Youth culture and Porn.

I think what worries me most about these images all over the internet, is how they are effecting the psyche of the digital natives. It seems these days that hyper sexualized images and youth culture go hand in hand. Now don't get me wrong, I am not denying that when I was 13 I was worried about what boys thought of me, but I wasn't plagued with all this pressure to compete for boys attention with sluts on the internet.

If I did anything stupid to get their attention, like wear a way to revealing top (lets face it I would have) at least no one had a camera at the party to take a photo of me and post it around the internet. There wasn't facebook, or bebo, or even myspace.

These days it seems like teenage girls think in order to get boys to look at their pages they have to live up to the rest of the content on the internet. The amount of young girls who are posting 'slutty' pictures of themselves on the internet is getting creepy. Its like these girls have the if you can't beat 'em join 'em mentality, what these girls aren't being reminded of is how these images of themselves can backfire. Once upon a time you did something stupid as a teen, and eventually people would forget about it... These days once its on the internet it is impossible to know what has happened to that information, has some else copy and pasted it? when will it come back to bite you in arse?

Perhaps this could be blamed on the parents and schooling systems? If children were told at school how these images could be used, would it make a difference? I find it terrifying to think of the way that these kids and girls especially seem to think that in order to show how mature you are you need to post a picture of them posing suggestively. I'm just grateful that the internet didn't offer a platform for me to represent myself as a 13 yo because who knows what would be lingering out there, waiting for the right time to embarrass me on a huge scale.