The slow, brutal draining of childhood innocence

A story headlined "Explicit Web site attracts pre-teens" (but for some reason with a different headline online) ran above the fold on the front page of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel today. Sounds saucy! What evildoer is trying to lure our children into smut and decadence this time? Is it an at-large purveyor of child pornography? A moralistic piledriver bent on turning children into violent animals? Dare say, which weapon of Satan are we to take up arms against?

Here's the story's lede: "A Web site bursting with big-breasted women and profanity has become the rage among South Florida middle-school students, who lie about their ages so they blog on MySpace."

MySpace? Like, the regular ol' MySpace? Oh yes. From the story:

Still, the sexual images are abundant. A Florida Atlantic University student calls herself "Easy Lover" and warns "Better forget it, cause you'll never get it."

A 17-year-old from Pompano Beach lists his "porn star name" as "Rod Stallion."

Dear god, people! A girl at FAU is being saucy -- although also confusing, since her nickname doesn't quite match her promise -- and a 17-year-old is parodying porn names? Why, the devil's hand has already gripped us by the necks and now he's beginning to squeeze.

This article infuriated me so much, I did something I'm generally loathe to do: I wrote the reporter to complain.

Here's my letter:

Lois,

Hello, my name is Jason Feifer. I’m a 25-year-old reporter in Massachusetts, and read your story, “Explicit Web site attracts pre-teens” with great frustration. We in the industry often talk of how to attract younger readers to newspapers, and I’ve long felt that part of the problem is stories like this one -- alarmist dispatches that display a great ignorance of youth culture -- which serve as repellants for young people while dissevering their parents with misleading and context-free information.

MySpace, as I hope you know, is not significantly different from its less-savvy predecessors -- Geocities, members.aol.com, etc. It’s simply an open web service on which individuals can create their own websites. It’s a paradigm of the Internet itself, and there are many sites just like it. You provide this context only secondarily and without nearly the emphasis you put on apparently threatening “big-breasted women,” and therefore unreasonably single out MySpace and brand it as something it is not.

Understand, I’m not defending MySpace. I’m not a member and I don’t particularly care about it one way or the other. However, I do care about newspapers unnecessarily and unreasonably stoking fears in parents, and doing so by misrepresenting what is largely a harmless social tool. Every gathering point is going to have its less appealing elements; on the Internet, given so many people’s misunderstanding and fear, it’s very easy to recast a forum like MySpace as a place dominated by “big-breasted women and profanity.” To do that is irresponsible, and does a disservice to readers. No doubt, many parents unnecessarily yanked their children off of MySpace because of your article today, and are ready to take action the next time the Sun-Sentinel reports on a supposedly vice-laden forum where kids are just trying to be kids. Next time, let’s hope, there’s good reason for action.

Take care,
Jason Feifer

I'll let you know if she responds.

Update: She did. And not surprisingly, she disagrees with me:

Jason, thanks for this e-mail. The story focused on the abundance of pre-teens who are using the site without their parents' knowledge. Although the sexual content may not be the site's focus, it is pretty much in your face as soon as you open the main page on some days, not to mention what people are putting on their personal blogs.

Point missed. Sigh.

Posted by Jason Feifer at November 25, 2005 05:42 PM