Debbie Nathan

It’s not like the government can’t get good information about sex, minors, and the internet — but it just won’t listen. The feds’ position tracks U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’ campaign to protect teen girls from their MySpace urges. Check out these dire warnings about the horny fellow students and creepy old guys who will forever ogle, gossip about and stalk you if they spot your bio or cleavage in a posting. Presumably, the ads air on venues such as Fox TV, sending nationwide shivers through parents. The chill extends to Congress, where the Senate is considering passing the Delete Online Predators Act (DOPA). It would block students from accessing their MySpace accounts at school or libraries.

Off on the sidelines, there’s real data like this excellent panel discussion sponsored recently by the non-partisan, DC-based Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee. Four researchers who study children and the internet sat down for the committee to present their findings. They note that the DOJ’s drumbeat, about how kids typically get tricked online into sex, is wrong.

Earlier this month, Dan Radosh’s blog mentioned one centerpiece of the panel discussion: a big law enforcement study about teens who had sex with adults they met online. The study found that grownups in these relationships rarely pretended to be kids or “just friends.” Instead, they usually made their advanced age and libidinous intentions quite clear, pretty quickly. And the kids – a quarter of them gay boys — got involved in the first place by deliberately visiting adult places like sex chat rooms. Girls and boys later hooked up with adults in person, sometimes after lying that they were over 18. Many of the teens got angry with the police when they were caught. Half said they were in love with the adult they’d met on the net.

Radosh.net didn’t link to the study, but it’s available at www.unh.edu/ccrc/pdf/CV71.pdf

The Congressional Internet Caucus Advisory Committee confab discusses a second study, downloadable here as abstract or full article. It examined the results of several online behaviors, including posting personal data on social networking spaces. Contradicting the spooky Gonzales PSAs, preeminent child protection sociologist David Finkelhor notes that “It’s not giving personal information that puts kids at risk.” Instead, it’s “being willing to talk about sex with a stranger,” “going to sex sites and chat rooms,” and behaving “like an internet daredevil” – often in the company of one’s friends. Another panelist says of earlier warnings not to post bio material and pix on MySpace: “We were wrong…we just spoke before we had the data.”

To keep kids out of trouble online, Finkelhor says, society has to “start with an acceptance of the fact that some teens are curious about sex and are looking for romance and adventure and take risks when they do that.”

“Some” teens?? How about all? And rather than “acceptance” we need “celebration.” Changing those words would advance adult efforts to help kids own their safety and their sexuality.

The sharpest panelist has a flair for presenting her own personal data. Ethnographer danah boyd – no uppercase – of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication, does field research into teens’ online social networking. She appreciates how it helps them do much more than ape Gossip Girl scenarios – they use MySpace to organize political activity, for instance. Alberto Gonzales apparently communicates only with adults, about pink-slipping U.S. prosecutors and waterboarding prisoners in warm climes, but boyd converses with kids. And she doesn’t just hoo-hah about their behavior online. She tries to figure out what it means to them. Click here to see lots of boyd’s work, and here’s her blog.

For example, a common belief about adolescents who get sexually involved with adults online is that the minors come from broken homes (the 2005 New York Times article about Justin Berry, who got took up porn webcamming at age 13, pointedly described him as a child of divorce). The law enforcement study, however, found that most teens who dallied with adults online lived with both parents.

At the panel, ethnographer boyd points out that often the kids’ problem is too much parental attention – though of the bad quality kind — rather than too little. Unlike in previous generations, they’re under constant surveillance by adults. And upper-middle-class teens are frequently under pressure: pushed to get into Ivy League schools, constantly “told they’re not doing things right.” In the suburbs teen boredom is rampant and has intensifid in the last decade. boyd points out that kids don’t even have malls anymore, “especially if you live in towns that are all big boxes now. So there’s no place to hang out.” The internet, she adds, “is a substitute” for teens stuck at home. Increasingly, home is populated by parents susceptible to government calls for paranoid, one-dimensional vigilance of children. Kids thus reach out on the net to older people “who have more freedom online,” says boyd. “They have his dream of freedom because their home…is not free.”

Kids’ idea of what constitutes online sexual intrusion differs from adults’. Teens couldn’t care less about the dark warnings on To Catch a Predator, says boyd. They don’t see men’s online questions about whether they’re virgins as threatening: “They’re so used to being marketed to that they just relate these sexual contacts as marketing and their approach is, ‘You just delete that.’” According to boyd, what really bothers kids is online Viagra solicitations.

