Filtered
When the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the Communications Decency Act,
civil libertarians sighed relief for the First Amendment rights of adults and
rose en masse, along with the parenting magazines and cyber columnists,
to salute a fleet of new software packages that would guard the borders
by "filtering" Net-borne filth from kids. The software came with names
evoking caregivers (NetNanny, CyberSitter) and cops (CyberPatrol).
The telecommunications bill, to which the CDA would have been an
amendment, was also the first to propose the V-chip, a device to be
installed in televisions that could screen out programs according to
ratings coded for sex, vulgar language, violence, and so forth. Around
that time, a New Yorker cartoon showed a computer scientist at her
workstation, telling a colleague, "I have in mind a V-chip to be implanted
directly in children."
As the joke suggests, these people's relief was misplaced. Sure,
parents had a hand in deciding what movies their kids saw, what
books they read and what Web sites they visited. But the could
not filter out all the "dirty" sex, even if they wanted to. And technology
was not going to solve the problem, no matter how smart
the programmers made it. For one thing, computer-savvy kids were
smarter. One enterprising twelve-year-old A student programmed
the computer to record his father's keystrokes as he set up the filter,
then deleted them, downloaded some porn, and sold it to his
friends.
Moreover, this artificial intelligence was about as discriminating
as Senator James Exon, the Nebraska Democrat who sponsored the
CDA. CyberSitter couldn't tell the difference between the dirty word
penis and the clean one any better than a person could. So the
programs, and the people employed to scroll through the names of
Web sites looking for potential offenders, erred on the far side of
caution. America Online blocked the word breast until cancer patients
complained they couldn't get to their support groups and
information sites. Cyber Patrol's top-secret CyberNOT list banned
Planed Parenthood's sites, feminist, youth, and gay sites, as well as
free speech and Second Amendment sites and such "violent" information
as that posted by the city of Hiroshima about is peace memorial.
CyberSitter blocked the site of the National Organization for Women.
The poet Anne Sexton and the Sussex County Fair were
universally banned because of the spelling of their names, as were
Christian sites advertising videos about sexuality. Even the allegedly
more sensitive PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection),
software that employs a site-rating system and was
recommended for schools and public libraries as well as homes, could
leave kids "confined to a research world smaller than their school library,"
attorney Heins pointed out, "because after all, the Encyclopedia
Brittanica has an entry on 'contraception,'" a word that would
give it the equivalent of an R or X rating. Nevertheless, by 1999,
almost a third of online households had installed a filtering device on
their computers. And in December 2000, unnoticed during the
prolonged presidential postelections, Bill Clinton signed the Child
Internet Protection Act (CIPA), requiring public libraries to filter
their computers or lose federal funding; upon his assumption of the
presidency, George W. Bush affirmed his commitment to Internet
censorship. At this writing, the American Library Association and
the ACLU have brought suit challenging CIPA's constitutionality.
Opponents of government regulation of the Net usually maintain
that parents, and not the state, should decide what their children
see and read. But there are some adults who believe kids can make
their own decisions. In Wired magazine, journalist Jon Katz argued
that by accepting technological surrogates for government censorship
under the Communications Decency Act, liberals had sold out
their kids' free-speech rights. Katz said he and his wife were
concerned for their fourteen-year-old daughter's safety, but they had
also schooled her in media literacy and instilled moral intelligence,
also known as conscience. In short, they trusted her. So the girl
surfed the Net unsupervised, discussing what she found there just
as she'd discuss a movie or an event at school. If an uncomfortable
or threatening situation arose, she was instructed to employ the tactic
she learned in preschool: "Use your words." The appropriate
phrase for Internet creeps, said Katz, is "Get lost."
The Facts
Luckily, just as the sources of information about sex dried up in the
earthbound institutions of the public school and the publishing house.
they started proliferating in cyberspace, where kids are wont to read
anyway. The cheap and wide-open World Wide Web began to offer
a bounty of witty, hip, pleasure-positive, credible, comforting, user-friendly
sites on sexuality for kids and by kids, as well as those not specifically
targeted to youngsters but useful to anyone engaging in sex or
contemplating it. (In fact, at this writing the two best recent sex-ed books
are compilations of the contents of Web sites: "The 'Go Ask Alice'
Book of Answers," from the Columbia University Web site of the same name,
and "Deal with It!" from gURL.com.)
