wear the smallest bathing suit, but they don’t want to wear one like mom’s either.
Twenty years ago I was shocked at a demure highschooler who offhandedly referred to shopping at Victoria’s Secret, as its reputation just a few years earlier was ads from the less-savory girlie magazines. Now girls wear University of Pink clothing to church, and shop at VS with their moms. Both ends of the fashion and behavior scale move toward display.
The tarting up of girls, teens, tweens, and tots is absolutely fascinating. In my day one really did not want to be considered a slut. Even if you had completely absent, neglectful crappy parents, who were never home and let you run wild, you still didn’t want anyone to know you were sleeping with your boyfriend. But now some weird kind of “feminism” seems to advocate that girls have a right to look really trampy and to be really trampy and to not be considered trampy. They are ’empowered’ by their sexuality. And “slut” is a sexist term. Okay next generation of Gloria Steinems, whatever you say. It seems even better for the boys though. You don’t even get a piece of pizza for putting out these days. It starts young too. A few years ago I lived in a ritzy suburb and they had a Halloween parade for the town children down mainstreet, and the sexualization of the costumes for five year old females was everywhere. Lots of five year old belly dancers in really racy outfits. yuck!
and it fun too!!!
you can cause a huge amount of trouble and not get in much trouble yourself…
liberation instead of liberty
anyone notice that the despots and control freaks ALWAYS ride in on a banner of liberation? after all, the idiots wouldnt follow someone with a banner that says despotism… in EVERY case, its the same, they never get what they are promised, and their actions later create the justification for the despotism.
can we really start discussing the real history and flow of all this? its getting really tiring to think that kids and such are coming up with ideas like this all on their own, when there is a left liberal industry devoted to sexualizeing and making heroes of such people.
to keep saying that they are not doing this, they are not in control, they are not representing so they are nto meaningful, is a big can of BS!!!
because for the past 40 plus years, these failures have beaten every other sensible course to nothign.
Male Prostitute Compares Himself to Rosa Parks
“It’s just the same as when Rosa Parks decided to sit at the front (of the bus) instead of the back,” he told Details. “She was proclaiming her rights as a disadvantaged, African-American older woman. And I’m doing the same…”
that each BRICK IN THE WALL WAS PLACED…
that over decades each part has been moved into place. dewey copying soviet school system and using the national guard to move kids into it against parents wishes. (dewey was later found to be running somer fronts, like christine quinn).
meade and kinsey settign a false (like AGW) basis in medicine and law to legitimize things… (and we are nto removing their influence now we know they are cranks)
each stage, the people were uplifted and funded… you can see it you can read it, but if you sit still you sure as heck not going to be spoon fed it.
i asked people to read about sexualizing of the population and bela kuhn government.
go back and read the papers from these nasty regimes… and you will know WHY we are copying them or they copied us first, so we changed our ways.
the whole idea of sexualizing kids is to destroy the family. its a process, and SOCIAL ENGINEERING is the means.
changing the circumstances of peoples lives against their wills and knowlege by using the traditional foundatinos and economic levers in a illegal way to impose a result of new age man on them.
new age man is the one that would accept his slavery gladly… i can show you if you go back and read the papers and things of the people that started all this kind of thought.
back then they were less circumspect..
but, unlike our imaginary musings as to WHY they murdered so many, why they choose such bad things to do, why they do what they do…
they explain it…
so its VERY frustrating to sit here and day after day see that imaginary musings with no basis in history, or anything other than it sounds good or reasonable in the absence of anything else, is really frustrating.
all this goes back to roussaeu as ideas.
but as tools to implement social control and to destroy other pockets of opposing power, you ahve to go to lenin, koloniki, and so forth.
The intentional destruction of the Russian family, just like the systematic destruction of Russian ethnicity, is intended to make impossible any defense against Bolshevism’s bloody dictatorship. this fact was stated with brutal openness at the Komintern Congress in 1924:
“The revolution is powerless so long as the concepts of family and family ties remain.”
The corruption of the meaning of marriage into a matter of mere sexual drives serves the same goal. The oft proclaimed right to abortion supposedly frees the woman “from the chains of bourgeois morality.” This freedom results in the destruction of the family and leads to an unlimited exploitation of women’s labor in the service of world revolution.
