I think that we all pretty much know that the kids are sending all kinds of R and X rated things to each other on their cell phones. This somehow came up today as at my coffee shop, a girl (19) who works there had send a very X rated photo of her self via picture message to a few others. Now, as a joke this photo was sent to me (um…wow).
Now, I understand the point here was that one girl (20) purchased a new sex toy, was telling how great it was and LENT IT TO HER FRIEND!!! Fer christs sake! Do not lend out your speedo, your underwear, your wife, your husband - or your sex toys. Am I the only one who thinks this is WAY off base and a terrible thing for our youth to think is okay?
“Nancy, I got the greatest new dildo - wanna borrow it?”
“sure, I will let you know what I think - and photo it and send them to you”
My god, I get more lost every day. Or, am I just getting old and old fashioned?
In the interests of full disclosure and in order to get a proper perspective from which to offer my opinion, I think I speak for all men here when I say we need to see the photo in order to offer a cogent and well-reasoned comment.
You do know that you can post pics to the forum, right?
All kidding aside, I just don’t get it either. My daughter is 9 and while I know that the best that you can do is to raise them by a good example, with good values, I’m still scared to death…
All kidding aside, I just don’t get it either. My daughter is 9 and while I know that the best that you can do is to raise them by a good example, with good values, I’m still scared to death…
I’ve got 2 daughterrs. Like you said, just look after your own. You have no say in what others like to do.
I second that motion for the pic of that coffee shop girl to be posted here.
You and me, both. How does any sane girl/woman think that it’s a good idea to: 1) share a sex toy, and 2) share a pic of her using that sex toy.
I often wonder if they’re just all trying to out-do each other with unbelievable acts. Almost like they’re showing how brave and confident they are because they do things like this. It should be embarrassing to them, but it’s not.
And my wife wonders why I’m scared shitless that I have a daughter due in 2 months. It’s not the crying, sleeplessness, pooping, puking, teething, whining, etc. I can handle that. I’m more concerned about the hormones, peer pressure, the sliding scale of things that seem “normal” (i.e. cell pics of playing with a friend’s toys) and dealing with guys like I was back in HS/College…
My wife and I are going through the same type of thing with our 13yo boy. (Actually my stepson).
We got him a cell phone under the condition that he used it responsibly. Within a month we are out to dinner and he gets up and goes to the bathroom leaving his phone on the table. My wife picks it up to look at and immediately finds a severely inappropriate picture he took of himself and sent to a girl he was ‘dating’.
He loses the phone for 6 months. Gets it back, is doing ok with it for several months. Wife checks it periodically but doesn’t find anything wrong. He starts ‘dating’ (if a 13 yo can even date) again and goes to bed one night leaving his phone in our kitchen. Wife checks it, finds inappropriate pictures and video from this 13yo girl and her friends they were sending to him and a ton of very explicit messages (the boy has a future writing for Penthouse forum).
Needless to say he lost phone for good and no longer gets to go skating, to the movies etc… with his friends un chaparoned.
His only comment throughout all this was that all his friends do stuff and send stuff like this and my wife and I are just old fashioned and don’t understand (we are still in our 30’s)!
And my wife wonders why I’m scared shitless that I have a daughter due in 2 months. It’s not the crying, sleeplessness, pooping, puking, teething, whining, etc. I can handle that. I’m more concerned about the hormones, peer pressure, the sliding scale of things that seem “normal” (i.e. cell pics of playing with a friend’s toys) and dealing with guys like I was back in HS/College…
The level to which her generation has gone is a bit of a shock to me.
I try to look at each successive generation and see how each one has “Devolved” and how each generation says “Well my generation never did that”, but I have to question the idea that at some point we had to swing back.
Looking back thru times and various cultures you can see some very sexually open societies. What I see going on with my daughters generation is as graphic and “open” as anything in past history. The real difference I see is that it seems to be at a younger age and with less “Self respect”.
My guess is that at some point there will be a swinging back to more “Conservative” relationships as a backlash to my daughters generation…I’m not sure how much more liberal you can get than her generation.
All one has to do is to log onto myspace and take a look at a few pictures. If a person is willing to post most of those in a public forum you can imagine what they are willing to post in “Private”.
