Online polls tend to elicit responses from a biased sample -- those most interested in the topic. Although I'm certain the numbers of young people who "sext" are high, this is likely to be an inflated estimate.

You freaked out little creep

I don't see your pizza ass

Doin' the Humpty dance

On little Miss. Bo-peep

So when Renaissance painters do nudes, it is "art." When some famous photographer does nudes it is "art." For the rest of us, it is "pornography." Natch. So if we want to eliminate pornography and increase the amount of beautiful art in the world, we should be teaching the kids how to take nude photos artistically. Which would mean practice and instruction.

(Is anyone else's head ready to explode from the double standard?)

Please - let us get real. A 30 year old taking nude photos of a 15 year old is child pornography. A 19 year old taking nude photos of a 17 year old is not. Some more enlightened states are passing Romeo and Juliet laws. These should include the "sexting" business.

Teens are merely inexperienced adults. They have the same sexual urges and issues as adults, just without wisdom. Punishing them is the height of folly and cruelty. What they need is education, not jail time.

And using terms like "porn" don't help matters. I hate the terms "porn" and "pornographic." They are so intensely charged emotionally that it stops brain cells from working right.

I don't think Tracy meant anything by it, but the words do demonstrate the illness at the center of Western sexuality.

From the D.H. Onion Center For Figuring Out Really Obvious Things: http://www.theonion.com/content/node/38603

Well done, Broadsheet. Continue picking the lowest of low-hanging fruit.

"Now, there is proof: An online poll has found that 20 percent of teens and 33 percent of young adults age 20 to 26 have sent or posted online nude or semi-nude photos or videos of themselves."

It might just have been a teeny bit clearer to specify that rather than 20% of teens and 33% of young adults, it was those percentages of them whom (insert) had voluntarily answered an on-line poll on sexting sponsored by Cosmmo and the National Campaign to... (end insert). This is a poll that establishes absolutely nothing about general American teen behaviour; in fact there is no certainty possible that the sample wasn't packed by on-line 50 year old pedophiles from Angola with a sense of humour.

Furthermore, one person's understanding of what constitutes a sexy picture and a salacious text, and another's, might differ just a trifle, and furthermore, the notorious gender-based bragging/under-reporting (quite possibly gender reversed in this case, actually) might just be kicking in as well.

All in all a totally worthless study as a basis to form any opinion whatsoever on. Not that it didn't inspire Tracy C-F to a good rumination and some darn good points; but she might just have been better off spending less time on this or that percentage or bringing up the study several times as if it meant anything at all, and kept herself to the points which are, ahem, bang on. Unlike the stupid fear-mongering study.

Incidentally, although they have nothing up on this story, I regularly check out http://youthfacts.org/index.html, a youth-fear-myth debunking site. It should be at the top of the bookmarks list for any reporter working on this stuff.

Um,...I don't think the teens of today are any different than any other generation when it comes to sex. They are no different than mine was.

I think the difference is the fascination with teen sex exhibited by the media. Every other week I see a new story in Salon or NYT or Drudge about teens fucking. I think the real story is the adult journalists getting their rocks off researching and writing about teen sex.

Whoever invented the camera phone had to know this would happen. Every advance in communication technology has been adapted for porn. It's the whole reason VHS beat out BETAMAX. Let's stop pretending that we're outraged at what's going on here. It happened with VCRs, it happened with the internet and now it's happening with phones and other personal communication devices. The only way to stop it is to stop the advancement of technology. Even that would only slow it down. For those who are so concenred about this (read: nosy busybodies with no lives of their own) take heart in the fact that the internet has actually put a dent in porn sales the past few years. Why buy the cow, and so forth...

This seems less an issue of young people being made into amateur porn stars by our sexed-up culture, than it is that virtually every aspect of their lives has gone digital.

Brave new world, isn't it? One without privacy -- where any act becomes immortalized for as long as the Internet exists.

The power of the technology at our fingertips far outstrips our capacity to weigh whether its effects benefit the common good.

The nightmare of "fifteen minutes of fame," which we all lived through with reality TV, has metastasized into "fifteen minutes of infamy." The starting point was probably Paris Hilton's sex tape. Now we can all make our own sex tapes, and see how far that will take us.

Harsh is the world we subject the young and the foolish.

Stimulus response, stimulus response...

Me see article of "young people" and "sexually explicit" -- me clicky.

Indeed, I must agree with the criticism already given since the first post -- self-chosen samples are not the best way to measure any tendency within a population. Look at the election pools, for instance: even the worse of them would run away from voluntarily filled forms like the pest.

So we need better data on how frequent teen 'sexting' is. My guess is: between 1/2 and 2/3 of what this research found. But I might be wrong.

But anyway, this avoids the main issue. Of course teen 'sexting' is happening, even if not at epidemic proportions. Like any other phenomenon of modern life, it can be discussed intelligently. Is it good or bad?

To me, there is no real problem there. Of course, the press likes to write about the topic--to make Xrandadu's point with other words, people like it and it wins more clicks. And, why not? It's fun to talk about teenage sexuality. I sure wish teenagers a much better, freer and less problematic contact with sexuality than I had when I was their age (though frankly, considering current tendencies--problematizing the unproblematic, etc.--I'm not sure they will). Are there issues if a 15-year-old girl/boy sends a photo of him/herself to a boy/girlfriend of the same age? No. It's again a question of trust. Of course the girl/boyfriend in question might show it to others or post it (e.g. as a revenge after being dumped). So they should be made aware that this could happen, and that they'll have to deal with the consequences. It would be better if our society agreed with those respondents who said it was 'no big deal' if your nudie pic ends up in some internet post. Unfortunately in the real world this may cost you job opportunities if you boss finds out.

I hope that this will change. Who knows, maybe when we all have nudie pics of ourselves somewhere in some online neck of the woods, we will all--bosses included--feel that it is really 'no big deal'...