GroéŸe antibolschewistische Ausstellung 1937
thats what they wrote when we didnt read them.
the american progressives all read this, and they said… hmmm… there is a tool.
then they came up with ways that the women woudl impliment the tool! (among other groups and fronts and things)
many of them confessed. you can read them.
i have noted them for you
but instead you want to stay on the message that the progressives have handed you.
the wolf in sheeps clothing (fabians) are telling the sheep what to do… but who does it benifit, the sheep or the wolves?
women were targeted, because they are more gullible. and if you convince them that they are not, then they will not even defend against it!!!
it dont matter what your opinion is, or the label, or the story. those are all conviencies of an intelligence for handling information! they dont exist except for the context of our minds and believes.
i explained that they are copying wiemar. i gave names. dates. histories. i gave links between them and the people who are now in state. defectors, and so on.
and nothing will influence anything other than if it matches what was provided at an earlier time.
The destruction of the family has had its worst effects on the youth, the living future of every people. Hordes of starving children fill Russia’s country roads, becoming homeless tramps and criminals without a conscience. Bolshevism knew of no other way to deal with this youth misery than through a truly barbaric measure, the death penalty for children.
the Nazi’s wanted to populate the world while depopulating it of others on behalf of their people.
the russians wanted to depopulate the world and keep it for just the small group of leaders, who would then repopulate it.
both were interpreting marx’s
“revolutionary holocaust”
[where have i heard that word before?]
so when you read the stuff of them criticizing each other… you can learn the truth as to what they allow and apply to themselves and such.
the socialists in germany wanted the goals of international socialism. to wipe away evryone but them and the new socialist man who would love his slavery
[aldous huxley retuned that to the kind of society where we live now, where sex and candy, and drugs adn such are the temptation of pleasure to get everyone on board to their own demise]
and sexualizing the population has a definite purpose in this. the german people didnt want that, as they didnt hate themselves enough to want to extermiante themselves (unlike americans and westeners today).
and so, while they could sign on to socialisms goals, they signed on for the goal for all their people, not just their leaders.
guess who won?
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
Ours is a Godless, child-centered society, where some parents choose to delegate responsibility for training their children to TV and peers, and most of the rest train their children (usually unintentionally) to be as lewd and crude as themselves. In such a society, cell phones for kids makes perfect sense, and “sexting” is inevitable. It’s like handing a kitchen knife to a baby.
For those few parents who take their responsibility to their children seriously, it is inconceivable to supply their children with cellphones before a suitable moral code has been instilled, fortified, and tested.
I’m not yet sure when my children will be ready. Perhaps by 16; perhaps not.
My wife taught high school before our kids came along. I helped chaperone a few events then. She was a part-time adjunct while the kids were growing up and went fulltime high school when they graduated. Which is to say that about twenty years passed between the last dance I’d chaperoned and the next.
I was horrified. Part of the dance floor looked like fifth-grade recess–it would–and the other half looked like something MTV would think too far.
The principal looked at me, my mouth hanging open, and laughed. He’d experienced this incrementally. He may have been disappointed, but he wasn’t shocked.
Happy hunting ground for the guys.
Thing is, however mature the girls think they are, they are putting out to keep some seventeen-year-old kid calling them.
So the big question is why they need somebody, even a seventeen-year-old kid, so badly.
WTF????
lookup hookup culture….basically the women have been turned into a free harem for the elite… prior to the west, the elite could have a harem.. if they could earn enough to support it… but then came western.. that said, no. that the elite had to be like commoners and should have only one.
then came the cultural revoltuion.. a copy from soviets. and now, the wealthy can have all the sex they want in a culture in which the women are harem girls. and wahts clever is that these are liberated harem girls!! that means that they are the collevtive harem that supports itself and makes no drain.. that way their best ladies whom they have kids with cant tell.
here… read…the hookup culture: having casual relationships is the new dating.
media.www.gwhatchet.com/media/storage/paper332/news/2005/10/03/CampusNews/The-Hookup.Culture.Having.Casual.Relationships.Is.The.New.Dating-1006650.shtml
by the way, the women hate it. its not really the kind of thing that most women would want. but women today have to be what the rads who control the schools and have forced required studies on them tell them to be. not what they want to be (for as bouvier said, then they would want to be somethnig that the elite women dont want. and thas heterosexual moms… )
15 percent of all American women who are infertile can attribute it to tubal damage from an STD—so it dovtails with other eugenic/euthanasia/pop control games.