Yes, any twelve-year-old with a jot of computer literacy can quickly click
to a postage-size photo of a man in scuba gear forcing a female amputee
to have anal intercourse with a sea cucumber (well, the sea cucumber is
blacked out unless you type in your credit-card number). "Boy, I go on the
Web and I'm seeing stuff that makes me feel Amish!" exclaimed a member
of a group of not exactly prudish propagandists called the Safer Sex Sluts.
But in his job as a freelance sex educator, this man, Rob Yaeger, encourages
kids to search out all the sexual information they can find. And he knows they
can find it, up-to-date and uncensored, on the Web.
Because Web sites are here today and gone tomorrow, the designation
of any sort of a sex-educational cyber-canon is impossible. Instead, I'll
name names of sites extant at this writing as exemplars of what a good
resource should be.
Detailed, Playful, Egalitarian
Go Ask Alice, Columbia University's sex and health information site staffed
by a half dozen writers in occasional consultation with the university
hospital's doctors, answers hundreds of questions a day from nervous first
kissers and unsure bisexuals, HIV-positive teens and those wishing to avoid
becoming so, virgins and pre-orgasmic lovers in more than fifty countries.
"I am 16 years old and I have never been kissed and I have so many questions
about it, but I am very nervous about it because I think I am really going to
mess up," writes Freaked Out About First Kiss. "What is the common age
for a girl to be kissed? When you kiss someone, do you both move your tongue
at the same time? And where do you move your tongue? God this is driving
me crazy. And since I have never kissed anyone, I am afraid to go out with a
guy because what if he freaks out when I tell him that I have never been kissed,
and, if he tells a whole bunch of people, I would feel so stupid."
Calm, reassuring, and authoritative, Alice replies: "No need to get your
knickers in a twist over your very first kiss -- the more relaxed you are,
the more enjoyable this event will likely be for you and your lucky partner.
Nor does Alice see why you need to tell any potential partner about your
kissing, or non-kissing, history."
Typically thorough and gently humorous, Alice proceed through more
precise suggestions for kissing practice. She resolutely resists defining
normal behavior, even though "Am I normal?" lurks beneath many of the
questions she, and every other "expert" receives (particularly the
perennials about masturbation, penis size, and homosexuality). "Each
kiss will be a little different, depending on many things, such as who you are
kissing, how you feel about the person, and what is going on at the time,"
she says. "Kissing is not a science."
Alice's values are those of democracy, equality, communication, and
mutual consent: "Your tongue will most likely be met by the other
person's, and the both of you can go from there -- figuring out what pleases
each other and what is, and is not, comfortable." Although she does not
dispense over-the-counter behavioral or medical prescriptions, questions about
intercourse or oral or anal sex are accompanied by safe-sex tips. Information
on contraception and abortion, STD testing, homosexuality, HIV prevention
and treatment, and sexual violence are ubiquitous on the site, along with
links to other resources.
Sex-Positive, "Graphic"
Like Alice, and like the best classroom teachers and texts, the superior
sex-ed sites combine realism about the likelihood of youthful sexual
activity with enthusiasm, but not boosterism, for sex -- a sort of sexual
pro-choice position. This balance is struck nicely on the home page of
Chicago's adult-and-youth Coalition for Positive Sexuality and in its
slogan, "Just say yes."
"Just Say Yes means having a positive attitude about sexuality -- gay,
straight or bi. It means saying "yes" to sex you do want, and "no" to
sex you don't. It means there's nothing wrong with you if you decide to
have sex, and nothing wrong with you if you decide not to. You have
the right to make your own choices, and to have people respect them.
Sex is enjoyable when everyone involved is into it, and when everyone
has the information they need to take care of themselves and each other."
