If you have not heard of “sexting” — a neologism I suspect does not originate with the young people who practice it, but mostly likely arises from media hype — I recommend highly three excellent articles from the Wide, Wide World of Web:

• Judith Levine’s “What’s The Matter With Teen Sexting?” at The American Prospect, where I first learned about this “trend.” She makes the point I illustrate in the final panel of this cartoon, that teens face greater risks from the adults in their lives than from each other.
• Dahlia Lithwick’s “Textual Misconduct: What to do about teens and their dumb naked photos of themselves” provides an insightful legal analysis of how the misuse of child porn laws by prosecutors does more harm than good. In fact, there is no “good.” It’s all harm.
• Tracy Clark-Flory’s “The new pornographers” covers similar ground to Lithwick, but also hits upon our culture’s “pathological fear” of juvenile sexuality.

Tags: law enforcement, sexting, technology, teens, youth culture

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 26th, 2009 at 12:00 am and is filed under In Contempt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.