Lalley: Risk Factors

MEDIA SENSATIONALISM, ADUTT PRURIENCE, AND THI SPECTER OF TEEN SEXUAttTY
Teens across the U.S. are ditching school to have oral-sex orgies, walns a guest
on Oprah. NBC's Dateline is leading an oniine vigilante hunt To Catch a Pred'ator.
The parents of r3-year-old Dakota Fanning are under fire for allowing her to play
the part of a rape victim in a new film. And just when we thought the decadeJong
JonBenet Ramsey media circus was finally over, confessor |ohn Mark Karr turned
out to be lying.
BY JACeUELINE
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LAttEY I tltusTRATI0N
FEMiNrsr RESpoNsE ro pop cuLruRE
BY LAURA HUGHES
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The American public is in a moral panic over youth
and sex, and there is indeed cause for alarm: One-third
of females get pregnant before age 20, our teen birthrate
(4 percent) is one of the highest of any developing nation,
one in four teens contracts an srt each year, and 27 per'
cent of women and r6 percent of men report having been
sexually abused as children, almost always by someone
they knew. But it's the splashier risks-online predation,
child porn, teen sex gangs-that lend themselves best to
news stories and entertainment that drip with salacious
details. As "new" phenomena-even if they're really just
fresh variations on old standbys-they command our
attention, while many of the seemingly perennial risks
facing American youth-such as pregnancy, srts, and
familial sexual abuse-get less play.
In a country where kids are often portrayed as either
innocents or out-of-control sex monsters and adults as
either rushing to overprotect them or prowling for the
next one to victimize, is it possible to find a middle
groundl Can we use the media to keep kids safe and
encourage their healthy sexual developmentl Or are we
stuck between the push and pull of panic and prurience,
a paradox best expressed by the satirical Onion headline,
"Your IGds: Are They Sexy Enoughi"
YOU'VE GOT MAIL_TRODI A PBEDATOR!
For anyone who hasn't seen NBC Dateline's series To
Catch q Predator, here's how it works: A man finds a
teen or child online-in reality, a decoy working for the
sting operation Perverted )ustice-and suggests meeting in person, with the tacit expectation of sex. When he
arrives at "her" home (it's almost always a her), out come
the cameras and Dateline correspondent Chris Hansen,
who explains that there is no "hotgrh4'" The man blubbers for a while about how he's never, ever done anything
like this before, and that he "iust wanted to hang out."
Hansen whips out explicit Iu transcripts that tell a different story, and cops appear and take the perpetrator
away in handcuffs.
\ryHEN "SAFE'' BECAME
..SAFER.,"
AND OTHER
GREAT MOMENTS IN
SEX AND PROT]CTION
The show's success has 1ed to a number of spin-offs:
On Milwaukee's NBC affiliate WTMJ, a reporter pays
surprise visits to the homes of registered sex offenders
who have sexual images of women on their MySpace
pages (over which the camera lingers). With one foot in
the doorway, the reporter tersely asks a middle-aged guy
why so many sex offenders are wiliing to take the risk.
The man stammers that he was "just looking for skiing
partners." Then we cut to an interview with a fresh-faced,
blond seventh-grader who-gasp-has a MySpace page.
She whispers: "You hear stories all the time about how
kids meet sexual predators online."
To Catch a Predator, Law Q Order: SVU, and other
shows that frequently deal with online predation may
raise awareness of the problem, but they do so in a disturbingiy prurient manner, which the Milwaukee spinoff helps to illustrate: With no allegations being made
that any of these men had or even sought contact with
kids, the repeated shots of their MySpace porn and
their paunchy middle'aged faces intercut with images
of angelic-looking children can't be there to support a
news story. Though these programs by no means condone predation, allowing images of kids in sexual peril
to serve as entertainment has the effect of helping us
disown the problem: Our enjoyment consists, in part, of
feeling innocent ourselves.
Which is not to say that online predators aren't a prob-
In
zoo1, 5 percent of kids ages ro to 17 reported
sexually solicited or approached by an adult
been
having
over the Internet. Four percent of kids had received an
"aggressive" approach in which someone requested reai
contact or sent snail mail, money, or gifts. While these
statistics don't begin to approach the number of children
who have been abused by a relative or accluaintance, the
problem-being newer and perhaps less compiicated
to identify and prosecute-is receiving increased atten-
lem.
tion from policy makers and through public-education
initiatives.
