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Love and Hate in the Era of Surveillance: | 4 comments

[new] my so called [real] life: (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#4)
by paullloydsargent (enolagrey@hotmail.com) on Mon Jan 26th, 2004 at 09:36:07 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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First off, a number of friends checked this thread and for whatever reason, responded to me off site. So, included here, somewhat tangentially, are responses to a few thoughts raised by folks who emailed me. As well, I'm not sure I have an answer for Aileen's question (What could people - especially young people - be looking for from one another?), but let's run through some ideas:

There are many who've been dissecting "falling in love" for quite some time. Foucault's "History of Sexuality" does a nice job peeking under the covers of courtly love. Laura Kipnis's recent book "Against Love--A Polemic" questions a great number of the sacred tenets of traditional monogamous relationships. I ought to note as well Dan Savage's attacks on monogamy in his columns and recent book "Skipping Towards Gomorra." How those who question "family-values"-sex and traditional partnerships would write about teenage love/lust in the age of reverse Google searches and SMS isn't totally clear to me, but from my perspective, I think one has to trace a few different teleological progressions to get to the 15-year-old stripping, alone in his/her room, for all the world to see via a PC and web cam.

Folks like Larry Clark have been trying to shock the "truth" about teens into us for almost half a century now (I was amused once at a Hollywood Video chain in Las Vegas that had filed the movie "Kids" in their documentary section). My thought while watching "Kids" in 1995 was that despite the massive over-simplifications and extreme exaggerations in the story's fictional timeline, I could imagine many of my friends' experiences illustrated by the film. At that age, I was quite timid, square even, by the standards of angry punk rock skateboarding kids caught between the lures of drug culture, "manly" sexual aggression, and the outright rage of the Straight Edge movement. I was instead witness to the pain and suffering among both male and female friends, as they learned the hard way that unsheltered life can hold some pretty severe consequences. I don't mean to get all "sex negative" here, but by 19 or so, there was no question in my mind that all our hard-won, teenage-riot freedom was not to be taken lightly. So if the kids of my generation (pre-Brittany, pre-online sex chat) were having trouble keeping their wits about them, I imagine it's only getting more complicated.

As well, at least according to many horrified social scientists, more and more kids are raising themselves. Even when parents are around, they often don't know the first thing about those new-fangled web cams or picture phones. So adding technological and independence factors to ever-advancing sexualities and now I'm starting to see how one arrives at "more than two hundred children--some as young as twelve--exposed to syphilis through group sex" or how "a Kentucky 15-year-old [can be caught running] an Internet child pornography ring."

How does this relate to a 14-year-old's first date? I'd say it MUST affect kids-- sheltered, coddled and cared for or otherwise--and their behavior. If nothing else, a sense of fear and cynicism must creep into traditional crushes. My sexually formative high school years corresponded with US sex ed attempts to scare the "fuck" right out of us, thanks to HIV/AIDS and cursory nods to "date rape awareness." Though these factors may not have directed every sex-related decision I made, they certainly made me worry a lot! Similarly, I have to assume cultural overloading affects teens today. If more than half of the marriages you observe in your parents' generation end in divorce, if you can get to (legal) porn sites with teens only a year or two your elder, if you can meet other kids and teens from all over the globe and chat with them about this stuff (as well as the new Kelis video on MTV!), you'd have to be affected in some way. So maybe "falling in love" could mean "safe sex," with only Internet affairs with cute chat room girls from a thousand miles away. Maybe the drama of a cell phone relationship is just fine with you because, last night on national TV, Dr. Phil was scolding a 13-year-old girl for giving blowjobs to her guy friends at school. Witness all the "reclaim yr virginity" movements, like the Silver Ring Thing, and the rise in Christian rock (from chart-friendly Creed to downright fanatic Ghoti Hook and the rest of the Tooth & Nail line up ) among teen audiences.

And maybe, like Laura Kipnis suggests in her book, we might be too busy to "work" at love because we are so busy "working at work." Maybe a nice IM tryst is all the love for which we have time, thanks to the all-consuming multitasking of New Millennium capitalism. Or maybe virtual sex absolves us of all of the guilt and responsibility and faithfulness and commitment and...of traditional monogamous relationships. Do Androids dream of electric regret?

So maybe kids and teens today are better off falling in love with characters in books and movies, with untouchable celebrities, because translating unhealthy crushes to "so called real life," with its Caller ID and spy cams, can be soooo much less Romantic than scary, like Leonardo DiCaprio as Romeo in the bushes below the balcony with a Sony Night Vision camera and the URL www.trueteenbabes.com. Or maybe it is just like when "we" were kids; a distraction from other, rather boring or annoying teen dramas, like Algebra, puberty, and parents who want to talk about the dangers of sex and smoking.

paullloyd rambling
signs, signs, everywhere signs...
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Love and Hate in the Era of Surveillance: | 4 comments

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