Sexting

I'm sure that when Alexander Graham-Bell invented the telephone he could never have imagined that one day, they would be totally wireless, much less that one day young people would use them to transmit nude photos of themselves to others. Thank goodness good ol' fashioned American ingenuity and know-how came together to make that dream a reality. Ever since technology had remarkably steep improvements in the latter half of the 20th century, there seems to have been an equally steep rise of this epidemic to protect children from it. "Sexting" has done nothing to quell this problem; if anything it's only exacerbated it. Sexting is generally defined as texting messages that consist of dialogue of a sexual nature and also sending nude or partially nude photos via cell phone. Now let's be frank, most of us have done this in some form whether benign or extreme. Generally speaking I don't really see this as a big problem. Sex is appealing. It just is. Every living organism is born with two main instincts: survival and reproduction. People were designed to be sexually attracted to one another in order for the species to continue. Whether for reproduction or pleasure, it is what it is and we shouldn't fear it or shy away from it. More importantly, we shouldn't worry about kids discovering it. I don't know if it has to do with the puritanical blood of the first settlers still coursing through the veins of the collective consciousness of our society, but America has a huge fuck problem. Especially when it has to do with kids. To be clear, when I say "kids" I'm referring to teenagers, because teenagers are the ones doing most if not all of the sexting. A lot of people have a problem with this because they don't want their kids exposed (no pun intended) to this stuff. Personally I think that if a kid as young as 13 wants to send pictures of themselves to another 13 year old...whatever. I don't really care. Now you might say, "...but Nick, what about older people sending pictures to younger kids." Excellent point. To that, I simply say this: if there is a 19 year old guy with nude pictures of a 15 year old girl on his phone...big deal. I really don't think it's that big of an issue, especially when you consider the double standard there is towards girls. We tend to think of girls in general as being the more pure and innocent of the sexes, so naturally we think that an older boy with pictures of a younger girl is wrong. But consider the flip side to that. What if a 15 year old boy had pictures of a 19 year old girl on his phone? I guarantee you no one would care as much. People would probably just say, "Wow. You must be one charming little fucker. Lucky kid." His father would probably be secretly proud. Now, if there are teenagers sending pictures of themselves to people that are like 30, then they're just stupid. Lock up the 30 year old and punish the teenager for being an idiot. Basically as long as it's kept within a certain age range I don't think it's anything to worry about; certainly not something for the law to get involved in. If anything it's the parents' job to monitor their kids' activities anyway and they should deal with it. All in all, if you're going to upset about something don't let it be something as natural as human sexuality. Remember, it wasn't so long ago that it was normal for a 13 year old girl to marry a man in his mid twenties.