Even while they espouse such wide-open values, many of the sex sites
post warnings that their discussions might occasionally be "graphic" (this
may be to mollify fretting moms and dads or zealous politicians or federal
agents). What this means is that the information is detailed enough to be
useful to someone who actually intends to use it. So, unlike abstinence-plus
educators, who might teach condom application using the ever-firm banana,
or the abstinence-only educators, whose goal is to make the condom sound
so icky and unreliable that students will reject the whole ordeal of
penetration, the designers of safe-sex pages proceed as if the condom is
going to be rolled onto a penis, which is then going to be inserted into
a bodily orifice of another person. These sites universally discuss a crucial,
and too often neglected, component of condom use: lubricant, which renders
the latex prophylactic more pleasurable in sensation and less likely to tear.
On Just Say Yes's site, an animated limp penis stands up to receive its
rubber hat, applied by someone else's hands, then goes limp and starts all
over again, endlessly. "Get it on," the text advises, noting the other vital
detail that the penis has to be erect before the condom goes on it. The
organ, by the way, is healthy-looking but not intimidatingly large.
Youthful, Compassionate
Equally important in the interactive universe of the Web are the kid-to-kid
chats and personal stories featured on many sites. On gayplace.com,
a site maintained by the SAFETeen Project for GLBTQ (that's gay, lesbian,
bi, transgendered, and "questioning") youth, "Jason -- A Story of Love,
Determination, Hope, and Death," tells the autobiographcial (and possibly
embroidered) tale of a fourteen-year-old, "innocent, young, [Mormon] boy...
struggling to understand myself and my sexuality," who falls in love with Jason,
a twelve-year-old boy in his Boy Scout troop. After some months their
"relationship bloomed into a powerful bond of love. We became one in spirit,
soul, and often enough, body." Kicked out of his house, Jason runs away,
becomes a porn actor, and eventually kills himself. A melodrama perhaps,
but judging from the number of similar stories online, a direct arrow to the
hearts of isolated gay and lesbian kids. Of the estimated five thousand
young people who commit suicide annually, 30 percent are gay, lesbian,
or desperately "questioning."
Chat on Coalition for Positive Sexuality's "Let's Talk" bulletin board
wheels freely, from sadomasochism ("Okay, so here's the question.
im [sic] interested in becoming a submissive and then maybe a slave.
do any of you know any websites about that? mainly informative, not porn")
to a plea for help from a religious boy, "overwhelmed by my hormones,"
who wails, "Is there any kind of pill I can take or something else I can take to
totally stop this sex drive or at least curb it?" He received only one practical
response: "All I can say is avoid spicy food."
gURL.com, a Webzine for teenage girls, was founded by two women not
so far into adulthood that they'd forgotten either the pain and humiliation
("Those Yucky Emotions") or the sweetness of teen-girl life, including the
discovery of sexuality. Along with the straight-on info about such physical subjects
as the clitoris and vaginal discharge, the zine's interactive Sexuality Series
challenges the mainstream media's tyranny over young people's sexual
tastes and expectations. "[I]n the world of thinking about sex, anything
can be sexy," wrote the Webmistresses in one installment. "This is
sometimes difficult to remember while being bombarded with images and what-not
from the world which try to tell you 'WHAT SEX(Y) IS.'" Visitors' contributions
to a page on kissing included, for instance, "Kissing people's eyelids is really nice,
too."
A publication that comes both on paper and in pixels is Sex, Etc.
(www.sxetc.org), an award-winning newsletter produced for teens by teens
under the aegis of the Network for Family Life Education at
Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. Treating issues from open adoption
to parental consent for abortion, from depression to whether masturbation
can "hurt you in any way" (answer, in short: no), the well-written, good-looking
pub strikes a balance between uncertainty and knowingness, feeling and fact.
Its racially, sexually, and economically diverse editorial board ensures a wide
range of language and opinion.
Anonymous
Although adults have posted Danger signs all along the byways of
cyberspace, the online world is actually one of the safest sexual zones.
If a young person is inclined to try her typing fingers at cyber-sex, she can
experiment with sexual poses and fantasies without worrying about pregnancy,
STDs, or even, for the most part, emotional involvement. If the action gets
too hot, she can politely absent herself or delete an overanxious suitor.
The same anonymity that gives cybersex its fluidity and safety also
lubricates the dissemination of sexual information. The namelessness
of its correspondents, usually flagged as the Web's inherent peril, shelters
youngsters from the mortification of appearing klutzy or uncool, slutty or
prudish. Questions that are virtually unaskable in person are easily asked
virtually. One boy queries Alice about the etiquette of oral sex, specifically,
whether or not to come in his girlfriend's mouth and how to talk about it.
