#eleep

Well, that's a wrap.

eLEEP Summer 2014 comes to a close, but not without these outstanding sexual health videos courtesy of our peer leaders with Boston's Start Strong, PLI, Family Van and VIP. Check them out and learn something!

"If you’re between 8 and 18, you spend more than 11 hours a day plugged into an electronic device. The average American teen now spends nearly every waking moment on a smart phone or computer or watching TV. This seismic shift in how kids spend their time is having a profound effect on the way they make friends, the way they date, and their introduction to the world of sex."

Nancy Jo Sales, author and journalist known for her Vanity Fair article which inspired the major motion picture "The Bling Ring," has a lot to say about today's young people and their means of an "informative" adolescence. 

"Friends Without Benefits" follows young women from New York and LA whom Sales got to talking with concerning the effects of social media on their personal, sexual lives. With the use of social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and dating apps like Tinder, Grindr, and Blendr, young men and women are creating a new approach to dating and sexual relationships—perhaps the only approach they know.

When your live exists and evolves on a 2"x4" iPhone screen, social media dating feels normal. Combined with the easily accessible online world of sex, screen-to-screen dating has an immense and often overlooked influence on young people and their understanding of what a healthy dating and/or sexual relationship looks like.

She wanted it to be like the scene in the Lana Del Rey video for “Blue Jeans”—“hot and slow and epic.” The scene where strangers meet and fall into an easy intimacy, making love in a pool—“and they look so hot and it’s just, like, totally epic.” A boy at her school—she didn’t want to talk about him now; he’d broken her heart; but “like, whatever.” She’d “deleted him” from her phone. “I was stalking him too much, seeing him doing fun things on Instagram, and it hurt.”

This snippet from Sales' "Friends Without Benefits" may sound familiar. As she zooms in on the online social scene it becomes apparent that one isolated case may be indicative of an entire generation. Let's prove her wrong.

A recent Huffington Post article tackled the media versus teens looking at the most media-friendly generation and what exactly they're getting in return: zilch. 

"Teenagers are often singled out in the media to further create this dramatic, sensationalized stereotype that just, frankly, is not accurate. Our teens know this and feel this too.

According to a recent poll of more than 1,000 young people by the think tank Demos, four-fifths of 14- to 17-year-olds feel their age group is unfairly represented in the media. In addition, 85 percent believe these negative stereotypes affect their ability to get a job (and aren't we, as adults, always telling them to do just that?). Kind of ironic that the reason they can't find employment is oftentimes because of the way we have allowed society to portray them."

So, what's the deal? Seems like the teen-reliant industry is exploiting the youth to fuel its industry while deflecting the blame, causing it to bounce back onto the shoulders of our youth. 

"We are in the midst of a culture that relies on shock TV for entertainment, and teens are caught in the middle. The media is "using" these kids to further their own agenda and their own bank account without any regard to the impact on them personally and as a generation. They are a target, the media's prey."