Teens, Sexting and Morality Police

(Young Spartacus pages)

Across the U.S., a howl of outraged moralism has arisen against a new, terrifying danger springing from every DSL connection, every Wi-Fi linkup, transmitted by invisible radio waves from GSM tower to GSM tower. This horrifying plague? Young people showing one another their naughty bits.

For “sexting,” sending or receiving sexy photos of each other via cell phones and computers, teenagers across the country have been hauled off to jail and charged with creation, possession and distribution of child pornography. According to a 2009 survey by MTV and the Associated Press, three in every ten people between the ages of 14 and 24 have been involved in sexting. But in capitalist America, religious backwardness and “family values” moralism make sexual experiences as scarring and guilt-ridden as possible while draining as much enjoyment from them as can be. We say: Consensual sexual expression is no crime!

It’s no surprise that youth want to play digital doctor. Whenever humans have developed a new medium of communication, they have inevitably taken advantage of it to broadcast their physical assets, and doubly so for teenagers with their hormones all atwitter. However, the current uproar over sexting, driven by the bourgeois media, feminists and moral majority think tanks such as the pro-abstinence National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, poses a very real danger—especially, but not only, to the teenagers they say they want to “protect.”

Consider Hope Witsell, a 13-year-old in Florida. She sent a photograph of her breasts to a boy she liked, which was subsequently circulated among other students at her school. For this “crime” she was suspended from school, grounded and banned from the Internet and her cell phone. After another “incident” she was sent to a Christian counselor. For trying to attract a boy, she was virtually branded with a scarlet letter—picked on, mocked and isolated from school, her friends and the outside world. Soon after the next school year started, she committed suicide. Her death can be laid squarely at the feet of the bourgeoisie’s anti-sex bigots.

At age 18, Phillip Alpert was arrested in Florida for distributing child pornography because he forwarded a picture of his naked girlfriend to her friends and family after a fight with her. Stigmatized under the bourgeoisie’s vicious anti-sex crusade, he will be forced to register as a sex offender until he is 43 years old. Alpert can’t live with his father because his father lives too close to a high school—the same one Alpert attended. Alpert has been kicked out of college and, as a convicted felon, has not been able to find a job. He is afraid to e-mail his lawyer because Alpert’s probation officer can send him to jail for e-mail that is not work- or school-related. In an invitation to vigilante terror, Alpert’s age, hair color, eye color and home address have been posted on the public sex offender registry on the Internet, and, as he describes, “I’ve actually had a lot of neighbors come to my door...to check if it was safe for their kids to play around outside, with me here” (MTV News, 11 February). Hands off Phillip Alpert!

The “family values” hypocrites are intent on stamping out all behavior that threatens the bourgeois conception of marriage as one man on one woman, for life. Fear, guilt and repression are loaded on the very young for even having sexual thoughts. The cops, courts and prisons have been mobilized—the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program classifies “sex offenses” as “Offenses against chastity, common decency, morals, and the like”! This all flows from the capitalist class’s dependence on the institution of the family—the main source of the oppression of women and youth. For workers, its purpose is to inculcate social conservatism and to raise the next generation; for the rich, it is the vehicle for passing wealth on to their children.

The sexting witchhunt is an old-fashioned moral panic in the service of social reaction, reminiscent of the early 20th-century hysteria over automobiles leading to “necking” and “heavy petting.” Flirting, fighting, arguing, screwing, spreading horrid rumors, making both regrettable and reasonable decisions—these are all part of growing up. What’s going on is not a new “hypersexualized” culture, as right-wing and feminist commentators alike have claimed. Nor is it the case that youth today are growing up “too fast.” To the contrary, sociologists widely recognize that modern society has forced youth into an artificially prolonged adolescence. Now beset by financial crisis, capitalist society has little to offer those youth who are not scions of bourgeois families—decent education, jobs and an independent future appear further and further out of reach for most, leaving youth more dependent on their families.

Cases like Witsell’s and Alpert’s have sparked a national debate over what is an “appropriate” penalty for sexting, with the result that over ten states have passed or are considering legislation specifically targeting the practice. But the real criminals here are those forces of capitalist reaction ruining the lives of youth for doing something that youth do naturally. Marxists oppose the prosecution of sexting just as we oppose all laws against “crimes without victims,” such as prostitution, drug use or pornography, including “child pornography,” which, like all pornography, is simply words and images designed for pleasure. We oppose reactionary “age of consent” laws and all laws that criminalize consensual sexual activity. Our guiding principle in sexual matters is simply that of mutual effective consent—that is, mutual agreement and understanding. We say: Government out of the bedroom!

Under capitalism, human relations, including sexuality, will always be twisted and distorted. The family must be replaced as part of the transition to a classless, communist society. But to even begin to do this, the working class must first smash the capitalist state—whose genuine inhuman perversity was shown in the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, Bagram prison and Guantánamo Bay—along with all of its reactionary laws, and establish a workers state. As we wrote in “Coming of Age in the U.S.A.—Sex, Fear and Religious Reaction” (WV No. 877, 29 September 2006):

“Technology and modern medicine enable humanity to increasingly control the forces of nature and use them to the advantage of human beings. Abortion and birth control give women greater control over their own reproduction, and there are simple measures that greatly reduce the risk of STDs. While these advances allow sex to be a safe and enjoyable act for both men and women, it is only with the destruction of capitalism that humanity will be able to fully avail itself of these advances and be freed from state repression and religious bigotry. And only then will youth be able to do what they please sexually, with whom they please, free of state and parental control.”