1 in 5 Americans between the ages of 15 and 55 are currently infected with one or more STDs
12 million Americans are newly infected each year. That’s nearly 5% of the entire population of the U.S. Of these new infections, 63% are in people less than 25 years old.
from a tactical point if your an external force which wants a downfall of a superior other. all this is great news. as is lead in toys, as in other things.
to 1960, there were only two significant sexually transmitted diseases: syphilis and gonorrhea. Both were easily treatable with antibiotics. In the sixties and seventies this relatively stable situation began to change.
you think?
so lets see. the ideology has a lot of experience with playing games with peoples lives with impunity. herbert marcuse gets us to “if it feels good do it”. kinsey puts out his crap illegal work.. mead is celebrated…but how many kow tha boas their mentor was a spy? then naomi goldstein a hack with a wall street husband wrote her book using mead, and kinsey and the argyumetns fromt he soviet revolution which most americans are completely ignorant of. she also used a different name, that way they couldnt tie her work back to her cpusa stuff under naomi. her name? oh betty freidan… (she was wealthy, kids had a nany, the gulag was boring).
c’mon guys…even wiki knows more abotu the free love that started all this than our imaginations keep making up!!!
Free love en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_love
or have we forgotten platos retreat, the trapeze club (been there, interesting place), and others?
The history of free love is entwined with the history of feminism. From the late 18th century, leading feminists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, have challenged the institution of marriage, and many have advocated its abolition.
Sex, to proponents of free love, was not only about reproduction. Access to birth control was considered a means to women’s independence, and leading birth-control activists like Margaret Sanger also embraced free love.
for some reason they give that story, but they dont give the truth. same woman said this (and hitler even wrote her people for advice before implementing HIS population program)
“The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.” — Margaret Sanger, letter to Clarence Gamble, Dec. 10,1939. – Sanger manuscripts, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. (Dec. 10 is the correct date of the letter. There is a different date circulated, e.g. Oct. 19, 1939; but Dec. 10 is the correct date of Ms Sanger’s letter to Mr. Gamble.)
the negro project became planned parenthood. when we do it, its ok, we can find an excuse…when they do it its a horror. does one need any more explanation why horrors happen?
A number of utopian social movements throughout history have shared a vision of free love. The all-male Essenes, who lived in the Middle East from the 1st century BC to the 1st century AD apparently shunned sex, marriage, and slavery.[18] They also renounced wealth, lived communally, and were pacifist[19] vegetarians.
anyone want to give the name of the most famous essene? anyway.. the point was to remold this, which is what the west followed thanks to that one man. into the more usful (to the elite) version of the soviet style. you see… yuo will read the history on that wiki page, and you will think that its from all that. but if you read carefully, you will realize that these other strains were not given song, and one strain came from another place.. that is, if you know the animal, you can identify the different species.
Victorian feminist Victoria Woodhull (1838—1927), the first woman to run for presidency in the U.S. in 1872, was also called “the high priestess of free love”. In 1871, Woodhull wrote:
“Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere. And I have the further right to demand a free and unrestricted exercise of that right, and it is your duty not only to accord it, but, as a community, to see that I am protected in it. I trust that I am fully understood, for I mean just that, and nothing less!” And the Truth Shall Make You Free (November 20, 1871)
The women’s movement, free love and Spiritualism were three strongly linked movements at the time, and Woodhull was also a spiritualist leader. Like Noyes, she also supported eugenics.
Fellow social reformer and educator Mary Gove Nichols was happily married (to her second husband), and together they published a newspaper and wrote medical books and articles,[28][29][30] a novel, and a treatise on marriage, in which they argued the case for free love.
Both Woodhull and Nichols eventually repudiated free love.
like friedan, and langston huges, bella dodd, and others, we dont remember their later repudiations….usually they realized they were dups, and that they coudlnt go back and remove the great work they did on behalf of such
[edited for length by neo-neocon]
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/epid-std.html
The Epidemic of
Sexually Transmitted Diseases
Dr. Ray Bohlin
The medical reasons for teens’ high susceptibility to STDs specifically relates to females. The cervix of a teenage girl has a lining which produces mucus that is a great growth medium for viruses and bacteria. As a girl reaches her 20s or has a baby, this lining is replaced with a tougher, more resistant lining. Also during the first two years of menstruation, 50% of the periods occur with-out ovulation. This will produce a more liquid mucus which also grows bacteria and viruses very well. A 15-year-old girl has a 1-in-8 chance of developing pelvic inflammatory disease simply by having sex, whereas a 24-year-old woman has only a 1- in-80 chance in that situation.
but abstinence is not allowed to be taught.
it might brgin back christianity and morality
As Charles Sykes succinctly put it, in his advice to teenagers: “Dressing like a slut does not empower you”.
