—comes from the 2010 Saturday Night Live skit featuring a news anchor presenting an account about “another terrifying teenage trend, ” accompanied by a trench-coated reporter explaining trampolining: “A teen kid sits on top of the one-story household getting dental intercourse from a woman leaping down and up for a backyard trampoline that is large. Sources say if a woman trampolines ten boys, she gets a bracelet—and that is exactly just just what Silly Bandz are. ” The skit proceeded to demonstrate a teen calmly dismissing the reporter’s questions about trampolining (“I’ve never ever done this…. We don’t think that’s also actually possible”), while her mom is overcome by hysterical fear. The skit been able to combine the sex that is oral of events utilizing the bracelet-as-coupon theme of intercourse bracelets also to illustrate exactly just how television uncritically encourages concern in addition to general general public gets caught up in fear. Satire, then, allowed a critical representation of television’s protection of those tales which was otherwise missing whenever TV addressed claims about intercourse bracelets and rainbow parties.
Although this chapter examines role that is television’s distributing the modern legends about intercourse bracelets and rainbow parties,
They are only two among numerous claims sex that is about teen have obtained significant amounts of news attention in modern times. As an example, in 2008, Time mag went a bit about a senior school in|school that is high Massachusetts where there was indeed a rise in student pregnancies and quoted the school principal, whom advertised that girls had produced pact to bisexual masterbation have expecting together. After this tale, there is an onslaught of media protection citing the pregnancy that is so-called as another bit of proof that teenagers were out of hand. This tale made headlines into the U.S. Also in Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland., some reports cast doubt on whether there ever ended up being such a pact (evidently, the key whom stated there is a pact could perhaps not remember where he heard that information, and no one else could verify his type of the whole tale). Yet news protection persisted, as well as in 2010, a made-for-television movie, The Pregnancy Pact, premiered from the life cable channel, which reported it had been “inspired by a true tale. ”
The pattern is clear for the pregnancy-pact story, like reports of sex bracelets and rainbow parties.
The news picks up a story that is salacious intimate subjects are newsworthy; in specific, tales about young ones and intercourse are specially newsworthy since they could be approached from different angles—vulnerable children at risk of victimization and needing protection, licentious young ones, specially girls, gone wild and having to be brought in check, middle-class children acting down just as much as children through the “wrong region of the tracks, ” and so forth. While printing news often provide nuanced remedies that enable experts and skeptics become heard, television’s attention tends to become more fleeting and less subdued. Whenever television did address rainbow parties or intercourse bracelets, it seldom lasted significantly more than a few minutes—a quick segment in a program that is longer. Presumably, this reflected the restricted product television needed to use: there clearly was no footage of sexual play, no step-by-step testimony from young ones whom acknowledged playing these tasks, no specialists that has examined the topics. Alternatively, television protection arrived right down to saying the legends. There isn’t much distinction between Oprah hosting a author whom stated that she chatted to girls whom stated they’d found out about rainbow parties and conversations for which individuals relay exactly exactly what they’ve heard from somebody who understands somebody who knows an individual who had sex after breaking a bracelet. But television’s larger audiences imply that these stories spread further, until they become familiar social touchstones, one of those ideas we all know about kids today. As a result, not just perform some legends become commonly thought, nevertheless the “teens gone that is wild becomes ingrained. This, in change, impacts how exactly we consider the image that is overall of young individuals.
Excerpted from “Kids Gone crazy: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, comprehending the buzz Over Teen Sex” by Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle. Copyright © 2014 by Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle. Reprinted by arrangement with NYU Press. All legal rights reserved.
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