What Happens When the Birds Are Sexting and the Bees Watch Pornography? Digital Sexualities, Sexuality Education and New Zealand Adolescents
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What happens when the birds are sexting and the bees watch pornography? Digital sexualities, sexuality education and New Zealand adolescents Nell O’Dwyer-Strang A thesis submitted for the degree of Master of Arts Qualification University of Otago New Zealand 2017 Contents Dedication… 3 Acknowledgements… 4 Abstract… 5 Introduction… 6 Chapter One – The Current Realities and Criticisms of Sexuality Education in the New Zealand Classroom... 17 Chapter Two – Sex? Lies? and the Internet: Young People Navigating the Cyber Sexual Minefield… 32 Chapter Three – Prolificating Scandals and Dubious Monikers: ‘Roast Busters’, ‘Rack Appreciation’ and ‘Mates & Dates’… 53 Chapter Four – Now What?... 75 Conclusion… 89 References… 93 2 For all young people. It is not easy to be ‘the future’. 3 Acknowledgments With many thanks to my lovely supervisor Chris Brickell, a wonderful conversationalist. Also to my partner Kosta, who made many cups of coffee. Lastly thanks always to my mum, for her endless wisdom and bountiful garden. 4 Abstract The relationships between young people, technology and sexuality are highly contentious. We live in a digital age and young people are fully immersed. Increasingly, their communities are negotiated and formed in cyberspace. This historical moment is viewed as unprecedented, yet many persistent and historical structural inequalities permeate the digital sphere, framed as contemporary problems. This can be seen in cases such as the 2013 ‘Roast Busters’ scandal which I will consider in this thesis. The notion of young people in cyberspace has been considered and reconsidered by academics, the media and popular culture alike. Simplistic interpretations of complex realities have robbed many debates of the richness that they otherwise could have had. This has frequently seen young people constructed as corruptible, at risk, and in need of protection. This thesis examines the diverse and divisive discourses that surround young people’s use of technology, particularly as it is utilised to negotiate their sexualities. Further, it interrogates governmental policy that is enacted to solve the social ‘problems’ associated with young peoples’ (digital) sexualities. I will reveal and dissect anxieties which regard young people and their bodies as problematic. Using a Foucauldian feminist framework, I ask who speaks and why, and locate biopower in the mechanisms and techniques used by the State to subjugate and control young ‘unruly’ bodies. I look specifically at sexuality education in New Zealand, and whether it has adapted to a transformative digital context. I will also contemplate interventions such as the Harmful Digital Communications Act and the relationship education programme Mates & Dates and ask if they simply add to the neoliberal ideologies that prop up decontextualized understandings of sexuality and health, or if they represent progress. 5 Introduction We are none of us without a standpoint (Hartsock, 1983). Everything we think, the ways in which we comprehend and understand our lived experiences are so because we were born in a place and a time and a context. I would like to begin by locating myself in my own context, and thereby the place from which this thesis has been produced. I cannot remember a time without cell phones and computers. They were not ubiquitous in my earliest years, but I was quickly aware of them. I remember the beep of a pager. I remember my Solicitor uncle’s large but impressive cell phone. My small school had a computer on which we played Treasure Maths Storm to learn multiplication. My best friend at 6 had a computer which was connected to the bright shiny new dial-up internet. When I visited we would play for hours on Barbie.com which hosted an online game allowing us to mix and match Barbie’s outfits. I was enthralled. When I was seven my mother was given a laptop by her work. It was fully black and white and my older brother and I would play an early version of the game Prince of Persia, which was considerably more violent than choosing Barbie’s outfit. The prince would bleed when you made him jump to his doom and he became impaled on spikes. My older brother had a Playstation and we had earlier played on a Sega and a Nintendo at our grandparents’ house. I got my own desktop computer when I was around 13 and it was soon connected to the internet. Dial-up internet was the cause of many arguments at my house. Only one of us could use it at a time, and mum would yell loudly around the whole house ‘I need to use the phone!’ when she picked up the receiver to the shriek of internet connectivity. To her, the relatively new phenomena of communicating on the internet using email and chat programmes was not ‘real’ or important when compared with speaking on the phone. Around this time I also got my first cell phone. Its main function was to send and receive texts - $10 bought you 2000 text messages, able to be sent only to other Telecom numbers. It was socially-imperative to be with Telecom, otherwise your friends would refuse to text you because it cost extra. I ran out of texts before the end of the month, every month. I had the first taste of relying on technology, of a constant technological companion. I used MSN messenger like my life depended on it. I watched DVDs on my computer rather than on the television. My older cousin bought one of the first camera phones for over $1000 - we younger cousins were all very impressed. At 15 I got my own laptop and learned all about (slowly) 6 downloading music and movies. I had a patience for this process that I cannot fathom now. I also became very aware that many of my other friends, largely young men, used the internet to download pornography. Pornography was shared between friends to save on download time and bandwidth. One young man I knew told me he thought he might have an addiction to pornography, showed me his downloaded collection that totalled over a terabyte (a lot). I had no idea what to say to him. I believe I first saw porn when I was around seven years old. My best friend and I knew some older boys had hidden some magazines down by a nearby river and we went to find them. I do not recall understanding at first exactly what pornography was, and the naked, spread women in the slightly muddy magazine meant little to me. My older brother soon had magazines, and later images and videos on his own computer. I always knew how to find them and was always curious. In later years he has never been shy about his porn use and has rarely been castigated for his defence of the ‘fantasy’ it evokes. Pornography and the internet became linked. My male friends would share it, put it on at parties. It became a challenge to get around school firewalls in information technology and invariably search for pornography. Porn became shock and spectacle too; at 16 my friend showed me 2 Girls, 1 Cup which infamously shows two women eating faeces and vomiting into each other’s mouths. It became a game to watch other people react to this video. Sometimes I wonder about the two women in that video, but I am too afraid to search and find out. I watched a famous big budget porn film with an ex-friend who turned out to have a propensity for sexual abuse. I do not remember finding it erotic, I just wanted to know what a multi-million-dollar porn production looked like. I do not remember being terribly bothered by pornography until I was older. Truthfully, I was so aware of pornography being a part of the lives of many people that I cared about and on the fringe of mine that it is sure a process of normalisation had happened. If I ever was struck by the urge to find something erotic I was distracted by many of the hallmarks of standard pornography that I find anywhere from unerotic to problematic to horrific. Yet even early on I had a sense that to trouble the sexual ‘tastes’ of others was not often a done thing. People’s sexualities were private, and yet many I knew were being decidedly public about watching pornography. There seemed to be an imagined division between sexuality and pornography, but it did not truly exist. I remember a friend of mine telling an anecdote about receiving an injury while his girlfriend was fellating him (I was around 16, as was he). He surmised that if one wanted to learn how ‘do a blow job’, one should simply watch porn. In my final year of high school I was similarly privy to a loud conversation in the back of a classroom where a group of young men spoke about how disgusting ‘going down’ on women 7 was. I feel I have implicated my young male friends and acquaintances in this discussion, but I distinctly also remember an environment of sexual currency in my years at a single-sex girls school. If you were not doing ‘it’ you were frigid, and if you were doing it too much you were a slut. If there was a magic number that is cool I do not think anyone really knew of it, but to have committed boyfriend who did not end the relationship after it became intimate was certainly seen as a status symbol. Many of my friends formed romantic relationships with the same people that other friends had previously ‘dated’, and this caused issues. It was rumoured that this was sometimes to get back at another friend for supposed wrongdoing.