In addition to trying to catch and arrest predators, rem-
3000 BCE-1220 BCE: Ancient art depicts Egyptians
wearing early versions of condoms, probably made
from linen and animal skins. While the original pur-
Greeks discover the herb Siliphion in
northern Africa and use it for contraception and
pose of such devices remains unknown, the likely use
abortion. The plant is so popular-and difficult
to cultivate-that it is harvested to the point ol
was prevention of disease.
extinction by 100 CE.
COMPILXD BY ANNE JONAS AND II,IIR,IAII WOLF
1850 BC[: Many Egyptians make use
of pessaries, objects made of crocodile dung, honey, and sodium carbonate and inserted into the vagina to
block or kill sperm.
+aIbitch
600 BC[:
FEMrNrsr RESpoNSE ro pop cuLruRE
edies have included "fencing off" areas of the Internet
from kids. After four families announced they were
and the loosening of age-oiconsent laws," according to
suing MySpace for damages because their children were
solicited by adults on the site, executives appointed a
security chief who has introduced parental monitoring
software and barred children under 14 fuom having a
With online child porn getting so much public attention, policy makers and commentators have rallied to
crack down on consumers, sellers, and manufacturers.
This year, the U.S. is spending $58.4 million on the FBI's
Innocent Images Task Force, which investigates child
pornography, abduction, and prostitution. Despite this
MySpace page.
But fence-building has obvious limitations. Kids curi
ous about sex often seek to initiate contact with others as
a way of exploring and learning about it. And being technically savvier than many adults, kids can snip holes in
fences as quickly as they are built-it's as sifnple as enter-
ing a birthdate of or-or-r9o7 on their MySpace page.
The new parent-child technology gap overlaps with the
same old parent-child communication gap. A recent Ad
Council campaign led by the federally funded National
Center for Missing and Exploited Children tries to get
parents to bridge both gaps, warning, "What you don't
know will hurt your kids." NetSmartz, a set of educational tools developed by the Boys & Girls Clubs with
other partners, goes deeper by guiding kids and parents
through a critical analysis ofhow kids fal1 prey to predators. They also advise parents to keep computers out of
kids' rooms and in a common area, and to limit kids'
time on it. But regardless of how many precautions parents take, many kids want to learn and talk about sex, and
they're probably going to find ways to do it online.
BOBN TO PORN
Child pornography,like predation, has received a fresh
dose of media attention over the past decade, thanks
to the Internet. A zoo6 New York Tintes investigation
turned up newsgroups of adults who meet online and
share contraband-one group placed bets on how quickly
a member could convince a girl to undress in front of
her webcam. This relatively new milieu has made it possible for reporters to get an inside view ofthese groups,
which "view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent
movement seeking legalization of child pornography
300s CE: lndia's Kana Sufra
lt includes
that do not involve
is written.
many suggestions for sexual pleasure
intercourse-practices that are being taught today in
safer sex curricula in lndia in an attempt to support
sex workers whose clients refuse to wear condoms.
lE73:
the Times' Kurt Eichenwald.
unprecedented investment and the relative ease of tracking a perpetrator through IP addresses and credit-card
numbers, the task force convicted just 17 percent of those
it apprehended for child porn over a four-year period-a
lolal of 444 people. The |ustice Department under Bush
has been slammed for its ineffectiveness at prosecuting
child pornographers, even by the party faithful: "We are
questioning the judgment of the fustice Department of
the United States of America, which seems to think it
can thumb its nose at the Congress of the United States,"
said foe Barton (R-Texas) in a zoo6 House committee
meeting, The committee had just heard testimony from
a 19-year-old male who had been coerced into stripping
for a webcam as a teen and ended up becoming a prosti
tute. He had turned to the authorities for help, but seven
months later, they had done virtually nothing to prosecute anyone.
The poor track record of enforcing the recent spate
of antiporn laws leaves the cynical among us to wonder
whether they were even designed with enforcement in
mind, or whether their primary job was to build public
approval around their champions. At their worst, policy
makers seem to be using such policies to draw attention
away from their own nefarious activities: Former U.S.
Rep. Mark Foley (R-Fla.) played a lead role in the Child
Modeling Exploitation Prevention Act and other similar
legislation.
And, of course, Hollywood is always a reliable flamefanner when it comes to teens and sex. In January, after
a new film called Hounddog premiered at the Sundance
festival, conservatives promptly called for its ban-
U.S. Congress passes the
Comstock laws, making all forms of
contraception illegal. Many contraceptive products are then sold as feminine
hygiene products.