I heartily recommend the book. (Interestingly, my then-nine-year-old loved it, and kept asking to be read to from it. I was happy to oblige, although some lessons seemed better saved for later.)
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
Sexting is also bad for teenage boys as it forces them to be on eggshells.
Good material Artfldgr.
While I don’t agree that it takes a village to raise a child, it’s nice to have a larger church family while trying to raise daughters with morals. While our pastor was catechizing our eldest, he told the class when they were tempted to have sex outside of marriage or take drugs, to picture his face, lol.
Also, my daughter just told me that sexting was stupid, because then “they publish your picture everywhere, and you’re the next big thing on Flickr.”
I remember in ancient times when I was in high school (1987), my boyfriend used to work in a photo place at the mall. He once showed me the “special book” they kept in the back with their own copies of the raciest young ladies’ photos they had processed!
So even in those days, you NEVER KNEW what might have happened to those indiscreet snaps!
The girls sending racy digitized images of themselves are incredibly foolish. It’s just sad.
When liberal democrats slam Scott Brown’s wife for appearing in a ‘movie’ in a bathing suit that means these young girls have ruined any future they may have planned. Someone, sometime will use the photo’s against the girls.
Wouldn’t a lot of this problem be solved by giving teenagers phones that DON’T have photo taking capability? Maybe I’m hopelessly outdated, but I’ve yet to “upgrade” to a phone with a camera – and I can communicate with the people in my life just fine. A camera on a phone is simply not a necessity – the crap that they keep cramming onto these devices is another issue entirely…
ALP, as someone who was just in the market, cell phones without cameras aren’t easy to find.
Here’s an excerpt from a very insightful column about the campus hookup culture recently written by a freshman at Providence College:
“…Upon arriving on campus, however, mixing and mingling with upperclassmen, you soon came to realize that relationships and dating, as they once were (the old-fashioned notion), have been replaced with drinking and hookups. We apparently have no time for relationships, so why bother? Instead, we get the message we should go for the no-strings-attached, fast and easy, fun approach. But is the experience really fun and worth it?
Studies show that objectifying your partner plays a definite role in this process and if you ask most girls, it’s all about the guy. Many feminists have tried to sell the hookup culture on the grounds that it’s empowering to women: “I’ll screw him before he gets the chance to screw me.” The underlying theme here seems to me to be fear — fear of rejection, fear of commitment, fear that he won’t really like me. Fear is what has been driving girls to the hookup scene for a while now.
Yet, here is my question: How is this empowerment? Don’t you see he’s getting what he wants either way? Even if you think you are more self confident because you took the first step, got what you wanted, and got out, that doesn’t change the fact that you are making it faster and easier for him to get what he wants and leave. Since when did being comfortable with your sexuality equate to hooking up, having sex, and everything in between?
By giving into this culture that pushes instant gratification at all costs and downplays feelings and emotions, you are not rebelling, standing out, empowering yourself, or making a difference. Instead, you’re doing the complete opposite: you are pushing yourself into a corner, reprogramming yourself to repel love (yes, love, that nearly foreign word that seems to have joined the dinosaurs in the land of extinction), attempting to hardwire your emotions to an on and off switch. In the future, when you are ready to experience a real relationship, it will be a lot harder to turn on….”
Read the whole thing here:
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/view/dating_to_be_different/
For an excellent book covering what CV talks about, read The Thrill of the Chaste by Dawn Eden. Eden was an agnostic Jew who lived a promiscuous lifestyle until she converted to Christianity in her early thirties. Until very recently, she also had her own blog.
“Yet, here is my question: How is this empowerment? Don’t you see he’s getting what he wants either way?”
It can be hard to figure out who is being exploited in many cases. Many of these women are selling that time and their body for higher priced items they want and the men want their bodies. They are both getting what the “want” yet are usually highly highly unhappy and can’t figure out why.
