—comes from a 2010 Saturday Night Live skit featuring a news anchor presenting a story about “another terrifying teenage trend, ” followed closely by a trench-coated reporter describing trampolining: “A teen child sits on top of a one-story home getting oral intercourse from a lady leaping along for a backyard trampoline that is large. Sources state if a lady trampolines ten boys, she gets a bracelet—and that is exactly just what Silly Bandz are. ” The skit went on to demonstrate an adolescent calmly dismissing the reporter’s questions about trampolining (“I’ve never ever done this…. We don’t think that’s also actually possible”), while her mom is overcome by hysterical fear. The skit were able to combine the dental sex of rainbow events because of the bracelet-as-coupon theme of intercourse bracelets and also to illustrate just exactly exactly how television uncritically promotes concern and also the general public gets caught up in fear. Satire, then, allowed a critical representation of television’s coverage of those tales which was otherwise missing whenever TV addressed claims about intercourse bracelets and rainbow parties.
Although this chapter examines role that is television’s distributing the modern legends about intercourse bracelets and rainbow parties,
They are just two among numerous claims about teen sex that have obtained a lot of news attention in the last few years. For instance, in 2008, Time mag went an item about a senior high school in|school that is high Massachusetts where there was indeed an increase in pupil pregnancies and quoted the school principal, whom stated that girls had produced pact getting expecting together. After this tale, there is an onslaught of media protection citing the alleged pregnancy pact as another piece of proof that teenagers had been out of hand. This tale made headlines within the U.S. Along with Australia, Canada, England, Ireland, and Scotland. Later on, some reports cast question on whether there ever ended up being such a pact (evidently, the main whom advertised there is a pact could maybe maybe not keep in mind where he heard that information, and no body else could verify their type of the whole tale). Yet news protection persisted, plus in 2010, a made-for-television film, The Pregnancy Pact, premiered in the life cable channel, which stated it had been “inspired by a real tale. ”
The pattern is clear for the pregnancy-pact story, like reports of sex bracelets and rainbow parties.
The news sees a story that is salacious intimate subjects are generally newsworthy; in specific, tales about young ones and intercourse are specifically newsworthy simply because they could be approached from different angles—vulnerable children vulnerable to victimization and needing protection, licentious young ones, particularly girls, gone wild and the need to be brought in check, middle-class children acting away up to young ones through the “wrong part regarding the tracks, ” and so forth. While printing news often provide nuanced remedies that enable experts and skeptics become heard, television’s attention tends to be more fleeting and less slight. Whenever television did address rainbow parties or intercourse bracelets, it seldom lasted significantly more than a few minutes—a quick portion in a program that is longer. Presumably, this reflected the restricted product television needed to use: there clearly was no footage of intimate play, no detail by detail testimony from young ones whom acknowledged taking part in these tasks, no specialists that has studied the topics. Rather, television protection arrived down seriously to repeating the legends. There isn’t much difference between Oprah hosting a author who stated they’d heard about rainbow parties and conversations in which people relay what they’ve heard from someone who knows someone who knows a person who had sex after breaking a bracelet that she talked to girls who said. But television’s larger audiences signify these stories spread further, until they become familiar touchstones that are cultural one of those actions everyone knows about children today. Because 
of this, not just perform some legends become commonly thought, however the “teens gone that is wild becomes ingrained. This, in change, impacts how exactly we take into account the general image of today’s young people.
Excerpted from “Kids Gone crazy: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, comprehending the buzz Over Teen Sex” by Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle. Copyright © 2014 by Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle. Reprinted by arrangement with NYU Press. All legal rights reserved.
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