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.

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