Nowhere is this contradiction more apparent than in our attitudes about child pornography. While Calvin Klein ads and slasher films frankly depicting nubile sexuality proliferate with impunity, a real teenage girl, Marissa Miller from Tunkhannock Area High School in Pennsylvania, was recently threatened with child pornography charges for a photo taken of her wearing a bra at a slumber party 2 years ago, a photo apparently discovered on the cellphones of teenage boys in her school. That’s right. The photo was 2 years old. It showed her at 13 wearing a bra. And someone else texted it around without her knowledge. But now Marissa Miller is being threatened by the Wyoming County, PA district attorney with charges that could land her both jail time and the special privilege of being a registered sex offender for the rest of her life.
As a society, we’ve gone off the deep end when it comes to pornography, and child pornography in particular. Look, child pornography has always been illegal for one simple reason—adults were presumed to be hurting real children in its production. But as sex has been increasingly politicized (need I mention the debates over abstinence education and gay marriage, or the brouhaha over Elliot Spitzer’s use of escorts or Congressman Mark Foley’s flirtatious text messaging?), it seems that sexual thoughts are as dangerous as actions. Congress recently outlawed the possession of sexualized images of children that are completely computer generated. While no child was hurt in their production, the titillation they create was, therefore, effectively criminalized.
The Wyoming County DA thought that the picture of Marissa Miller was lewd and wanted to teach her a lesson. The issues, however, go way beyond this type of boneheaded prosecutorial misconduct. The recent upsurge in what is called “sexting”—the transmission of sexual images via cell phone—is rife with issues never before faced by teenagers and parents alike and has to be addressed in ways that don’t make kids paranoid, drive their sexuality even more underground, and further accentuate the technological divide between the generations. Harsh and negative prohibitions make real conversations impossible. The legitimate problem potentially associated with sexting has to do, not with sex, but with privacy and autonomy. As they increasingly individuate and claim their independence, teenagers often do not understand the potential dangers of revealing personal matters in cyberspace, whether it be via their cellphones or facebook pages. There’s a saying that “information wants to be free,” meaning that what goes out onto the Internet or SMS networks remains there forever and is not any more under anyone’s individual control. And yet control is exactly what adolescents are striving for. It is crucial that parents and schools help their children understand this. The involuntary disclosure of personal images or writings on the Internet is uncomfortable for anyone, but especially harmful to children and adolescents.
