Naked theft: tech is tearing down boundaries that protect children
Deplorable dresses, sexting, porn? Sexuality is rampant and we need to talk about our young people, writes Miriam O’Callaghan
AKILKENNY disco asks our young daughters to “keep it neat and discreet” and social media explodes. If only. The sisterhood was outraged on behalf of its younger siblings. The request sexualised, objectified, demeaned them. It was “misogyny”, “slut-shaming”, “victim-blaming”, a damning indictment of the organisation’s views on “consent”. Except it didn’t. It wasn’t.
It was a reasonable request by an organisation that children dress like children when they are in its care. No, not like an extra from Little House on the Prairie but in clothes that allow our girls to be proud of their burgeoning womanhood, without the need or expectation to expose it to every cat in the county.
The journalist Arlene Harris had the temerity to ask what if our boys showed up to discos wearing only a thong? She wondered if it might be a good idea to instil some sartorial elegance into our teens’ lives? I’m all for it.
She took a different view to the virtual big sisters advising our girls to wear whatever they like, as long as they feel comfortable. I’m all for comfort, too. If a girl or boy is over 18, and of an evening, they stick on the puppy slippers along with the split-crotch PVC catsuit, more power to them in their ‘seamless and frictionless’ world.
But if they are 15-year-old children appearing in public dressed like the wannabe adoptees of an instafamous brood, then the ‘comfort’ or otherwise of their micro-minis, stilettos or taped breasts is not the issue. It is whether these same clothes or adhesives are appropriate public attire for a child. I believe they are not.
I’m a mother of a teenage girl. When she was younger, we had the girls’ nights of dress-up and make-up when it seemed Paulie Gualtieri had dropped miniature denizens of Bada Bing! into the heart of suburban Dublin. But they were safe indoors. Not out in public to be gawped at.
At 10 o’clock their mothers or fathers took them home, happy to see them scrubbed, spotless.
On those nights, what looked like swimming togscum caliper-cum-dungeon wear was childish pretend, honouring some band or singer. It was a costume for a role. It was certainly not the real life of young teenage girls, where sometimes, I would arrive up with juice to find them in glitter, heels and skin ‘reorganising’ — ahem — the Sylvanian Families in log cabins, caravans or hotels.
But, this is the fragile ecosystem our young teens inhabit. In the week of the “deplorable dresses” we are ‘shocked’ that girls as young a nine are sexting. The shock is that we are shocked at all. Because even our young children live now in a highly sexualised world where they are not spared the exploitation of the marketeers, the poison of popularity, success, perfection. True for boys and girls alike.
Like it or not, though, it is girls and women who are still overly defined by their appearance. We can never be thin enough, pretty enough, blonde enough, dark enough, pale enough, tanned enough, popular enough, rich enough, famous enough, successful enough, good enough, tucked enough, toned enough.
Sadly the tyranny of Never Enough is moving also to our boys and men, but only because the women’s ‘market’ of self-loathing has reached if not quite perfection, then at least capacity.
The marketeers needed to peddle more product, hope or desperation, to more people. So our boys and men must make urgent sorties into the mythical territory of easy success and perfection, spending money and their personal capital to establish themselves — socially — within.
This is facilitated and exacerbated by technology, Neil Postman’s “Faustian pact” that frees and enslaves us simultaneously. If TV has “humiliated” the world, then has our ubiquitous and omnipotent technology degraded it, often, to the point of personal annihilation?
Reputations and careers destroyed when the pack hunts the teller of a stupid joke? Gorgeous young women driven to locked wards or suicide by revenge pornography? The young girls last week on a Dublin street, a jumble of exposed breasts, tans and thongs, trying to hail a taxi lying flat out on the ground? The older kids out after their Leaving Cert mocks trying to get them home without anyone photographing them? (Who, if anyone, was home to meet them?)
Even our young children are not immune. Technology has given them the world and the opportunity to share anything, everything with it. Simultaneously, technology has removed from them one of their most precious possessions — their boundaries.
They take naked pictures, press send. Not necessarily to be sexual, but to be social, acceptable, popular, ‘in’.
The most intimate image is sent not as sensation but as ‘conversation’.
But it’s also darker. Because with technology — and particularly porn that is distributed on the web — in a generation our children have gone from the vernacular of Zig and Zag to that of Oral and Anal.
The old ‘lads’ mags’ were positively postulant compared to the porn developed on the web, and available 24/7. Boys, especially, are taking live fire of pornography that is aggressive, violent, even sadomasochistic.
As the British playwright Lucy Kirkwood put it in an interview on her play NSFW (Not Safe for Work), for young boys, pornography no longer means “picking up a copy of Razzle from a railway siding. It is some woman having an object shoved into her anus on a sort of high-definition film”. Quite.
If anything it’s become worse in the five years since, with addiction to porn, even in young boys, becoming more common. According to the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge, porn addiction involves not only quantitative components, but also qualitative ones. He says “porn addictions change sexual tastes”.
Like any addiction, porn stimulates the reward centre of the brain, resulting in dopamine being discharged. However, according to Doidge, “once that centre is altered, a person will compulsively seek out the activity or place that triggered the dopamine discharge. They crave despite negative consequences.
This is why patients could crave porn without actually liking it. Worse, over time, a damaged dopamine system makes one more “tolerant” to the activity and needing more stimulation, to get the rush and quiet the craving. ‘Tolerance’ drives a search for ramped-up stimulation and this can drive the change in sexual tastes toward the extreme.
Now think of our boys with their neuroplastic brains being force-fed Kirkwood’s “plastic sexuality on a mass scale”. These living brains pounded by the dead certainty that in their sexual future every breast they encounter will be a Zeppelin, every girlfriend buffed, waxed, on her knees, a martyr to the cause of pleasure-pain, in this case, classic His ’n’ Hers.
Is this the foundation we want to lay for our boys’ sexual tastes? Do we really want our schoolgirls struggling under what Doidge terms, “the expectation ‘downloaded’ onto them that they play roles written by pornographers”? He concludes “once porn was used by teens to explore, prepare and relieve sexual tension, in expectation of a real sexual relationship. Today, it supplants it”.
Recently, the Taoiseach suggested that as a nation, we talk about porn and our children, the culture of sharing in which they risk losing their boundaries. For the children’s sake, we should, we must.
‘Today’s porn supplants a real sexual relationship for our teens’