Around the country, law enforcement officials and educators are struggling with how to confront minors who “sext,” an imprecise term that refers to sending sexual photos, videos or texts from one cellphone to another.
But adults face a hard truth. For teenagers, who have ready access to technology and are growing up in a culture that celebrates body flaunting, sexting is laughably easy, unremarkable and even compelling: the primary reason teenagers sext is to look cool and sexy to someone they find attractive.
Indeed, the photos can confer cachet.
“Having a naked picture of your significant other on your cellphone is an advertisement that you’re sexually active to a degree that gives you status,” said Rick Peters, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney for Thurston County, which includes Lacey. “It’s an electronic hickey.”
We may punish the young who commit such foolish and dangerous crimes, but we had better look at the parents without whom such adolescent irresponsibility would not have been possible. Start with the children of the sixties: One can follow the abandonment of all standards of self restraint decade by decade, each slacker and more narcissisitic, more exhibitionistic than the preceding decade. The trail is clear, and the behavior of the young fully predictable. Sexting may be morally repellent to those whom “morally” actually means something, but that number gets smaller and smaller. One need only go to a parade of homosexuals and lesbians to see why and where the connection has been made between the last two generations and the homosexual subculture. they share common interests, and the one they share most clearly is the destruction of all long held standards of behavior . Larry