Even worse I know of some of them that got married based on that idea (it was just coming into vogue when I graduated college) and, of course, you can guess how well those turned out.
I can tell you that one of the quickest ways to have me dislike you is to obviously not show interest, have someone ask me what I do for a living, and suddenly be all over me when I say “Software Engineer”. Being on of those – including the strange mental quirks otherwise known as geekdom (I’m one that is generally referred to as an “Alpha Geek”) – sees that occur fairly often.
@ALP: The camera isn’t the problem. Even without a camera, “dirty talk” (dirty texting?) goes on all the time between those who are so motivated. All other things being equal, removing the camera is like building a fence around your woodstove to keep your kids safe. It doesn’t teach them the danger involved; it teaches them to find a different stove.
The problem is that children’s morality is most often taught by TV/Internet and peers. Those parents who do actually attempt teaching morals are usually unable to instill them effectively because of their own shaky morals.
There is an extremely effective solution, of course, but it requires morally rock-solid parents and a significant investment of time over many years. The former is in short supply, as is motivation for the latter. More’s the pity.
This is just a sign that the times are getting worse and that technology does not just have benefits but also disadvantages. Another is that, most of these teenagers are not at all guided in the right path. Aside from lack of parental love and guidance, the media has greatly influenced their way of thinking that it’s ok to flaunt what they have even if it’s through wrong means.
The youth of this country are slowly being turned into Eloi
I have two very daughters and a son. All well into there twenties now. There were not allowed cell phones, although I did have a single “kids’ line” in the house for them.
Hopefully, I will never know any of the things my kids may have done that would curl my hair or wound me to the marrow. But I would like to think their dad helped them navigate the crap world they currently inhabit.
Hi Neo,
I may be crazy. Find me a psychologist! But I think that these trends are driven by the schools themselves. Here is my general theory of education and conservatives:
Since you are a psychologist, you are somewhat rare in the conservative movement. Not very many psychologists are conservative. And, possibly more importantly, not very many conservatives are psychologists. As a result, conservatives generally understand psychology a lot less than they should.
Its especially the case in the sphere of education where our psyches are formed from a young age. Simply put, schooling destroys fundamental psychological qualities of every kid who spends time in them. Especially those who spend time in them from age 5 – 10. The perverse behavior of come classes of society are nothing more than the side effects of such destruction.
How does school do this? Three ways actually.
1) Remove all psychological safety from a young age.
2) Control kids with distant authority.
3) Teach kids values with no reason for those values to exist.
These methods overlap, and each could fill a large essay, but briefly.
1) Adults enjoy a concept called “Freedom of Association”. This includes the ability to disassociate with those who are abusive. Kids are given no such ability. Trapped in the unprotected cage, they react in two ways. They build a wall of indifference about themselves – popularly called Nihilism or Cool. They develop a self protection group of friends. Those friends are then their protectors. Expecting them to reject peer pressure from that group of friends is pretty much insane.
2) Teachers have very little authority. Principles have slightly more, but not much. The kids then live in a world of enforcers who enforce rules, but have no ability to affect the rules. It feels very much like a machine to the kids. Machines aren’t capable of love, which means that no-one cares about the kids but their friends.
3) Of course, God is gone from the schools. But the schools try to replace the Nihilism or cool with some other belief system. Its no use, as no preaching is as strong as the lessons taught by methods 1 and 2. It does probably increase cynicism though.
According to the critics of 20 years ago, Home Schooling does not teach “socialization”. Of course, psychologists can’t measure “socialization”. There is no such thing. Instead they can measure “curiosity”, “self knowledge”, “empathy” and even “happiness”. When they do this, they generally find that home school kids score much higher on those quantities than the public school kids. Its not a surprise, as home school parents accidentally found out when they didn’t destroy their kid’s psychological health as described above. They just thought they were teaching their kids to read and write.
Someone recently said on a blog somewhere that America has the worst 20 year olds in the world, and the best 30 year olds. That’s probably an exaggeration, but if partly true, I think the above explanation is a big part of it. 20 year olds don’t understand themselves. They spent their previous 15 years being cool. They spend their 20’s figuring out themselves in a free society, and emerge ready for life at 30. Its kind of a waste I think.
