#i mean granted she accidentally took a selfie with her computer camera when she was 9 and posted it on pinterest

[elenorasweet]

My sister was a sex ed instructor for a while and went around middle-and-high schools in our city speaking to kids, and coming back around to the same schools every one in a while and answering new questions and shit. It was a good program, she felt like she was helping a ton of kids with very specific experiences and questions.

I don't know where she got this from, I imagine it's an existing thing, but she would talk about "safer sex", not "safe sex", because some teens are going to want to experiment with unsafe behaviours, and your job is not to tell them "absolutely never do that" or "don't even think about that until you turn 18", it was to educate them and give them the information to choose for themselves how safe they do or don't want to be.

Because if you try to force them to be safe, then there are some who won't be safe at all, and it'll be even riskier because they won't know shit.

I think about that a lot in relation to online safety and shit. My kids and I talk about it a lot too. Like, my 15 y-o daughter is allowed to go online, and I'm not monitoring who she talks to. But she talks to me about her online friends, and the one question I got as a teenager that made me clam up was "but how do you know who these people REALLY are??" so I don't ask that.

I've talked to her about predators, and how some people will lie like fucking creeps, and she seems to get it well enough. Her friends know she's french canadian and a teenager, because any amount of voice chat will indicate both of those real quick, and that seems to be about it. She has a "public" instagram that has her name and face and is related to school stuff, and a private one that has no identifying information. That's not something we suggested, that's her own idea.

If I was monitoring her search history or whatever, I know my kid would be smart enough to find another way to get information or talk to the people she wanted to talk to, and that's getting into riskier territory.

Cutting her off from people and restricting what she can access seems like a real bad way to protect her, man.

ngl feel really really weird about the direction we've gone wrt internet safety for teens. when i was a kid it was hammered into us that we should never reveal our real names, our faces, or our ages on the internet. in fact it was extremely important not to reveal your age bc if you did, predators could target you.

now we've decided that the locus of potential sexual harm from adults is not predators who set out to target teens, but rather well-meaning adults who might accidentally let a minor see smut on their blog. so we make everyone broadcast their ages to everyone. which puts a target on the backs of teens who are now advertising to everyone that they're underage.

we also situate sexual harm of minors in "a minor saw sexual content!!" which, listen, im sorry to tell you this but teenagers have sex drives and want to see sexual content. a 16yo is not being harmed by reading a smut fic.

now i do understand why nsfw blogs don't allow minors to interact, bc the interaction constitutes an issue since that's on some level a teen and adult interacting sexually. but the issue is not that a teen saw something sexual, it's that you should not be having that interaction with them. still i am not convinced that that is riskier than giving predators knowledge of who to target.

i also worry what happens when all the well meaning people with best practices turn teens out of their spaces -- who does that end up leaving them with? i'm not saying the solution is to invite them in but there has to be some other, third option. i also think we need to understand the difference between a 17yo liking a sex-related shitpost on tumblr vs an actual intentionally predatory sexual interaction from an adult.

i don't think it's necessarily bad to set a boundary and not allow them to like the shitpost, but i don't like the idea that it was harmful for them to have even seen it. i think it's actually positive for teens to have exposure to adults who are talking about sexuality in consent-based, sex-positive, queer-informed ways to balance out all the shitty, sexist bioessentialist perspectives they're getting elsewhere.

also again, we should remember that the issue is sex-based interactions between teens and adults, NOT that teens are bad or wrong for being interested in sex and sexuality. if a really young teen is too interested in that it could be concerning but age-appropriate levels of sexuality are fine and good and i don't want kids to think they're wrong, dirty, or bad for experiencing sexuality.

i think there's a balance here where we need to make sure interactions are safe without diving headfirst into a spring-awakening-style world where we assume teens are too innocent and pure to know anything about sex which results in risky behavior, not practicing safe sex, and not understanding consent. and i get worried sometimes that the current culture around this leads us there.

i especially worry about this in regards to kink and bdsm because i don't know if there are any educational resources out there geared to teens. i do think it's a good idea to wait until you're 18 before doing anything hardcore or too intense, or even kink at all, but if they're going to anyway (and some will) i'd rather teens have a solid safety backing and knowledge as opposed to just acting on instinct because that can really be dangerous. and something i really worry about is people who turn 18 and immediately show up to play parties and start hooking up with people without having that background knowledge because they were prevented from accessing it before then, since it's so easy for abusers to exploit them. young adult women are already extremely vulnerable in those spaces.

i don't know what my exact solution to these issues is but i feel really concerned about where we're heading. i've been wanting to say something for a while but have been afraid that people would interpret this the wrong way. i'm sure some still will, but i hope this can at least start a conversation about these issues.