Sexting
Every art form has a sub-culture of pornography. Ancient sculptures and paintings, early photographs, early video, etc. all show how sexual acts appear rapidly in culture. It seems like every new technology is a new way to depict and distribute naked people. People have been sending naked pictures over the Internet for years now! What held a lot of this back? Well, before digital cameras, you had to get somebody to develop those naked pictures. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want some store clerk making extra copies for himself. Now that problem is solved. But, with a camera, you still had to load it onto a computer. Teenagers don’t want their parents finding these things. Again, problem solved! Every teenager has a cell phone and every cell phone has a camera and the ability to text message and send pictures.
That whole long introduction (which just happened to be me thought process on the subject, albeit completely unnecessary to read) leads to this point. If these oversexed students all have the ability to take naked pics and send them around, who’s going to stop them? Nobody. These stories surface in the news every once in a while because somebody gets caught and people get in trouble. Serious trouble. But those are isolated incidents, right? If you believe that this doesn’t happen all the time you are being naive. Ask any teenager how many naked pictures they have on their phone at the moment. If they trust you won’t get them in trouble, they’ll probably say “a few.” Who are these girls ( I say girls because mostly it’s girls)? Girls from neighboring schools, girls from the same school, friends (no joke) and just random people. How do all these people get these pictures? A better question is this: Would you trust a high school boy to not show a naked picture (especially of somebody they know) to everybody? I wouldn’t. As soon as one student gets a picture, the entire school has it.
In the most recent case, it seems that the boys who had the pictures on the phone are in trouble for having child pornography. One of the mothers is trying to get the charges dropped because her kid did nothing wrong. I have to agree. It seems to me like the police are using these specific students to set an example and scare others. If the are going to press charges, they might as well arrest the whole student body.
As I’m writing this, I’m trying to think of my main point. What am I trying to say? I think it’s that people should know this practice is now common. It sort of reminds me of Napster. Everybody and their mother was downloading free music until they started prosecuting random people and finally shut the site down. Raise your hand if you’ve ever downloaded music for free (illegally) and didn’t get arrested and/or fined for it. Same thing applies here, but who thinks anybody is going to force cell phone companies to stop putting cameras in their phones? I certainly don’t.
