I’m in a ragey mood. Not enough sleep, too much coffee, too much harmful hysterical slut-shaming crap in the world, too often dreamed up by authorities, disguised as education and delivered directly to young people.
Stephen Conroy, non-favourite Minister of freedom-loving hornbags across the country, has today launched a film “to help Australian kids get cybersmart.” It’s called “TAGGED” because “what you do online could tag you for life.”
If you’re female, that is! Boys barely get a line in the entire eighteen-minute film. As we’ve seen, the only credible research on the topic of sexting indicates that boys and girls sext at nearly equal rates. Still, nobody seems to give a shit about male teen sexuality.
I think what you’ll particularly love about the film is the way the girl who eventually has naked shots of her distributed around the school spends the first ten minutes as a diabolically evil cyber-bully, thus obviating the need for you to feel any sympathy for her when she’s outed as a slut.
You can watch the film and its uniformly very attractive white teen girl cast members here. Oh hey, quiz! What do porn and educational films and all other media ever anywhere have in common?
Yeah, HOT GIRLS! You know, it strikes me that one of the reasons people (including teens) send sexts is because feeling as though you’re sexually attractive to someone is a beautiful, powerful, gratifying thing. I’d wager that the feeling is especially sweet for young women, still struggling with adolescence, who see thousands of insecurity-generating images of impossibly attractive women on billboards, tv shows and magazines every damn day for years on end. It just kills me, it really just kills me, that this film which purports to help young women is itself representing only very conventionally attractive teen girls that the more average teen girls watching can compare themselves to, adding another drop to the ocean of desire to be desireable.
Anyhow, the film has one redeeming feature and I’ll give it credit where credit’s due. The final scene sees the bully-turn-bullied-slut being treated nicely by one person, and we’re left with the sense that a new friend will be made and the gossip-mill will churn onto something else soon enough. Kind of contradicts the film’s tagline, but I guess “What you do online could tag you for three to five weeks” just doesn’t have the same impact.