Which is not to say teens don’t appreciate the state’s gloom and doom about danger; it’s just that they’ve got different notions of risk. They’ve heard for years not to post personal data in order to avoid people preying sexually on them. But they “repurpose” the message, according to boyd. Their reason for not posting is so college admissions officers and future bosses – the real predators? — won’t find dirt on them and ruin their lives.

Hey, is Art Spiegelman in the house? Or some other cartoonist of semitic spirit? Anita Kunz, artist for this week’s New Yorker cover, does not qualify, regardless of her religious background. Maybe she went to shul as a child, who knows? No matter — she’s from Toronto; that must be her problem. In the New Yorker she had a chance to portray the complete, vaguely disturbing range of Western fundamentalisms that clothe the female devout of NYC — including Jews. That would have constituted a satire gestalt, redolent of Brooklyn or Long Island or Queens, a visual take on Lenny Bruce, Sarah Silverman and Jimmy Breslin. Ironic, self-deprecating, cosmo, jittery, emblematic New York. Worthy of the Chosen Pilpul (of any faith).

Instead, Kunz left out the shaytl, the tikhl, the long skirt and the stifling, navy-blue jacket. Was she implying that literalist Jewish women are less cosseted than burqa’ed Muslims and habited nuns? Gevald!

And another odd thing: the half-naked “secular” girl in the picture has Upper East Side skin and hair color (as Kunz does, if you check the bio picture on her website). But really — how many WASPs go around with pierced belly buttons, no shirt, and on the subway no less? The 177 girls in Manhattan who are this pink take taxis! Anita — remember Sex in the City? This is New York: The stylishly immodest girl should be Latina. Can you please add some pigment?

And for the love of Hashem, put a fourth woman on the IRT, with a stiff wig and a Hebrew prayer book in hand. Let her sit by the long-haired Dominicana, staring ahead like the rest, but softly breathing the scent of coconut shampoo, not worrying if it clashes with milk, meat, shaytls, or winter in Toronto.

It looks like I’ll not be eating my cachucha (meaning hat, for those without the time to email “Ask a Mexican”). According to today’s Las Cruces Sun News, that Joint Terrorism Task Force report about Iraqis smuggled across the border, which I wrote about yesterday, is most likely utter mierda. It turns out the “intelligence” came from a small-town sheriff who cites a “confidential informant,” but who didn’t even bother passing on his tip to county-level superiors. (Note to border journos: check out the datilera – loco weed - crop this year. If you don’t know what that is, contact “Ask a Mexican.”)

Additional higher ups hemmed and hawed to the Sun News yesterday about the Joint Terrorism report. And when the paper called ABC to find out if they’d checked their info before worrying the nation about the “smuggling operation,” no one was willing to talk.

Next questions that Sun News has yet to report on: How did this bullshit end up in a Joint Terrorism Task Force report? Who gave the document to ABC? And why? Hint: Think anti-immigrant politicking. Think Bush administration response to Democrats’ “get out of Iraq” moves.

Think.

And that goes for you, El Paso Times, which — true to form — has done nothing with this story except ask semi-literates in Chaparral if they’re scared.

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Oh my goodness — Iraqis smuggled through our southern border! The FBI says so. ABC does, too. It sounds real!

But so does the story of that poor woman in the 1980s who shampooed her little dog then put it in the microwave to dry off, and you know the rest. Remember “Friend of a Friend” (FOAF) urban myths? They’re believable because they sound so up to date, so utterly contemporary. Who would guess they’re a species of folktale, with themes that often go back hundreds, even thousands, of years?

(Take the one about adults hanging around grade schools, seducing tykes with tiny paper panes laced with LSD and illustrated with Mickey Mouse cartoons. Folklorists trace this apocryphal tale to the mid-19th century, when English postage stamps were first outfitted with lickable glue. This new adhesive technology apparently scared the beejeezus out of people, and the story spread that the glue side of the stamps was conspiratorially drenched with poison.)

