20s/30s journalists bringing insight into contemporary adolescent life

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/18/grown-ups-guide-to-sexting

this always has a vaguely implausible register and the overcompensation that happens when someone pretends to be au fait with how people half their age live, not because they know them but because they sort of 'are' them, kind of, or can cosplay it to the slower 53 yr old commissioning editors

is it unreasonable to suggest a major news organization couldn't find some actual biological adolescents to write on youth related topics? anonymized if necessary

compare this graf from a long story on the steubenville rape case by Ariel Levy (born Oct. 17, 1974)

At the party, she met up with a sixteen-year-old named Trent Mays, a good-looking, dark-haired football player with whom she’d been flirting by text and tweet. She’d been “talking to him,” a porous term that teen-agers use to refer to a romantic relationship that is unlikely to be exclusive, and can involve spending time together or just courting through social media. A friend of Mays’s named Anthony Craig had also been talking to the girl that summer. Months later, a prosecutor asked Craig if he had been dating her, and he replied that some people “may look at it as that.” He meant people on the outside of adolescent culture, who have to translate contemporary categories into old-fashioned ones that they can understand.

adults should aspire to complete ignorance of teen culture

I thought this was going to be about articles written in the 1920s and 30s.

IIRC the Guardian used to have a male and female teenager's diary in the parenting section?

is it unreasonable to suggest a major news organization couldn't find some actual biological adolescents to write on youth related topics?

are you kidding me? YES

not in the form of a zoe williams column with venereal disease anecdotes instead of childcare anecdotes but like.....get them to describe the lived phenomenological reality of being a sextee or whatever and then parenthetically explain why this is important and socially relevant and a damning indictment of whatever and not just a bit of pageview prurience

a sextee

oh ffs ignore me, was trying to parse latinate origin of neologism

'sixteen year-old' vs 'recipient of sexual message'

vs 'wearer of pornographic garment'

charlie, 26, from glasgow explores this disturbing phenomenon among other adolescents like himself

speaking almost freakishly of which, Footballers who really don't need to be on Twitter