Good lord every night at 10 o’clock sharp the “Girls Gone wild” advertisements start. These are 18yr olds, and tons of them at that, that think it perfectly ok to basically jump into soft porn and do it nationally.
It’s 100% true that “All of her/his friends are doing it”, that doesn’t make it right.
What a nightmare! I had been waffling about getting my 12 year old son a cell phone (it’s all he thinks and talks about when he’s not doing homework), but your story and a story about “sex-messaging” from a junior high teacher friend of mine just added two years to his possibility of a cell phone. If nothing else, when he does get one, I am not going to enable text messages. That way all he can do is talk and I limit the inappropriate behavior to that which he is willing to say out loud.
As for the accusation of being old-fashioned, I plan to tell him that someone has to be a grown-up and train him to be a grown-up.
Yeah, we went through the whole myspace issue too.
He begged and begged for us to let him on so we did. Around the same time as he got busted with his cell phone he also made the mistake of leaving his myspace logged on and went to bed. I sat down and was greeted with a string of explicit e-mails. Some were from the girl he was seeing and some were just from friends, but my god the stuff they were typing I would have not imagined when I was 13-14 years old. He got banned from the computer too.
Funny story was the next day my wife (who changed his password to something he didnt’ know) checked the next day and one of his girlfriends sent him a message saying something like ‘hey, I thought you said you got banned from myspace by your mom but I see you’re online, wanna talk dirty’. My wife typed back and simply said ‘he is banned, this is his mother.’ Wish I could have seen this girls face when she got that.
I’m with you on that one. I have refused to get my 13 year old daughter a cell phone and I actually think she’s the only kid in her entire grade 8 class without one. My reasoning is that she doesn’t really need one. She’s not out on her own yet (she needs to complete a self-defense course before she gets that privilege), so she’s either at school or with me or my DH. When she gets to the point that she’s out on her own, traveling by public transit and such, then it makes more sense. Right now, it’s just an expensive toy.
The hottie thread that has been going on in the LR for the last several months is another thing that scares me. Not that guys are posting and looking at pics of beautiful women - I have no problem with that. The thing that bothers me is that there are so many pics out there of young women in suggestive poses. I’m sure there’s much worse than what’s posted in there, but why do these girls/women feel compelled to post these pics to the whole world? I don’t have a problem if they’re sharing with close friends. I do have a problem when they’re just posted on Facebook or Myspace for everyone to see.
What a nightmare! I had been waffling about getting my 12 year old son a cell phone (it’s all he thinks and talks about when he’s not doing homework), but your story and a story about “sex-messaging” from a junior high teacher friend of mine just added two years to his possibility of a cell phone. If nothing else, when he does get one, I am not going to enable text messages. That way all he can do is talk and I limit the inappropriate behavior to that which he is willing to say out loud.
As for the accusation of being old-fashioned, I plan to tell him that someone has to be a grown-up and train him to be a grown-up.
We told our boy when he gets his phone back he’s getting the most simple, basic looking phone that there is with no text, no camera etc… I told my wife to just buy him that Jitterbug phone for old people and let him carry that around for a while.
The scary thing is that it seemed like these girls, and there were many of them, were as willing or more willing to put suggestive pictures up or send him stuff for the hell of it. I know the one video my wife found was 3 of his friends having a sleepover and they were sending out vidoes of them flashing and then posing as a group half naked. We have 2 daughters, one 10 and one 3, and these girls were only 13! When we tried to talk to our boy about it he just kept saying everyone he knows does stuff like that so it’s no big deal.
We try/tried TONS of things including banning, monitoring, counciling…screaming, yelling
She didn’t have a cell phone until she was 17+, and we made/make her pay for it.
In the end we’ve found you have to figure out a way to try and instill some values and “Draw them back from the edge” but still let them deal with the situation, age appropriately of course. After all this is and will be their world, they need to learn how to live in it on their own.
OTOH what my parents may have looked at and said “Your degrading yourself”, things like sex before marriage, living together etc., I accept as “Normal”. I look at the things my kid does as “Degrading” and she looks at them as “Normal”.
Somehwere there’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed but we are all looking at things from different perspectives. For me it’s about the reason the person is doing the things they are doing, not necessarily what they are doing.