1914: The American Social
Hygiene Association is founded
to halt the syphilis epidemic
by
focusing sex education on fulfilling sex within maniage.
1E44: Charles Goodyear patents vulcanization of rubber.
Soon, rubber condoms are mass-produced. These early
1640: Approximate date of
creation for oldest condoms
ever discovered.
condoms were made to be washed and reused, and were
called by George Bernard Shaw "the greatest invention
of the nineteenth century."
191E: Condoms made legal in the U.S,
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THE "PROIIISCUOUS TEEN"
STORY GIVES
ning- Hound.dog-..rn which an Elvis-obsessed 9-year-old
(played by then-rz-year-old Dakota Fanning) is rapedwas deemed child pornography and Fanning and her
management castigated for promoting it. Though critics of diverse political persuasions did agree on one
thing-that Hounddog, as a work of fiim, pretty much
sucked-it was the kind of periodic art-vs.-porn controversy that does more to market a movie than to address
actual problems of safetY'
THE IYTEDIA A
HIGII-SCHOOt CONTIDENTIAL
Americans' prurience in part drives our mania for
media coverage of child predators and porn, the same
can be said of our fascination with teen promiscuity'
Like the online-predation narrative, the "promiscuous
teen" story gives the media a chance to gleefully flash
images of nearly naked young girls. A Febutary zooT
Newsweek article titied "Girls Gone Bad" decried the
influence of Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay
Lohan on young girls and, ofcourse, featured pictures of
the famously undies-free stars. Buried in page after page
of anecdotes meant to stoke parents' anxiety about the
Hiltonification of their daughters lies a brief mention of
the actual statistics: Teen pregnancy, drinking, and drug
use have dropped over the past Jo years. But why let that
If
CHANCE TO
GLEEFULLY
FTASH IIIAGES
OF NEARLY
fact get in the way of all those great photosl
Want more proof that we iike our teen-sex news with
a side of salaciousness? Look no further than the speed
with which sexual urban legends become media fact'
Take the sex'bracelet scandal: As colorful rubber wristbands have become marketing tools for everything from
cancer research to religious affiliation, they've also been
said to signify a girl's willingness to perform certain
sex acts. According to rumors, it was a game: Break off
her yellow bracelet and, depending on which source you
NAKED YOUNG
GIRLS.
believe, you get either a hug or a blow iob. Black bracelet)
The proverbial works.
Talk shows and news media enthusiastically covered
the story but were never able to verify
1923: Margaret Sanger
opens the first medically supervised birth
control clinic.
it'
Mythbuster
1960: The Searle drug company receives FDA
approval for Enovid, the first birth control pill, which
is 100 percent effective but has tenible side effecis,
including li{ethreatening blood clots. The company
eventually realizes the dose is 10 times too high.
1932: Ihe Tuskegee Syphilis Study begins, and for the next 40
years commits one of the most egregious acts of institutional
racism and breach of trust between doctors and patients tn
modern medicine. President Clinton will later apologize, on
behalf of the nation, for the studY.
Barbara Mikkelson of Snopes.com points to the sheer
physical impossibility of breaking these bands by hand,
but she adds that she's received notes from teens who say
their friends have, in fact, honored said breakage. When a
Fiorida school district forbade the bands, it did so purely
because of the distraction caused by the rumors.
And then there's the now-legendary rainbow party. In
the early 2ooos, a rumor circulated about teen gatherings where girls put on different shades of iipstick and
boys competed to see who could collect the most colored
rings below the belt. The idea gained public attention
because of that weather vane of morai panic, The Oprah
Winfrey Show. A guest on the "Is Your Child Leading a
Double Lifel" episode in zoo3 referred to the supposed
phenomenon as fact, and the media ran with it. There
was skepticism, of course: Deborah Tolman, director
of the Center for Research on Gender and Sexuality at
San Francisco State University, told the New york Tirrtes
that the purported fad "has all the classic hallmarks of a
moral panic.... One day we have never heard of rainbow
parties and then suddenly they are everywhere, feeding
on adults' fears that moraily bankrupt sexuality among
younger teens is rampant, despite any actual evidence.',
But for many people, Oprah's outcry and paul Ruditis,s
controversy-generating novel Rqinbow Party, which imagined a day in the life of a group of kids planning to attend
the titular event, were the only evidence needed.
