The new pornographers

A recent online poll found that 20 percent of teens have shared nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves, the majority with a boyfriend or girlfriend. (Sure, voluntary polls tend to be self-selecting, but the results seem obvious, maybe even understated.) Teens will, as they always have, experiment with their sexuality. But at a time when free hardcore porn is ubiquitous, technology is cheap and the Internet is a comfortable channel for expression and experimentation, is it really any surprise that this is a generation of amateur pornographers? It certainly isn't to 20-somethings like myself who came of age during the Internet's youth. By the time I was 14, I had seen my share of online porn and late-night HBO and made frequent use of the phrase "U wanna cyber?" in early AOL chat rooms. In high school in Berkeley, Calif., at least two student sex tapes were rumored to be making the rounds. I didn't have a cellphone camera or a webcam, thank god -- though I did have a Polaroid camera, which, to be sure, my longtime boyfriend and I toyed around with. This is all part of how kids initiate themselves into our sexual culture long before they actually have sex. At one time, that meant a boy would flip through his father's stash of Playboys and a girl would try on her mother's ample bra. For me, it meant privately mimicking the stripper moves I had seen on TV and having online chats with people who occasionally turned out to be aging pervs. It was the best way I knew to try on, test out and confirm my femininity without actually having sex. (And that's having been raised by hippie parents who compared the spiritual magic of sex to "two star systems colliding in outer space.") That sexual rite of passage remains, but today's teens have an entirely different notion of privacy than past generations. They grew up in the exhibitionistic Web culture of LiveJournal, YouTube and MySpace. They've seen girls on TV playfully jiggling their breasts for plastic beads, "Real World" cast members boldly screwing in front of cameras, Britney flashing her bald lady parts. These days, why would a girl be concerned about her silly topless snapshot circulating around school? That's certainly the case with 16-year-old Melissa, a student at a high school near Greensburg-Salem, who has never worried about any of the X-rated pictures she's shared, because she cropped her face out of the photos, so "no one could identify me unless like [they] lifted up my shirt to figure it out haha," she wrote in a message sent on the blog platform Xanga. On her profile page, a rap song with the lyrics "I jus' wanna act like a porno flick actor" plays. It also exhibits a self-portrait she took with a cellphone camera of her reflection in a floor-length mirror; the sassy expression on her face matches the page's background: a sexy hot pink and lime green leopard print. Joey, an 18-year-old who graduated from a San Francisco high school last year, has gotten X-rated snapshots from girls on his phone, through e-mail and on his MySpace page since he was 15. Some were longtime girlfriends that he swapped photos with and others were girls he'd just casually met; some pictures were suggestive, others were explicit. ("How graphic do you want me to get?" he asks, cautiously. "I've had girls send me photos of them fingering themselves.") <<<---Back