teens

Did you feel icky seeing headlines about the Carrie Prejean nudie pics and the "sexting" epidemic? Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon argues that when you share or make public someone's privately-made sex photos or video, it's a form of sexual assault.

We're still trying to navigate what the digital world means for sexual harassment, espcially when it comes to young people. That's where ThatsNotCool.com comes in...

Update: This post is tragically apropos. A thirteen year old girl committed suicide after her nude photos were spread by classmates. More at The Curvature.

In Chris Lynch’s 2005 young adult novel Inexcusable (2005 National Book Award Finalist – Young People’s Literature, 2005 School Library Journal’s Best Books, 2006 YALSA Best Books for Young Adults) is a disturbing tale of the effects of rape culture from the inside. In narrator Keir Sarafian, high school senior and football star, Lynch has created a sickeningly realistic embodiment of a teen rapist.

I opened a big can of feminist worms on Thursday with my post I Blame Porn, In which I talked about how the mainstreaming of mass-produced hetero porn is starting to influence—negatively—the cultural perceptions of what’s sexy, particularly among teenagers. I was stunned by the number of Bitch readers who shouted me down, proclaiming that bald-vadge, facial-cumshot studio-produced porn isn’t misogynist and doesn’t have any effect at all on sexual behavior. The most common reason it couldn’t be bad or misogynist? Because they like it and imitate it and they choose their choice! Free will FTW! Guess what, folks? You can choose your choice, but you do not live—or fuck—in a vacuum. No matter how liberated you think you are, the truth is, your sexual development did not just happen spontaneously. We are having different sex than our mothers did. They had different sex than their mothers did. Why? The changes in their sex lives reflected the huge changes in the culture that they lived in. When society shifts the way it regards sex—and women—our sex lives change. Whether those cultural changes are due to birth control, women's lib, the destigmatizing of gay and premarital sex, greater access to written erotica or internet porn, there's no doubt that when it comes to our sexual behavior CULTURE MATTERS. If you think your sexual desires and behavior just sprang up sui generis because you are a unique individual with free will who's completely uninfluenced by society, you are kidding yourself.

Facials, hairlessness, porn stars as role models...is internet porn changing sex for teenagers and twentysomethings? How has the rise of mainstream, accessible porn started fucking with teenage brains, both male and female?

"YA Lit Bitch" is the new Page Turner series about my ever-so-slight (or ever-so-obvious) obsession with young adult literature that’s not only good, but represents a wide-open range of teenagers’ lives with a feminist heroine (or 2, 3) thrown into the mix. The series features interviews with YA authors about their work as well as feminism, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, and other issues.

This week we talk with author Laurie Halse Anderson, who’s written five YA novels, including the New York Times best-seller Speak, one of the most compelling depictions of the trauma of the interior space of a teenage sexual assault survivor. Anderson has been getting letters from teen rape and incest survivors ever since she published Speak, which was her first novel, ten years ago. Her latest,Wintergirls, covers the well-worn, adolescent terrain of eating disorders through the lives of two 18-year-old girls, Lia and Cassie.

Page Turner talked with Anderson about growing up feminist, what she loves about the teen audience, personal power in a consumer-driven culture, and how Wintergirls brought to light her own issues with disordered eating and body image.

Read on for more!