James
I don’t have children, and if I did I would seriously entertain the homeschool notion, but not without a few concerns. I worked at a college and a student there was homeschooled, and she was quite bright, and quite advanced academically. She was however far too involved with her mother, and unfortunately did not have the maturity to deal with life away from Mom, who had hovered over this poor girl every second of her life non-stop for eighteen years. The girl ended up flunking out of college her freshman year. She didn’t have the emotional/psychological wherewithal to deal with life without mom. It was a shame. Now, perhaps these were just maladjusted folks, and not indicative of anything more. Yet, I’ve also seen it before with the homeschoolers. The Moms have completely dropped out of society at large and put all of their energies into their kids (I’ve seen this with the daughters). The daughter can’t get away from her Mom, because the daughter has become Mom’s identity. This has gone a bit off topic I realize.
Julia.
Controlling, dominating parents can bypass public schooling’s escape hours.
I know a woman who was constantly at her kids’ schools demanding exceptions from one or another reasonable practice.
In some cases, her demands would have made something impossible.
No, her kids weren’t going to carry around a school calculator because somebody might steal it. Then where woult they be? No, if the school can’t guarantee a calculator would be safe, she wasn’t going to pay for one.
Etc.
And she was a helicopter parent when her kids went to college.
Her daughter married with perhaps more speed than prudence, more than likely to get away.
Julia,
This all proves that it is very easy to be misunderstood when writing.
My comment wasn’t really a recommendation for home schooling, though that is part of the solution.
Rather, my point was that school as currently constructed is damaging to kids, who then grow to damage themselves. Lots of private school options certainly have the ability to reduce or eliminate the problems as I describe them. My own kids are montessori educated through the 5th grade which seems to have eliminated the cool culture in their lives.
Its generally my opinion that this topic can only be solved through the market place. That is, a free market in schooling, probably helped along by vouchers for the bottom 20-30% of kids in America. I think I can identify the destructive nature of the current system. But only the market place can find the solution that will work for the general population.
James
James,
I never thought your comment was a recommendation for home schooling. Sorry if I seemed to give that impression (yes, apparently it is easy to be misunderstood when writing, as I so demonstrate.) I was just chiming in my two cents worth on the state of education these days, and how popular sleazy porno culture seems to have a huge influence on the behavior of children. It is certainly a harrowing scene. Especially for the poor folks who live in NYC. I have been thinking along these lines for awhile because a. my friends are all having to deal with the school system, and b. a few people I know are teachers, so I hear a bit of their frustrations. Regardless thank you for your comments and posts, they were most interesting. I have no idea what the solution is and parents have my sympathies.
James, great post (your first one). For a variety of reasons I have long agreed with your thesis (school is spiritually and socially damaging, and a waste of time), but you’ve mentioned two I haven’t seen articulated quite so well before (#1 and #2). Good food for thought, thanks!
Julia, if you ever find anyone claiming homeschooling is a panacea, please let me know so I can berate them. In my experience, arguments such as yours are typically used defensively by the uninformed, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
In the real world, most homeschooling parents understand that homeschooling is a tool, nothing more, and just like any tool, the outcome is completely dependent on the skill and determination of the one wielding it. In the right hands, a scalpel saves lives; in the wrong hands it can easily kill. From an objective standpoint, however, homeschooling has a tremendous potential, which no outside-the-home solution can ever approach.
I don’t find “sexting” all that surprising. Throughout most of human existence, and in much of the world today, marriageable age for girls has been 14 – 16. Teenage sexuality is normal, our desire to suppress it is the abnormal behavior. Our bodies are built to become sexually active at puberty, start having children shortly thereafter, and die at 40. Western civilization is what imposes strain on the natural order.
So what are these girls doing? Simply classic biological “display.” (Why human beings are one of the few species in which the female displays more than the male I have no idea, but I’m sure somebody out there does.) There are fewer males available who are willing to make a commitment to females, so the girls naturally respond by more display of sexual attractiveness to compete for the fewer available males.
Look at pictures taken of the old West. With so many more available men than woman, there was no need for female display — even prostitutes wore high-neck blouses and ankle-length skirts!
Technology facilitates, but the underlying behavior is to be expected as a response to a disparity in the marriageable male-female ratio.
Mitch there is considerable biological truth behind your statements, but remember that our biology equipped us for 150,000 years (or more) of hunter-gathering. It is not just Western society that is “artificial” in that sense, but all civilization over the last 7,000 years that could be called a recent development. Do you wish to consider all of this a problem?
