Social Media's Sexualization of Youth Culture

By Naomi Wolf, Guardian UK

29 October 12

As the sad story of the bullied Canadian teenager shows, girls are especially vulnerable to imagery sold by the porn industry.

manda Todd, a teenager who lived in the Vancouver area, died earlier this month by her own hand. Shortly before she killed herself, she made a YouTube video describing the bullying she had suffered both in school and after school that had driven her to abuse drugs and alcohol, and self-harm -and which would, ultimately, result in her suicide. She described boys tormenting her, and girls beating her so severely that, when they were done, she simply lay in a ditch until her father found her.

What caused the bullying that pursued her so viciously?

In seventh grade, Todd had logged onto a webcam site where she met a 30-year-old man who cajoled her into showing him her breasts. When she sought to withdraw from the man's persistent attentions, he contacted her via Facebook. He threatened to send the topless photos of her to "everyone" if she did not "put on a show".

Unfortunately for Todd, it was no empty threat: the man had obtained her personal data, including where she lived and went to school, and made good on his word. When she changed schools to avoid the people who had seen the uncensored photo, he made it his profile picture on Facebook.

The media, as well as the girl's school, have stressed the issue of bullying in this story, but they must also address adult male cyberstalking and the influence of porn on teenage social interaction. The last two issues are often considered too "difficult" to address in the mainstream, even though their influences are very much ingrained in the mainstream.

In fact, Todd's case is not an isolated one. At least two American girls have reportedly committed suicide after their former boyfriends, following a break-up, forwarded nude photos of them.

A study in the peer-reviewed journal Archives of Sexual Behavior found that almost 18% of high school students - boys and girls, some as young as 14 - acknowledged sending "explicit" images of themselves on cellphones to other students. Previous studies had just asked about "provocative" images, which are not illegal (nude images of minors are). In the survey group of 600 private high school students from the US south-west, 30% of girls reported having received an "explicit" image, while 50% of boys did. (The difference between the numbers of self-reported senders and receivers had to do with forwarding, according to the researchers.)

Most students left a question that sought to ascertain their awareness of the illegality of this kind of sexting blank. In other words, the students did not understand that what they were doing was illegal.

How has the influence of pornography created such an ungated torrent of sexually explicit images that invades lives like Todd's? And why, in a consumer culture in which you can buy anything, is it so difficult to place real filters against such intrusions?

As a free-speech advocate, I believe that adults should have access to any material they want. As a parent, and a community member, I think people should be able to protect their homes from imagery - much of it violent - that is, I feel, a form of child abuse when adult society inflicts it upon children. Porn is one such example of imagery that has come to be a powerfully negative influence on youth culture.

The ownership of the porn industry is, oddly, cloaked in mystery (though we know that Goldman Sachs recently got out of the lucrative prostitution listings business). It is also hard to establish the actual money involved: estimates for the value of the porn industry range from $10bn a year to $13bn (for the US market alone). Neither of these figures is as striking as the 2009 United Nations estimate of the value of the porn industry worldwide: $100bn, with child porn accounting for $20bn.

Why is ownership and revenue data in this huge industry so opaque? Authors Melinda Tankard Reist and Abigail Bray of Big Porn Inc: Exposing the Harms of the Global Pornography Industry argue that "porn money" has bought up research departments in universities, and contributed to governmental lobbying efforts. If true, that would certainly help to explain the absence of any practical controls that would keep the industry freely available in a strongly filtered adults-only space.

This free market inundation of explicit imagery is certainly affecting teens. Guidance counselors in Manhattan schools, as well as schools in the US midwest, have expressed their concerns with me that online images, "sexting" and homemade erotic videos are all increasingly used to torment and isolate kids - especially by "slut-shaming" girls and young women.

Caught in an impossible double bind, teenaged girls are encouraged by the ubiquity of porn's influence to post suggestive, racy pictures of themselves on their Facebook pages or via other social media, and even engage - as Amanda Todd did - in more direct, self-revealing behavior online that is then captured forever. In a vacuum of any responsible adult conversation about privacy, dealing with porn imagery and chat rooms, or appropriate sexual behavior, these girls are left to the mercy of an industry setting the bar for their interactions. That then becomes the behavioral norm for both sexes in youth culture.

The outcome? This dangerous proliferation of teenagers using technology to paint scarlet letters on girls that are practically impossible to delete from cyberspace. How many Amanda Todds will there be before we act on this problem?