Seventeen-year-old Natalie Tracey recently adjusted her cell phone plan to accommodate her growing text-messaging addiction. But the Sacramento high school senior had never heard of anyone at her school “sexting” – sending a nude photo via cell phone.
“Everything about it sounds lame,” Natalie said, noting that she was unaware of the term until an adult introduced it to her and that the online humiliations suffered by young celebrities such as Vanessa Hudgens and Pete Wentz might serve as a cautionary tale for her generation. “All that stuff just creates drama,” she said.
Natalie’s attitude toward sexting echoes a view shared by sexual-health educators, teen advocates and academics gathering in San Francisco this week for Sex Tech, a conference that promotes sexual health among youth through technology. They believe that the sexting “trend” is a cultural fascination du jour and is way overblown.
“Sexting is the latest way adults are getting panicky about teen sexuality and for mainstream culture to get panicky about technology,” said Marty Klein, a Palo Alto author and sex therapist who is leading a panel discussion on the topic. “And when you mix the two together, there’s always a lot of anxiety and misunderstanding.”
In December, a study from the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy reported that 20 percent of 653 teenagers polled said they’d posted nude or seminude pictures of themselves at least once via computer or cell phone. After school administrators and law enforcement agencies nationwide learned of the activity, USA Today reported that since January at least two dozen teenagers in six states were being investigated for sending explicit images by cell phone, including two Massachusetts teens who faced felony child pornography distribution charges. Last week in Los Alamitos (Orange County), as many as nine middle school boys were suspended after they digitally shared a nude picture of a 14-year-old female student.
But whereas some see evidence of teenagers growing up too fast in an increasingly technologically connected world, those within the youth sexual health community have a more sober take on the behavior: They see sexting as an educational opportunity.