Also, not all other societies across time and space have early marriage. That pattern is dominant, but not exclusive. Beware those who try to sell you anything like the idea that early sex is natural and we are among the few prudish societies who play with fire by bucking that trend. They are often rationalising rather than informing (see Mead, Margaret).
They certainly aren’t researching.
> This seems far too Draconian
I think it’s over the top on the surface, but that depends on how they really treat it and how they let it plead out, as much as anything.
What’s really asinine is if it goes too far, and the five end up on sex offender registries for the rest of their lives. In one sense, it’s so preposterous a thought that it’s LOL, but it’s an actual possibility.
I have no problem with using the law to scare the ever-lovin’ sh** out of these idiot kids who misuse the camera features of their phones. Consider — this can also cover illicitly taken pics of unwilling individuals which can be used to embarrass classmates mercilessly, mind you — this is already considered a problem.
I don’t think that this sort of thing has any business screwing them all up by putting them into a sex offender registry, but it’s not good that the kids don’t have the sense to use their available tools properly.
I think the schools need to have meetings that make it clear that any such blatant misuse of phones WILL result in prosecution and expulsion, with pretty near to zero-tolerance.
P.S. — what is wrong with society:
Vampires are heroes (Twilight, The Vampire Diaries)
Angels are villains (Legion)
Don’t need much more than that to see the explicitly corrupt notions being sold to society.
It’s all a part of moral relativism, of course — “there is no such thing as true evil”.
Obloodyhell,
yup…
i recently saw one horror movie where a defrocked priest (if he ever was one), explained that evangiliste means evil angel…
heaven is hell..
and then hell must be heaven
and if they cant make heaven
then they will make a hell and call it heaven
if you have read history and lots of literature, you can see and hear the clues that other well read people are giving you. as in old times, people hide things in their work.
if one wasnt a thoreau fan, one would miss in pink floyds songs the reference “hanging on in quiet desperation is the english way”, and even madonna has such things in it.
however the blessed and cursed band has been telling us for years, if only we could listen.
they understood, and understood even better after meeting the kinds of people that top the points of their industry.
think about the process you and others just pointed out, and think about how its point is to get us to enter a cage to live in.
then read these lyrics.
So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We’re just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground.
What have we found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
its about the inversion of culture as a means of destroying it, and how we cling to each other as things are done to us, for all we are, we are all that is left familiar to us, while the outside changes at a fearful pace.
when you invert cultuyre and morals what are you doing?
you are doing what bose headphones do to sound. you are CANCELING It out by promoting its negation.
Its what you asked for
but it isnt what you wanted
or were promised.
on another note, i have some magic beans here some may be interested in.
Forty Years of Feminism Now Bearing Fruit
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/01/forty_years_of_feminism_now_be.html
A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America’s moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, “If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they’ll tell you it’s not a big deal. In fact, they don’t consider it sex. They don’t consider a lot of things sex.” In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.
One girl sums up the new attitudes: “Five minutes and I got $100. If I’m going to sleep with them anyway because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”
Azam said that this was going on in good homes right under parents’ noses: “The prettiest girls from the most successful families [are the most at risk]. We’re not talking about marginalized girls. [Parents] don’t want to know because they really don’t know what to do. I mean, you might be prepared to learn that, at age 12, your daughter has had sex, but what are you supposed to do when your daughter has traded her virginity for $1,000 or a new bag?”
This is the bitter fruit of forty years of feminist domination in the United States.
Artfldgr: I’d say it’s the bitter fruit of a combination of sexual “liberation,” materialism, consumerism, secularism, feminism, and abdication of parental responsibility.
I know feminism is definitely in there, but it’s hardly the main thing. I know it’s in there because I well remember a long conversation I once had with a young graduate of a feminist studies program. The subject was prostitution and pornography, and she argued that participation in both by a young woman could often be a liberating, self-actualizing, feminist statement.
AVI:
I agree completely. I wasn’t intending to indict Western civilization only, just trying to point out that we shouldn’t be surprised when teenagers act as their bodies are hard-wired to act. If we don’t want them to, we will have to put a lot more societal effort into superceding that programming.
magnificent issues altogether, you simply gained a new reader. What may you suggest in regards to your put up that you made a few days in the past? Any positive?