In case you’re wondering, I just cited more relevant data in one paragraph than Sales has in five pages.I’m not saying I can prove Sales wrong. I’m just saying there’s no good reason to believe she’s right, either. Collecting "hookup" statistics is complicated: for one thing, hooking up can mean anything from kissing to sex. One group found that internet-era college students were neither having sex more frequently nor sleeping with more people than their counterparts from the 1980s and 1990s.
-Game, set, match. b_b said it well in the first post Hold the fuck up. I'm calling BS on this, given that this article (and every other one I've read that is just like it) seems to suffer from an incredible lack of data. Teenage girls getting their hearts broken by asshole boys? Is that a new concept? Might as well be an 80's party movie.
-yep.
The thing is, pretty much none of this shit happened when I was at school because it couldn't. Of course there was still bullying, but it could no way exceed to the depths of hell it does now with the internet (let's forget "social media" and just talk about what's actually relevant here, the internet itself). * you couldn't be groomed over an anonymous communications network * you couldn't communicate 24/7 unsupervised with strangers (getting private time on the home phone was hard enough) * porn exposure was a fraction of what it is now. Soft porn, like Playboy, was the norm, not "Teen Anal Gangbang Sluts V" * there was nothing like "pro-ana" sites to encourage eating disorders, and "heroin chic" still hadn't arrived. Cindy Crawford was the ideal * I had never heard of cutting. I am sure it existed, but no way was it as prevalent * no one just "hooked up", there was just no concept of "friends with benefits" (in a non-slut sense). Maybe this was a bad thing, because there was more shame about casual sex in my day, but you generally didn't just sleep with someone unless you were kinda-sorting-dating them at least * people had barely heard of anal, it was considered very "out there" I'm not some raging anti-porn campaigner. I just think it's totally disingenuous to try and pretend that the experience and activities of today's generation is no different from previous ones. What they are exposed to, and what they go through is utterly different on so many levels than what we went through in the 1980s and previously. I also wouldn't be studying college age students to spot these trends. I would be studying tweens to mid-teens.
Facebook is a force multiplier, for sure. The thing of it is, though, it hasn't added to the vetting, it's shifted the vetting. Whereas you and I used to rely on face-to-face communication and innuendo, it can now be done digitally... so the personal slander-mongering has actually gone down. My data on this is scarce - conversations with a few teenagers - but Facebook hasn't created a surveillance culture, it's created an ornate and intricate world where digital missteps matter too much. As far as the proliferation of porn, it's at least one cause for forceable rape dropping 30 percent and may be related to the plummeting teenage pregnancy rates in the United States. And I don't know about you, but we sure as fuck had John Holmes anal sex videos in 8th grade, they were just SLP on VHS. You could buy them by the truckload out of the back of National Lampoon. One of the reasons I have no tolerance for cutters is I dated two and knew five... back in '91. Cindy Crawford may have been the norm, but you can't blame the Internet for this list. And fuckin' A - I hooked up plenty. We just called them "one night stands" and they were points of pride for men, points of shame for women. At least now we've got some equality. The Internet complicates the fuck out of things. I've raged about this before. But to somehow think the trevails of modern adolescent life are wholly due to the proliferation of the Internet is naive.