Like Howndd.og, Rainbow Party drew criticism both
from conservative commentators for being "smut" (to
quote Michelle Malkin), and from a mostly liberal litcritic circle for being a painfully didactic, poorly written
exercise in young-adult fiction. The book banks on the
reader's ardent desire to believe in the ritualized sex act,
but it also craftily questions that myth's basis in fact. The
party's host got the idea when she "saw it on rv," and one
character asks, "If the girls were doing it right...wouldn,t
it just be a gray mess," not a rainbow) The book may be
most valuable when viewed as a catalog of the rainbow
of sexual types that adults project onto today's youths-
1985: Griswdd v. Connecticut,
a
197E: National Condom
l98l:
Connecticut law baning use of contracep-
Week started by students
Disease Control and
tion, is overturned. The Supreme Court
rules that the right to "privacy" is
at UC-Berkeley.
Prevention names new outbreak GRID-Gay-Related
protected by the Constitution.
19?1: At the height of the
"free love" era, New York
The Centers for
lmmune Deficiency.
City begins distributing
19E0: The virus eventually known as
HIV spreads to at least five continents
(North America, South America, Europe,
free condoms.
Africa, and Australia).
1984:
Gay Men's Health Crisis
publishes its first safe-sex guidelines, "Healthy Sex ls Great Sex.'
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as
from the president of the Celibacy CIub to the monogamous couple to the gutsy tart who conceives of the party.
(On a side note, I truly feel for the author of a zooz
children's book, also called Rainbow Party, that purports
to "build appreciation for God's world'" Demonstrating
the limits of artificial intelligence, Amazon.com recommends the two as "better together.")
Perhaps the American public is fully aware that rainbow parties are a crock, but we're willing to play along
for the chance at a public dialogue, however hysterical,
about disturbing trends in young women's sexual development. As Ariel Levy noted in her book on women and
raunch culture, Fernale Chauvinist Pr.gs, girls are feeling
immense pressure to emulate strippers and porn stars
in their attitudes, their dress, and their sexual behavior. Treating myths as reality may be a way of dealing
with our collective social anxiety over the possibility that
despite three waves of feminism, the desires and wellbeing of girls and young women have little influence in
the larger sexual arena.
JUST SAY NO
Youthful sex can indeed be unwanted, pregnancy- and
srr-inducing, and just plain bad. But for all the complexity of the problems facing youth in their sexual development, and all the hormones urging them to just do it,
we seem to expect them to buy into one very simplistic
"solution": |ust say no. While public sex-education efforts
have historically been comprehensive, the conservative
movement has been busy promulgating the message
that abstinence-only programs preserve the innocence of
children and that comprehensive sex education condones
their exploitation.
A Better Choice (ABC), a woman's center that counsels against abortion, is one of many organizations with
programs that coach kids on how to stay virgins. While
the phrase "abstinence-only education" often connotes
not talking about sex, ABC is a1ltoo hrppy to talk about
it-in terms of negative consequences. "I didn't think
PERHAPS WE'RE
AWARE THAT
RAINBOW
PARTIES ARE
A CROCK, BUT
WE'RE WILLING
TO PLAY
ATONG TOR
THE CHANCE
AT A PUBTIC
DIALOGUE.
1989: ln the wake of increased use of dental dams in the lesbian community after reports
of possible female{o{emale HIV transmission, the Women's Caucus of ACT UP New York
announces a contest t0 rename the dental dam. Their aim is to get the manufacturers to
make them more widely available and thinner. Apparently, since we're still using the terminology, contest entries like "Venus veil" must not have caught on.
1993: The female condom is
approved in the U.S., giving
women an option they can use to
protect against the spread of srrs.
1986r Surgeon General C.
1991: Condomania"America's f irst condom
1992: Arguing that no sexual
activity is entirely risk-free,
1992-1994:
called AIDS, calling for
store"-opens in
public health experts begin to
Stewart create the "Peer
education and condom use.
York City.
adopt the term "saler sex."
Safer Sex Slut Team."
Everett Koop issues a landmark
report on the epidemic now
solbitch pEMrNrsr REspoNsE ro pop cuLruRE
New
Lani
Ka'ahumanu and Cianna
3q7...
o
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oral sex could do any harm, but now I know you can
get lsrrs] and I don't plan on doing it," writes one suspiciously acquiescent teen on the group's website.