And now, Iraqis on the border. ABC reported yesterday (July 17) that it recently obtained a Joint Terrorism Task Force FBI intelligence report indicating the FBI is investigating a human smuggling operation based in Chaparral, New Mexico, a tiny town near El Paso, Texas. The report claimed the ring is bringing “Iraqis and other Middle Eastern” people across the Rio Grande from Mexico. The smugglers purportedly have been sneaking Iraqis in for more than a year. Each customer is said to pay $20,000 to $25,000. They’re transported from Mexico to “train stations in El Paso, Texas or Belen, New Mexico,” according to the FBI.

As a former El Pasoan, I’m ready to eat my cachucha if this “report” turns out to be anything more than a FOAFtale (with that second “F” standing for FBI). First of all, both ABC and follow-up news reports in West Texas and New Mexico indicate that local officials are in the dark about the FBI’s claims. Border Patrol officials say they have no details about about the report. Ditto for federal prosecutors in New Mexico — they don’t have any cases involving smuggled Iraqis. An FBI spokesman in Albuquerque said the agency had “no viable information” that could lead to a case. The El Paso FBI said the same.

And the Las Cruces Sun-News further suggests there’s no there there. “Some intelligence information is provided in a raw, unsubstantiated format,” the paper quoted El Paso FBI spokeswoman Andrea Simmons demurring about the report. “That information can later be proven or disproven but is often provided in this raw format to inform the intelligence community of possible threats.”

Duh. Hey, border rats — do you think a bunch of Iraqis could hang around dumpy little Chaparral, New Mexico without being noticed? The place is so funky and boring and bored that anyone walking down one of its unpaved streets, or peeking out of its 1960s-era trailer windows, is a veritable Broadway show to everyone else around. Don’t believe that old Cormac McCarthy hype about the wild, loner west: in El Paso you can’t lose yourself in a crowd like in New York, but on the other hand you can’t do much where at least a few people aren’t looking. (And believe me, self-proclaimed “hermit” McCarthy liked to be seen when he lived on the border. He was quite the regular at cocktail parties and such.) Amtrak stations?? I’ve never been to El Paso’s when there have been more than three people — besides the vigilant ticket agent, train administrators, and yeah, Border Patrol officers — in the whole building. At least one is usually an ambulatory psychotic white lady, and that leaves only two others to melt into the woodwork — as if. Belen is even harder to hide in.

The last terrorism FOAF-scare in El Paso happened in about 1987. The local papers were full of dire warnings about Iraqi air strips in the desert, and Iraqis massed in Ciudad Juarez to invade and plant bombs or something. Finally the FBI staged a daring raid on a hotel on Avenida 16 de Septiembre, in downtown Juarez, and came back to El Paso with a couple who agents excitedly said were Middle Eastern terrorists.

Turned out they were tourists from, like, Estonia.

Sorry I don’t have pictures for this piece. If anyone finds one of an Iraqi smuggled through Chaparral, send it along. I’m laminate it on my hat, then wolf it down with chipotle salsa and tikka.

Ah, the Times! Recently I interviewed a renowned sex therapist about “pornography addiction.” She doesn’t believe in the concept — she thinks spending too much time looking at internet smut is just a bad habit (though certainly, quite a troubling one for many people). She compared it to her own irksome vice: hours wasted every day reading the Times from front to back. I’m nowhere near that bad; still, do you think I need therapy? I see stuff in the Times and get weirded out and want to blog about it. My life goes down the rabbit hole. On the other hand, it’s almost as fun as going to the movies.

This morning, for instance. Midway through the “A” section I suddenly get the feeling I’m watching Todd Solondz’s Palindromes, where one character, the daughter, keeps shape-shifting body mass and race, between normal-weight, very white girl to stunningly obese African American — and even from female to male.

So cool of Solondz! And today the Times appears to be doing Palindromes: The Sequel with a John Edwards story. Check out this photo op of Edwards on a poverty tour down South.

The Times caption says: “John Edwards and his wife, Elizabeth, with Tanya Harris and Vanessa Gueringer yesterday in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans”.

Hey wait a sec — isn’t the convention to run names left to right? So, like, is Edwards’ wife a big, black woman? Or a little white gal? Or maybe both? Does she change back, on the far right, to something in the middle? (Or back on the far left — a la Solondz — is John-boy the wife — of himself?  Just like that Broadway play?)

Or did the caption writer just assume no one in their right mind would ever think John Edwards could be married to a big Negro lady?

I prefer the Palindromes interpretation.

Times, I could be addicted, but you are hip!