Slate :: Teen Hooker Hysteria: Newsweek's Bogus Trendspotting
Article

> "Potentially good sex is a small price to pay for the freedom
> to spend money on what I want," Stacey tells Newsweek. "The
> easiest way, she discovered, was to offer her body in trade,"
> writes Newsweek reporter Suzanne Smalley.

Jack Shafer concedes there may be something to the teen prostitution issue. It's not hard to speculate on a rationale. Given the sexual liberalization of the American media (in popular movies and music and especially online), the positive reinforcement of their peers (especially male ones), and the absence of the kind of training in subtlety, courtesy, and taste that a stronger educational system would provide, are young women increasingly just making explicit a trade-off that's always been in play? (Substitute "Christian moral values" for "a stronger educational system" in the last sentence, and I could be William J. Bennett -- well, except that I'm not sure teen prostitution is unequivocally bad -- though, admittedly, the conditions in which it might be constructive are impossible to create.) Shafer, however, lucidly points up the contradictions and misleading vagaries of the Newsweek article. An exemplary demonstration of everyday critical textual analysis and healthy skepticism that doesn't require especially specialized or arcane knowledge. Still, probably more general education by better qualified teachers than most Americans receive today. (An excellent cartoon accompanies the article.)
posted by Tomohiro Idokoro @ 8:51 AM

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