But the talk stops short of educating kids on how to
avoid those negative consequences should they end up
having sex. Denny Pattyn, founder of the virginity-pledge
program Silver Ring Thing, goes so far as to teach kids
that condoms are to be avoided. "l would not tell [my own
daughter] to use a condom" if she said she was going to
have sex, said Pattyn in an interview with CBS News. "I
don't think it'll protect her. It won't protect her heart. It
won't protect her emotional life."
It's no secret that our nation's $r billion investment
in abstinence-only education over five years has yielded
dismal results: Of teens who take virginity pledges, 88
percent have premarital sex anyway, and pledge-takers
put off sex for just a year and a half on average. What's
worse, when these kids do have sex, they use condoms
at one-third the rate of other kids. U.S. Rep. Henry A.
Waxman (D-Calif.), spearheaded a zoo4 report demonstrating the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only curricula,
using research from Columbia University. His curriculum review turned up such pedagogical gems as the "girlas-tape" metaphor: Take a piece of tape-that's a virginal
giri. Stick it on a guy-that's sex. Now pull it off-that
piece oftape is now a worn-out, saggy-boobed hussy that
nobody will ever want again, because it "doesn't stick."
Abstinence-only advocates would have us believe that
youth promiscuity is on the rise. The most recent data
available indicates teen sex rates were the same in the
early zooos as they were in the r98ds. Still, that means
about half of all teens have had sex-oral sex or intercourse. Most parents want those kids to know not iust
about "plumbing" and condoms, but also about the possible emotional, economic, and social consequences of
sex. An ad campaign from the National Campaign to
Prevent Teen Pregnancy delivers on these points. The
ads superimpose words like cheap, d'irty, and prick over
youths' photos in large print. While these provocative
words describe how abstinence-oriented adults believe
a young person should feel after sex, the smaller print
aims at changing attitudes and behaviors: "Condoms are
cHEAp. If we'd used one, I wouldn't have to tell my parents
I'm pregnant."
So who stands to gain from our cuitural obsession with
predation, porn, and ritualized promiscuity) Ask Mark
Foley, who-before he was busted for trying to poke
pages-won public support by coauthoring the Adam
Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act of zoo6. Or the
producers of Dateline, which nets millions of dollars
in advertising from To Catch. a Predator. Or one of the
many child-molesting Catholic priests who sermonize on
the evils of nonmarital sex. Or, for that matter, ask all
of us who tune in, vote for, or say "amen" to these distorted views.
Of course watching rv, voting, and going to church
don't directly cause kids to be victimized, any more than
"graphic sex education" does (an allegation advanced by
Foley apologist Wendy Wright, president of Concerned
Women for America). But as long as our strongest media
messages on youth and sex are more about entertaining
than educating, we remain largely ill-equipped to take
responsibility for the task at hand: We need to make the
media address the realities of youth when it comes to
sex. We need to spread accurate information about child
sexual abuse. We need to turn kids on to sensible and
hip websites and other media tools that can help them
prevent pregnancy and srrs with more than abstinenceand, for that matter, more than condoms. As much as the
media can hamper our response to sexual risks facing
youth, ihe media is still our best bet for helping kids
and adults make good sexual choices. As long as our
culture makes it difficult to find a better ratings-booster
than teen girls, sex, and danger, it's crucial that media
consumers be able to distinguish the difference between
fact and fiction.
a contributing writer for The Onion. Her essay "'l Had
an Abortion' and Other Ululations" appears in lborfion Under Attack: llomen
on the Challenges Facing Choice (Seal Press, 2006).
Jacqueline Lalley is
1995: Christian Leadership Ministries sponsors a series of advertisements on various college campuses t0 encourage marriage as
the only appropriate arena for sex. Advertisements such as "Love
or Latex?" and "Who needs a condom when you have a commitment?" are distributed to counter Condom Week activities.
1994: Surgeon General locelyn Elders
is forced to resign 15 months into her
appointment after making comments
suggesting that masturbation should be
a topic of discussion in school sex-ed.
2000:
CDC formally retracts support
of products containing the spermicide
Nonoxynol-9, after studies indicate that
its presence as a lubricant on condoms
may actually facilitate HIV transmission
2005: The first-ever primetime network television ads for condoms debut. The tame and
tasteful Trojan campaign for network w eschews
the brand's zippy Trojan Man spokescondom and
instead focuses on sexual health.
2006: "Safe
sex fatigue" and the efficacy of com-
bination HIV retroviral therapy inspires a wave of
anti-safer-sex behavior. The blog Con{essions of
a Bareback Top brings the controversy over unsafe
sex practices to the blogosphere.
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