Kids Gone Wild: From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

Here’s another popular (but unproven) claim: Kids these days are out of control! Traditional media sources and social media sites tend to contribute to the mania surrounding this claim as well as others about kids and sex. But how much truth is there to the stories you hear on the morning news? In Kids Gone Wild, Joel Best and Kathleen Bogle examine a few specific stories that have gotten lots of coverage in the last decade or so. Two of them are classified as contemporary legends, or what you might think of as an urban myth. Those are sex bracelets (the supposed assigning of sexual acts to different colors of jelly bracelets, and an obligation to perform said act when the band is snapped) and rainbow parties (which involve multiple people, oral sex, and different colors of lipstick). A third is that of “sexting,” or sending explicit photos or texts using cell phones. The authors examine all of these topics in depth, discussing whether or not they actually happen and what proof there is one way or the other. The results show that, not surprisingly, the fears of these kinds of sexual practices are more than a bit overblown. This book is a good dose of reality for concerned parents.