Yes, but let's distinguish bragging, sometimes embellished, in a junior high locker room, and providing hard evidence for all the world to see. It was hard enough for a kid to live her (or sometimes his) reputation down when there was only gossip, without moving away. It's harder now."Technology does change things, and there can be very serious consequences" Cumming said. "But that obscures the fact that children and young people are sexual beings who have explored their sexuality in all times, and all cultures and all places.
"A distinction has to be made between nudity and child porn," he added.
Trust The Nation to find an author who sees only the upside potential.
Make the transgressive so common that it becomes boring. We have much to look forward to.The new means of production carries pitfalls as surely as the fleeting passions of a teenager. The rude boy documenting a girl going down on him unawares to share behind her back with his MySpace buddies will always be with us, but her problem, and his too, started before the shutter clicked. The girl who has mastered the nude self-portrait may later regret its mass circulation, but she may also have got comfortable in her skin while taking pictures. Maybe the Polaroid Land Camera should make a comeback, but it is just possible that the 15-year-olds are envisioning, however inchoately, a saner world than the one the grown-ups lecturing them have constructed, one where their life chances won't be ruined by a "compromising" photograph on the Internet. If sexting really is as common as is claimed, it's more likely to proliferate than to abate, and then the issue won't be scandal or embarrassment but banality.
The truth is, a lot of good can come of taking nude pictures. Not so much the image as the act, and less the act of sex than the play of love, or imagination or freedom among friends. Remember play? Remember dalliance? Remember the captured glimpse of a lover stripped and weak with need?
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