Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
April 12, 2016
It ain’t exactly The Breakfast Club, but imagine a classroom filled with 12- or 13-year-old kids -- seventh graders serving after-school detention -- all of ‘em eating snacks while staring at their phones. Let take a closer look at six of these adolescents, shall we?
I’ve had this article in mind for a while but, to be blunt, didn’t have the stomach to research it -- especially the part about what kind of porn these young boys are learning from and getting off to. I’ll get to that later but let me first outline what I thought was a pretty interesting approach.
After watching the documentary, Fed Up, I decided I’d break down what each kid was consuming. From there, I was gonna' introduce you to the kids and explain what they’re doing on their phone. I only got through two such descriptions before the whole thing unraveled, in a hurry. Here are the two intros I wrote:
Daisy is in detention for missing so much school lately. Born in Mexico, she’s lived in the United States since she was a toddler. Daisy is downing her second Snapple Iced Tea (16 ounces = 50 grams sugar, 200 calories) as she frantically answers a series of texts from, um… “clients.” Four months ago, she was prostituted by two friends of her older brother. Since then, she’s been sold to buyers 10, 20, even 50 years older than her. Daisy has managed to keep this from her family but she suspects her brother knows after seeing the bar code tattoo on the back of her neck -- a tattoo which includes the name of her pimp (or “manager” to the liberal, post-modern crowd).
Donnie is the school’s star athlete but has, um, lost his motivation. This landed him in detention for skipping four straight baseball practices. Sipping on his Nesquick Fat Free Chocolate Milk (16 ounces = 54 grams sugar, 300 calories), Donnie is huddled in a corner seat, his eyes and mind fully focused on the images flashing on his phone’s screen. He started consuming “Gonzo” pornography two years prior and now spends up to five hours a day searching for more and more extreme videos.
This is where I dared myself to discover what “searching for more and more extreme videos” truly means in 2016. Before I address that, please allow me to introduce the other four kids:
1. James, another white boy, is a budding men's rights activist. What he’s doing on his phone: viciously bullying a gay classmate. James was serial-molested as a child by his uncle, but refuses to talk about it. His surly manner, unconventional looks, and lack of athletic skills drive him deeper into a inner world of online games and porn. He works up the nerve to ask out a girl and try out for the wrestling team. When both result in what he perceives as humiliating failure, he steals a couple of his father’s guns and plots his revenge.
2. Brittany, a white girl. What she’s doing on her phone: After spending the first half of detention perusing “thinspo” pages, Brittany gets busy researching what injuries are related to anal sex. She’s doing so because she’s being pressured by her 15 year old “boyfriend.” Brittany will be targeted by James during his rampage but will survive the shooting. Her “boyfriend” will dump her during her recovery when he finds someone more “open-minded.”
3. Nate, a Black boy. He’s obsessed with video games, anything to do with the U.S. military, and revenge porn. What he’s doing on his phone during detention: playing a violent video game. When James goes on his shooting rampage, it’ll be Nate who sneaks up and disarms him. He’ll ride this “hero” status right into an enlistment in the Marines. He’ll be injured in Afghanistan and come home suffering from PTSD and become homeless. I might tie in another issue by adding in that Nate would eventually be killed by a white cop that just so happens to be Donnie. (But that might be way over the top, huh?)
4. Kelly, a Black girl. She was also molested as child, by an older male cousin. What she’s doing on her phone during detention: freaking out as she discovers the “threesome” she was coerced into by two 18 year old guys has been exposed via a porn page called “Cum Tribute.” Kelly will not be targeted by James but will end up recruited by Daisy after her pimp sees the images of Kelly online.
Obviously, this was never gonna be an upbeat article but I felt it was tackling frightening connections that have been dangerously ignored. When teens and pre-teens are consuming poison disguised as food, treating porn as sex education, using their phones for the vast majority of social interactions, and embracing the normalizing of violence, well… do I really have to say more?
Actually, yes. I do have to say more. Much more.
You see, when I still had the ambition to flesh out the above into a more cohesive article, I felt I needed to provide at least a few examples of the kinds of porn these boys were consuming. Since I’ve written about Tumblr before, I opted to go that route again. I’m not easily shocked, not even close. What I found, however, did more than shock. It left me utterly despondent.
*TRIGGER WARNING*
I’ve vacillated over how many details to share. Should I tell you about the rivers of blood, the permanent scars, the surgical needles and thread, and the medieval devices? Speaking of devices, do you wanna hear about the vast technological advances made in the name of sexual torture? How about the trope of severe humiliation and public degradation as a rapid fire path to arousal? Perhaps it’d be more telling to focus on the sadistic language of the captions? Would you even flinch if I spoke of live fishes and a funnel? Or even worse, would you immediately and excitedly click away from this article and go see it for yourself?
If I had to sum it all up in a word, that word would be hatred. Pornographers hate girls and women. Pornographers profit mightily off encouraging other men to hate girls and women. Pornographers groom their next generation of customers by teaching boys to hate girls and women.
As Andrea Dworkin once said, “When your rape is entertainment, your worthlessness is absolute.”
With this as a cultural pillar (along with the poisoned food, the inherent isolation and alienation, the normalized violence and increasing white supremacy, etc.), I’ll sum up the primary point of this disjointed article: If we want even the hint of a chance at creating any worthwhile change, we can’t allow our children’s minds and bodies to be polluted -- on an hourly basis.
So, now you know. You can’t un-know. You can ignore this article. You can derail the conversation with more personal attacks on me. You can kid yourself that you’re “doing your part.” But you can’t un-know. So live with it. And if you can’t live with it, maybe you’ll do something serious to change it.
Mickey Z. can be found here.
"Why are teens and pre-teens always on their phones? The answers will blow you away." by Mickey Z. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://worldnewstrust.com/why-are-teens-and-pre-teens-always-on-their-phones-the-answers-will-blow-you-away-mickey-z.