MySpace causes sex, and other lessons from Milton Academy

By reischel on Tue, Aug 21, 2007 12:10 pm

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Thanks to two girls with a dream, a rich private school full of oversexed ego-maniacal teenagers, and the clunky generalizations of the Boston Globe, we’ve finally solved the mystery of why a 15-year-old girl would ever be willing to service five hockey players in the locker room as a birthday present.

Abigail Jones and Marissa Miley, two Milton Academy alums and, more pertinently, two former Atlantic interns, have decided to launch their journalistic careers with subject matter that’s guaranteed to get noticed: anonymous interviews about “teenage life today,” as lived by seven students at the school, and documented in a book called Restless Virgins. Shocker number one: Jones and Miley have veered away from the “tasteful, appropriate, academic" "sociological study” their subjects say they were promised, and have produced a sex-saturated tell-all. Shocker number two: they’re claiming that they did it all to educate parents about their sexed-up offspring, not just to get their names on a dust jacket. Shocker number three: the Globe writes a front-page Living Arts section article about this most recent scandal-about-a-scandal.

Could’ve seen all that coming, and frankly, I don’t care about how many orgies anonymous Milton students say didn't say they’ve had. Instead, it's the blithe, totally unsupported statements about the deeper social causes of teenage fellatio that get me. Walk with me through the girls' reasoning, as reported by the Globe:

The authors agree that casual sex among teenagers is a national phenomenon that can be blamed in part on the hyper sexualized culture. "You've had Abercrombie [& Fitch] selling thongs to 10-year-olds, and TV sex scenes doubled from 1998 to 2002," says Miley, who majored in English and economics at the University of Pennsylvania and now lives in New York.

OK, this is an old, oft-repeated saw, so I'm ok with seemingly unsupported assertions that feeding Pussycat Dolls videos to preschoolers might make for a little extra exhibitionism at naptime. Fine. But no, that’s not enough:

That, coupled with websites such as Facebook and MySpace, have created a universe where little is considered out-of-bounds. Jones calls it "generational exhibitionism." "These kids are putting their lives on display," she says. "People didn't used to have sex in front of others. This is the first generation of kids coming of age in the Internet, and there's a breaking down of privacy."

People didn’t used to have sex in front of others? What about Woodstock? What about Studio 54? What about fraternity initiations? Never mind that when the Milton sex scandal actually happened, in 2005, MySpace and the Facebook were still in their infancies, and therefore probably not the underlying cause of that specific locker room birthday present.

I mean, we at the Dig know how penetrative MySpace and Facebook usage is — we try to stay away from more than a login or two a day, just because of the relentless cock assaults we encounter therein. But last time I checked, there’s zero proven link between MySpace, the Facebook, and more sex among teenagers. (If anything, that shit should be causing less physical sex and more virtual sex.) Not even the most comprehensive account of how Web 2.0 technology has changed the mores of this generation, an epic New York Magazine article, dares to claim that social networking sites do anything more than, er, break down privacy. As in, put your name, address, and photos on the internet. Come on, people: just because you say it doesn't mean it's true.