"Sexting" Exposes Adultism

I started catching up with the teen “sexting” brouhaha today. One role of teenagers in a society is to shake up adult complacency and to test the limits of social behavior. This latest has certainly captured media attention. Nothing sells quite so well as teenagers and sex, does it? But you’ll never hear an adult commentator admitting that he wishes he were 16 again with a cell phone. Adults have a tendency to act as if young people live in a parallel universe that has nothing to do with them. We pretend to hold all the moral cards and pass judgment on the young from our ivory towers, even as we produce movies, TV shows and advertisements that expose our penchant for exploiting young, beautiful and sexy women.

Teens of all eras have been creative and innovative in tweaking adult sensibilities. In my high school and young adult years, free love was just getting started, pot was coming back from Viet Nam with young vets and making the rounds of ordinary kids, and music was starting to be more edgy than in previous generations. Heck, even Beatle haircuts were causing family feuds. The current “sexting” incidents are a spit in the eye to adults: you’ve created this technology, now we’re going to take it to the limit, push it in your face, see how far we can go.

I would feel a lot more comfortable about it if I knew that schools were providing comprehensive sexuality education to every teenager in the U.S., from 7th grade on and Sex Ed classes included lots and lots of discussion about relationships, identifying personal values and the sexual exploitation of girls in our culture. Since I know that our adultist society, by and large, feels compelled to withhold honest and thorough sexuality information from teenagers (we can't even talk openly about it ourselves), the idea of young high school girls sending nude photos of themselves to older teen boys is distressing because I don’t know if they understand the personal ramifications of their actions. For heaven sakes, they just need to know why sending a nude picture might come back to bite them later, and what adults who are into pornography might do with such a picture.

But, as usual, we are blaming the victims of our outdated ideas. I think it’s ridiculous to prosecute these young people as pornographers. If I were a prosecutor involved in one of these cases, I would indict the federal and local policies that prohibit comprehensive sexuality education about such an important and life-changing topic for human beings, a topic that adults need to become more comfortable in addressing.

How Adultism is Like Global Warming

I was listening to NPR today on the way to the bank. The program was about climate change and how there are many people who don’t want to admit that global warming is happening and that we humans are the cause. This reminded me of adultism. Adults just don’t want to admit that our behaviors and attitudes towards young people impact how they experience the world and how they behave as a result. And we’re always so surprised when a young person does something negative that is perfectly aligned with how they are treated in society. Mike Male’s book, The Scapegoat Generation: America’s War on Adolescents spells this out most clearly as I mentioned in an earlier blog. If a young person shoots someone it's because adults make the guns. If a young person is using pharmaceuticals, he or she probably found them in the medicine cabinet at home. If a young person gets pregnant or contracts an STD, it has a lot to do with adults refusing to allow them to have comprehensive sex education to learn how to take care of themselves. Young people don't create the problems, they just follow our lead. So, the next time you want to point a finger at a young person about their behavior, look first at your own.