All around the country teenagers are weighing up their uni choices. The dreaded UCAS machine has processed reams of information and is now spitting out potential places, which your children and mine will be trooping off to in September and October – if they get the right grades. It can be hard to make a selection, so a friend told me her 18-year-old had joined various Facebook groups for people with offers at her chosen unis. One of these is a UK top ten institution, a place which was considered great back when I was applying for uni and has only burnished its reputation in the years since then. The girl’s sensible idea was that she’d get to know what sort of types would be on her course, and would then be able to make up her mind with this added information. You’ll never guess what happened next.
Well, among all these smart kids on this particular Facebook group, kids who’ve already done well enough in their AS exams in order to be in this lucky and privileged position, were a handful, of both sexes, who started to send nude photos to the group. Yep, that’s right, they sent off pictures of their bits to a public forum containing hundreds of total strangers. With no prompting. No one was saying ‘you’ve got to do this’. There was no encouragement.
Um, what? And er, why?
Why on earth would this ever seem like a great way to meet new people?
Has this generation of teenagers become so blasé that they have to wave their genitals in each other’s faces to say hello?
It seems incredibly stupid. But then, these are not stupid teenagers. On paper, anyway. And I could just about understand one incredibly dumb teenage boy doing this. But several? And girls too??
You can download these images and save them forever – if you want to. Who knows what these teenagers will end up doing. They could be running the country in ten or twenty years. Don’t they understand these pictures could come back to haunt them?
It seems these Facebook groups are always being shut down and re-started because this sort of thing breaks out. Maybe it’s just the modern way. Maybe I am just being ridiculously old fashioned at a ‘bit of fun’? Maybe the world has just become very odd indeed.