Last week, I took a trip across the country with a great bunch of middle-class suburban kids ages 11-14. Over the course of four days, Two Girls, One Cup was mentioned more than once. There were, mercifully, some kids who didn’t know what it was—but there were others willing to fill them in. A troubling number seemed to have actually watched the video. (If you have the good fortune not to know what I’m talking about, follow the link above—or suffice to say that the video sexualizes both the consumption of solid human waste and vomit.)
If I’d overheard one of these conversations in a public place, I think I would have engaged in that kind of wishful distancing that many of us employ instinctively when a child disappears—blame the parents, and that will mean that as long as I do everything right, my child is safe. The thing is, I know these kids and I know their parents, and while none of us are perfect these aren’t disaffected rich kids raised by nannies or latchkey kids whose single moms are working two jobs and forced to leave them alone too much. This is the heartland: family vacations, volunteering at the schools, homework before dinner.
And somewhere in the mix, a little Internet porn.
Two Girls, One Cup (and its ilk), it seems, has become the new millennium equivalent of sneaking a peek at dad’s Playboy…except it isn’t equivalent at all. Playboy sexualized pretty women in various stages of undress—something we might not have wanted shared with our sons too early, but that largely represented what they would eventually discover and experience. Not so Two Girls, One Cup and the like, which sexualize things most people never do—or never did, in the era when getting risqué meant sneaking a peek at Playboy.
The associations formed in the early days of sexuality are powerful and lasting, and there is no question that our kids are getting very different messages about what is sexy and sexual than the ones we were exposed to in our youth. Adolescent boys are going to react to naked women kissing one another—and if those women happen to be incorporating feces and vomit into their make-out session, those images and associations are going to get confused. Sexual triggers will develop where they don’t for most people (or didn’t in the past).
I suspect that we can’t avoid this entirely, any more than parents 50 years ago could prevent their adolescents from spying on the neighbor lady when she bathed or looking at the pictures their older brothers hid under the mattress. But the risk is something entirely different today, and access is a thousand times easier than it was even ten or fifteen years ago.
We all need internet filters, no matter how good our kids are. They’re also curious and subject to the buzz that gets going about something like this. We all need to be aware; parents of today’s adolescents cover a large age-range and have different degrees of familiarity with the Internet. Know what’s out there, and how readily available it is. You can read all about Two Girls, One Cup on Wikipedia, for instance. And we need to talk to our kids about more than how to avoid pregnancy and STDs. Uncomfortable as it might be for everyone involved, they need to know that there’s a wide range of healthy, loving sexual activity that doesn’t involve the sorts of images they’re seeing: images that may, for some, be the first exposure to explicitly sexual material.
NOTE: For those in the "you're a neo-fascist totalitarian" camp, please see my follow-up post: Why I Wouldn't Want My Son to Get Off on Watching Women Eat Feces