The correspondent closes his letter, "I realize this question may sound
rather juvenile, but who else can I turn to?" Alice's answer: Discuss it
beforehand. Then, when the big moment arrives, say, "Where would you
like me to cum -- in your mouth, or somewhere else? ... I'll tell you when
I'm about to go... or I'll bark... or something." Alice congratulates the
writer for his maturity in being so considerate of his partner.
And then there are the postings whose responses might save a young
person from more than embarrassment. "My boyfriend hits me."
"I am turning tricks and want to know if I have to use condoms every
time." "My parents hate me because I'm gay. I want to kill myself."
On the Web, the lonely can get fast companionship; the clueless,
compassionate, nomoralistic support and crucial practical help.
At best, a kid in need can find a community of kindred souls struggling
with a marginalized sexual identity, with violence or date rape, hostile
parents or depression -- and then bookmark it for the next time.
Plentiful, Accessible
Many adults would argue that there's too much sexually explicit
materials on the Web, in the form of pornography. Doubtless,
there's lots. Will it hurt kids who look at it? I asked the constitutional
lawyer and writer Marjory Heins, who has probably reviewed the
subject more thoroughly than anyone else in the United States.
Her response (replete with lawyerly and scholarly qualifiers):
"As far as I'm aware, there's very little psychological research on the
effects of viewing pornography on children at all. And to the extent
one can even talk about scientific proof in social-science research,
it's my opinion that it has not been proved that there are widespread or
predictable adverse psychological effects on kids from exposure to
pornography." My own reviews of the literature, scant as it is, come to
the same conclusion. Pornography doesn't hurt the viewer, and, especially
for a young person trying to figure out his or her sexual orientation, it can
help in exploring fantasies and confirming that other people share the
same tastes.
But porn offers only one kind of information: rudimentary images of
physical parts and the permutations of their display and contact,
blessedly free of judgmental commentary (if you don't count
"Jessica's perfect boobs," etc.). In my opinion, the problem with
sexual information on the Net is not that there is too much of it but
that too little of it (at this writing, anyhow) is any good. That's what
David Shpritz, a high school cyberwizard at the Park School in
Brooklandville, Maryland, found when he went online in the late 1990s,
prospecting for resources on sexuality for his classmates. Under
the keywords sexual health, he turned up some information on AIDS
and HIV that he thought might be intimidating to teenagers, a few good
pages for gays and lesbians, and a preponderance of advertisements
for sexual aids, mostly for impotence. "One disturbing observation,"
he wrote, was "that even out of the sites that seemed helpful for teens,
there were very few that dealt at all with topics like communication
or relationships." All he found on this score was "Teen Love Connection,"
run by two sixteen-year-olds, but it was more like "a dating game or
'singles bar'" than a source of information. When he queried, "How do
I know if I'm in love?" (incidentally, an extremely frequent FAQ from teens),
he received no answer. Said Shpritz, with endearing humility, "I guess
it's a good thing I didn't really need to know."
Finally, what's on the Net is simply unavailable to too many kids.
While the percentage of American households with Internet access is
soaring, and Internet penetration is increasingly rapidly, alongside
that growth exists a persistent, even widening racial, ethnic, and
economic "digital divide." More than half of American households
owned computers and 41 percent were going online in August 2000.
But fewer than a quarter of black and Hispanic households had
Internet connections, a bigger gap between those families and
white and Asian American families than existed two years earlier.
Not surprisingly, income also accounted for disparities in Web access.
Whereas more than three-quarters of households with incomes over
fifty thousand dollars had Internet accounts in 2000, only 12.7 percent
of those making less than fifteen thousand dollars and 21 percent
between fifteen thousand and twenty-five thousand did.
Government and privately funded efforts to provide Internet access
to school and libraries in poor neighborhoods may do little for sex
education anyhow. For, under community and political pressure, many
of these institutions have installed filtering software, and Congress
has required it on every publicly owned computer accessed by
minors. Such filters, as we saw in chapter 1, block the very information
that might forestall a pregnancy or HIV infection or help a kid extricate
herself from an abusive relationship. To get the facts, kids need freedom.
