Parents, hide your webcams. Your little Lolita playing Nintendo in the next room is ready for her closeup. And trust me, you won’t want it in wallet-size.
Almost one quarter (22 percent) of all teen girls – and 11 percent ages 13-16 – say they have electronically sent, or posted online, nude or semi-nude images of themselves, according to a survey released yesterday by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com.
Makes you wonder why you’re spending all that money at Limited Too.
According to the survey, girls post these pictures mostly to be fun and flirtatious.
Good God. Whatever happened to winking?
Worse, these scandalous photos are the Wonder Ball of the Web, getting passed around at lightning speed: One-third of teen boys and one-quarter of teen girls say they have had private nude/semi-nude images shared with them.
And you’re embarrassed by the perm you got in 1987.
But it’s nothing to 8th-grade girls who are sending salacious photos of themselves across the Internet and cell phones. And why not? Look at their Queen Bee, “High School Musical” star Vanessa Hudgens, who plays wholesome bookworm Gabriella in the Disney movies.
Last September, full-frontal snapshots of the then-18-year-old star meant for the eyes of tween heartthrob Drake Bell surfaced and rapidly made the information superhighway.
Her self-described lapse in judgment didn’t hurt her career. She went on to star in “High School Musical 3.”
Speaking of Disney, when did the Mickey Mouse Club rent a room in the Playboy Mansion?
The Mouse Ears’ main attraction, Hannah Montana, also known as Miley Cyrus, caused a stir with her Vanity Fair shoot last spring. The semi-nude 15-year-old was wrapped up in a bedsheet, her hair tousled and makeup sexily smudged. But did Cyrus fear the flashbulb afterward? Nope. Another crop of Kodaks also surfaced on the Net . . . See Miley flashing her bra! See Miley in nothing but a tiny T and undies! See Miley tonguing a lollipop with her girlfriend!
And last week, another Disney star’s semi-nude photos became Google fodder. Though Adrienne Bailon is 25, the average age of her Cheetah Girls audience is about 12.
It’s steamy enough to make Walt defrost.
And who’s sorry now? No one. “Generation Y Keep Your Clothes On!” has been bottle-fed the fame game from the get-go, and lesson No. 1 is “Get naked!” (Thanks, Paris Hilton.)
“Girls in particular have been taught that this is to be expected,” said Jean Kilbourne, who has been studying the sexualization of teenagers and children since the 1970s. Kilbourne, the co-author of “So Sexy So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and What Parents Can Do to Protect Their Kids” (Ballantine, $25), said it’s not enough for girls to be smart and beautiful; they have to hot and sexy, too. And to demonstrate, they display it all over the Internet.
“One of the ways sexualization harms girls is that they learn to see themselves as objects and this is a prime example of that. It’s like they’re seeing themselves as something on eBay, putting themselves out there as a thing on their Web page as an advertisement.”
Of course, these kids didn’t invent the wheel. According to another survey, one-quarter of employees who use the Internet visit porn sites during the workday, according to October figures from Nielsen Online, up from 23 percent a year ago.
No wonder it’s so hard to reach customer service.
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Update
One In Five Teens Engage In Tech Sex
One in five teen girls has sent a revealing photograph of themselves via cell phone or e-mail or posted nude or partially nude images of themselves online, according to a survey released this week.
Eleven percent of them are 16 or younger.
The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and CosmoGirl.com teamed up to survey 1,280 teens and young adults, ages 13 to 26, from Sept. 25 through Oct. 3. They released a 20-page report on their “Sex and Tech” (PDF) survey Wednesday.
“Teenagers are early adopters of technology — from the latest social networking sites to the hottest new cell phones,” Susan Schulz, special projects editor for Hearst Magazines, said in a statement. “While this tech savvy can be seen as a positive, our study reveals there’s also a negative side. Teenagers should be aware of the real consequences to this type of behavior and we need to provide them with guidance and encourage them to make smart choices.”
Twenty-one percent of girls and 18% of boys said they have posted nude or partially nude pictures of themselves online. Forty-nine percent of teens and young adults have sent sexually suggestive text messages or e-mails of themselves. Fifteen percent of teens who sent sexually suggestive content said they have done so with someone they only know online.
Two-thirds of teen girls who sent or posted sexually suggestive content said they did it to be fun or flirtatious. Fifty-two percent said they wanted to give a sexy present to their boyfriends, and 40% said they did it as a joke.
The survey found that the pictures get around. One-third of teen boys and one-fourth of teen boys said they have seen nude or partially nude photos because someone shared an image that the sender meant to keep private.
The report stated that young people’s online behavior seems to affect their behavior in real life, with more than one in five teens saying technology makes them personally more forward and aggressive. More than one-third of teens said that exchanging sexy content makes dating or hooking up more likely. Nearly one-third said they believe that people exchanging sexy content are expected to date or hook up.
“That so many young people say technology is encouraging an even more casual, hook-up culture is reason for concern, given the high rates of teen and unplanned pregnancy in the United States,” Marisa Nightingale, senior adviser to the Entertainment Media Program at the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, said in a statement. “Parents should understand that their own notions of what’s public, what’s private, and what’s appropriate, may differ greatly from how teens and young adults define these concepts.”
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