Last Friday, a teen sex scandal hit Allentown, PA involving two girls, one cell phone.

The girls, 14 and 17, are students at Parkland High School, and the cell phone was used to take photos of both in pornographic poses. The images were subsequently spread via text message to approximately 40 Parkland students and then to the “wider world.”

Those are just the facts. I’ll pause for a second so you can laugh, cry or call your Allentown-area little sister to make sure she’s just a recipient.

But moving on, this story disappointed me for a few reasons. The first is that it reinforces the voyeuristic nature of adolescents, something we’re all too familiar with here at Penn. You probably remember about two years back, when an Engineering student posted photos on the Internet of two students having sex by an open window in the high rises (in the process redefining the term “glass blowing“).

This high school porn outrage isn’t much different, and both stories prove our incessant need to study biology outside the classroom. One Parkland student even created a Facebook group (”Parkland…Where Porn Stars Are Born”) to canonize the event. Good luck on internships, kid.

The second reason this story irks me is far more personal than the first: Penn was left out of the entire affair. Allentown, PA is in Philadelphia’s backyard; as such, I think Penn students had a right to know about these photos before they were national news.

Instead, Parkland students texted the pics “to Temple and Harvard universities, to a high school in Bethlehem, even to someone in Oregon.” When I read about Temple and Harvard, I was angered because the photos were sent to both a Philly school and an Ivy school, but not to Philly’s Ivy. And when I read about that “someone” in Oregon, I was just confused, because 1. I thought the state was inhabited entirely by goats and ducks, and 2. I didn’t know you could send texts to rotary phones.

I’m not asking for another porn scandal so Penn can feel included. I’m just asking that if something like a porn scandal happens, let us know.

At some point in my college career, I want news choppers at Penn for some reason other than our president posing with a terrorist look-alike or our admissions department enrolling a 15 year-old girl. (And no, there aren’t any pictures of her.)

Tags: glass-blowing, goats and ducks, sex scandal

This entry was posted on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Philadelphia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.