'Sexting' the One You Love

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"Sexting (a portmanteau of sex and texting) is the act of sending sexually explicit messages or photos electronically, primarily between cell phones."

Wikipedia

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This is not an easy thing for me to say, but, in many ways, things really have changed — a lot — since I was a teenager.

Oh, sure, some things haven't changed. The good–looking guys and girls still get together, and the relatively few who know they are good–looking — and are self–confident on top of that — are, most likely, still the envy of the vast majority of their classmates.

And most teenagers, whether they are counted among the "beautiful people" or not, have access to a car in which they play their music at excessive volumes.

But most teenagers today, it seems, also have cell phones. In my day (and, boy, do I feel like my grandfather when I say those three words!), the only phone in the house was on the kitchen wall. There was no privacy. If you were going to talk to someone on the phone in my house, you had to go into our kitchen. If it was around dinner time, my mother was probably in there, putting the finishing touches on the evening meal. At any other time, you ran the risk of being overheard by someone who came in to get something from the refrigerator while you were speaking on the phone.

Some of the teenagers I knew had phones in their rooms. But they were comparatively rare. And most of them merely had extensions of the home phone line, so anyone could listen in on an extension that was somewhere else in the house. A few had a personal phone line, but not many.

I'm not sure when mobile phones were invented. They may have existed when I was a teenager. But no one I knew had one. And when I first started hearing about them, I tended to brush them off as high–tech walkie–talkies.

In recent years, though, I've come to realize the many practical uses for mobile phones.

During the massacre at Columbine High School (by the way, next Monday will be the 10th anniversary of that event), many trapped students called 911 or friends or relatives on their cell phones. So did people stuck in the upper floors of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Countless people, young and old, have summoned help with their cell phones. Countless more have used them to call for directions when they were lost — although that's a function that has become less relevant as more people get access to GPS through their cell phones.

Anyway, the point is that these phones have helped people in ways that simply weren't possible when I was a teenager.

But, as cell phones have become more prevalent, so has the potential for abuse.

"Sexting," for instance.

Rather than define that term here, I'll just direct your attention to the Wikipedia definition at the top of this post. If you click on the link to Wikipedia, you can read about the history of "sexting."

Then come back and we'll continue.

(Pausing while reader familiarizes himself/herself with "sexting.")

Now that we all know what I'm talking about when I use the word "sexting," I'll proceed.

Going back to that old–school phrase here ... in my day, a phone was a phone. It wasn't a camera. It wasn't a computer (as an aside here, we did have cameras when I was a teenager, but personal computers were still in the future). It was a phone.

But today, a mobile phone is similar to a Swiss Army knife.

(Come to think of it, that may be an alien phrase to young ears, but a Swiss Army knife was a pocket knife that was much more than merely a knife. It had all kinds of gadgets in it — a screwdriver, a can opener, a bottle opener, scissors, a fork, a knife, a spoon. A Swiss Army knife was practically a compact tool kit. More elaborate ones probably came with lug wrenches and saws. Can anyone tell me if they still make Swiss Army knives?)

Mobile phones used to be just phones, but now they come equipped with cameras, computers, all kinds of stuff. You can check your e–mail on your cell phone these days.

And it seems that the smaller they become, the more there is in them. About 15 years ago, mobile phones were big, clunky gadgets, about the size of a brick, and some were nearly as heavy. Now they're about the size of a credit card — and almost as light.

Oh, and you can also use them for plain old conversations, too — but that is so 20th century.

So, too, I suppose, is the concept of "phone sex." I first started hearing about it in the '90s, I guess, although I would imagine the potential for that has been around since phones started to become fixtures in private homes.

Anyway, when the internet was still in its infancy, apparently, some people started exchanging phone numbers for that purpose by e–mail and in chat rooms, and there seemed to be something of a boom in popularity — for awhile.

And, for awhile there, "virtual sex" was a popular topic. From what I've heard, I gather that "virtual sex" referred to role playing in chat rooms.

But its appeal seems to have tapered off in recent years. I didn't understand that before. But now I think I know why.

"Sexting."

I hadn't heard much about it until lately. And now, to hear some people talk, it's the scourge of our times.

To me, it seems like the latest example of young people doing what young people do best — being curious about each other. And part of me is inclined to say, "Leave them alone! Let them enjoy being young." Our culture sometimes seems too prone to reducing things to their most basic and unappealing elements, and I am reminded of the words of Thelma Ritter in Hitchcock's "Rear Window" — "[Y]ou can't tell the difference between a petting party and a civil service exam."

But things have changed since Ritter's day.

As Susan Reimer points out in the Baltimore Sun, these nude images can take on lives of their own in cyberspace, regardless of initial intentions.

"[U]nlike love letters that can be tossed in the fireplace when the relationship is over," writes Reimer, "nothing in cyberspace ever really gets deleted."

Lately, it's been leading to some pretty extreme laws — jail time for distributing child pornography and registry as a sex offender? It's not good behavior, but, really, do we want to give kids criminal records for things like that?

The state of Vermont apparently has been rethinking its law, and that's good. More states need to use common sense when making these laws.

Clearly, it seems to me, parents and teenagers need to have more heart–to–heart conversations. But stay away from the fear tactics. Young people figured out that approach was a bunch of hooey when their parents tried to convince them they would become criminally insane if they smoked marijuana, which was blatantly false and forever tainted the fear factor, even when it was used legitimately.

If they lied to us about that, the thinking went, what else might they lie to us about?

Well, anything involving sex is way up there on the list.

And the risks of "sexting" are scary enough. No fictional embellishment is needed.

So let's keep things in a realistic realm. The technology has changed, but the human instincts are the same. The specifics are different than they were when I was a teenager, but, in general, not much has changed.

Do we really want to get the police and the courts involved?