This isn't even so unusual anymore: high school students exchanging naked pictures of themselves, school administrators concerned, one saves a picture as evidence, the picture isn't actually pornographic even by Loudoun County standards, but OMG HE'S POSSESSING CHILD PORNOGRAPHY!!!!, zero-tolerance, life ruined. Note that Loudoun County is the same place where they had the filtering software lawsuit in 1998; as one of the smarter commentators on the Wired article points out, if you're going to subject children to that kind of repression, what do you expect them to do a few years later when they're young adults? This kind of disaster is inevitable as long as we think it's a good idea to ban the mere possession of speech. Freedom of expression must be absolute. See also my comments from a few years ago on Nymphet and instigation, which I'd been meaning to move to my new site code and now looks like the right time. As I said then, if we treat the normal sexual behaviour of human beings - which absolutely starts at an age well under 18 - as a frightening aberration, then we guarantee that we will be frightened pretty often.
Comments
Vilhelm S from 165.123.212.230 at Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:07:06 +0000:
The linked article is hillarious, in a train-wreck kind of way. It seems to me that a major problem here is actually the fact that prosecutors are directly elected officials, so we get the populism that comes with that -- and at the same time, their stunts get reviewed by a judge, so they don't have to feel any responsibility to not do stupid things. If prosecutors were bureaucrats, there might be more sanity.
Re kiwano, I'd like to point out that the theory that onset of puberty has been pushed earlier is controversial. There is evidence suggesting that the effect is due to inaccurate reporting by Victorian-era scientists.
Scott from 99.40.197.2 at Mon, 22 Feb 2010 00:03:15 +0000:
@kiwano - Agreed. It does not bode well for the genetic future of the human race that economic factors keep pushing back the age when people have kids to times ever later in life.
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kiwano from 66.96.18.20 at Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:27:54 +0000:
The point is commonly raised in my family that, the only reason a tradition of absention from premarital sex was able to keep its hold on western society for so long was that people used to get married off in their early to mid teens. Even worse is that as our social norms keep pushing the threshold for traditionally "appropriate" sexual behaviour later and later in life, hormones and hormone mimics have pushed the onset of puberty earlier.
It's kinda disturbing to watch how our every time our society gets to wringing its collective hands over sexuality, it does so in a manner that even more violently ignores our underlying biology.