I'm looking for ways to combat this trend?
Your comments will be more than appreciated: How the faceless and amoral world of cyberspace has created a deeply disturbing... generation SEX By Olivia Lichtenstein Last updated at 8:12 AM on 28th January 2009 Remember that Hilaire Belloc cautionary tale - Matilda told such dreadful lies, it made one gasp and stretch one’s eyes? I used to love it as a child when telling lies was one of the naughtiest things you could do: Matilda ended up getting burned to death. These days, however, everything has changed and it’s the truths that children tell that make one gasp and stretch one’s eyes. A couple of years ago, my daughter Francesca, then aged 13, told me about a party she had been to one Saturday night. Insight: Olivia (left) and daughter Francesca In the course of the evening, she came upon one of her friends, also aged 13, performing oral sex on a boy in the garden. The boy was standing and videoing the event on his mobile phone. My daughter, in whom the feisty gene has always found strong expression, pulled her friend off the boy, knocked the phone out of his hand and slapped him round the face. I apologise for shocking you, but then there are a number of things shocking about this event: the casual nature in which such an intimate act is performed in public, the young age of the participants and last, but by no means least, the fact that it is being filmed. This not only signals the boy’s disassociation from the physical experience, it also indicates his intention to replay the event and, no doubt, to share his triumph with his friends as one might brandish a trophy above one’s head for all to see. Reality TV has a lot to answer for Nor was this the only such event on this particular evening. I am no prude, but Francesca painted a picture of Bacchanalia that certainly made me gasp. That week at school, when conducting a post mortem of their weekend as teenagers do (and always have done), the girls at her then school (she’s since moved), a private girls’ school in London, exclaimed: ‘Hurrah, now we’re more slutty than Slutney’, the affectionate nickname of another school. Call me old-fashioned, but when I was a gal, sluttishness was not a condition one aspired to. That year, they were all dressing in Hooters T-shirts (the uniform of the well-endowed waitresses of a U.S. restaurant chain whose slogan ‘delightfully tacky yet unrefined’ sums up its approach) and buttock-skimming shorts. They looked, as girls so often do, far older than their 13 years and not unlike the Playboy Bunnies who incensed a generation of feminists. (Interestingly, clothing depicting the distinctive Playboy bunny is highly popular now among teenage girls.) When one considers our society, it’s no surprise that our children have lost all sense of modesty. Reality check: TV's Skins glamorises teenage promiscuity Not only do social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo encourage teens to share information about themselves; but when they are not taking their clothes off, their role models are spilling their guts about their ‘private’ lives all over the pages of every national newspaper, magazine and on television. We have an immoderate interest in the private lives of perfect strangers. Pop stars such as Amy Winehouse and Britney Spears expose the car crash that is their life for all to see. Jordan, who won fame by revealing her breasts, has a documentary series where she and her husband, Peter Andre, discuss their sex life (or lack of it) in intimate detail. The Osbournes revealed all for our entertainment in their television series. Was this extraordinary exposure responsible in part for the subsequent drug and alcohol abuse of the two of their children who participated? One can’t help feeling it might have been. Their third child, Amy, wisely chose to stay out of the limelight. Whatever its exponents may say, reality television has a lot to answer for. I have been a documentary film-maker for more than two decades and am well aware of the power of the medium. Today’s teenagers are starring in the reality show of their own lives and doing all they can to make it as dramatic as possible. Where before mistakes we made when young - excessive drinking, acts of promiscuity - were quietly forgotten, now they are recorded and broadcast on the internet for all to see. From happy slapping to amateur sex videos (Paris Hilton rose to fame when a shamelessly intimate video of her and her boyfriend found its way on to the internet, a reality TV show followed, and the rest, as they say, is history). Do these girls even know what feminism is? The sexualisation of our young is ubiquitous: boys caught cheating on their girlfriends on mobile phones, ritual humiliation and worse by YouTube (In February 2008, a gang of London teenagers aged 14-16 drugged and raped a woman in front of her children and then posted the film of the attac
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1 :
ftake your daughter to a TRinity church with you at least once a month or more....set a good example....speak to her about right and wrong....read the Bible and help her to learn it too....OOO
2 :
tobe_new@yahoo.com
3 :
I wish there was a way to combat the trend. Girls are doing all these promiscuous acts for the attention. What they don't realize is that they're attracting attention from the wrong kind of guys. Guys who don't hold a door for a lady, who often have one-night stands, who cheat, who lie. These are not gentlemen they attract. Real gentlemen are not impressed by sexual deviancy. And this kind of behavior hits the boys just as hard. They're taught to mistreat women and do whatever it takes to get sexual relief from them. It's disgusting. And this only gets worse in college. College can be one of the sleaziest places in the world. Underage drinking mixed with being away for the first time can have horrible consequences. You have to instill self-respect into your child at a young age. Teach them about sexual deviancy and its consequences. Most of all, give them a role-model, which is hard to find in this day of drugs and artists being synonymous. It takes boys and girls with strong spirits to swim against this trend. It takes a lot of self-respect. It's worth it.
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