High school boys no longer require the internet to view pornography because their female classmates are texting sexually explicit pictures directly to their cell phones. It’s a practice some are calling ’sexting’ and “includes the act of text messaging someone in the hopes of having a sexual encounter with them later; initially casual, transitioning into highly suggestive and even sexually explicit,” as explained by some urban culture specialists. Here is a recent story about the practice:

PORTLAND, Ore. — The popularity of cell phone text messaging has led to a new and controversial trend for students and parents on Portalnd-area high schools. Teens told Portland TV station KPTV that many of their classmates are using cell phones to take and send explicit photos. They said “sexting” is a major problem at most campuses in Portland. Anton Bogan, a local high school student, said “9.7 times out of 10, it’s a nasty photo.”

In the news story I watched, teens admitted that it was mostly girls sending photos to boyfriends, for example. The sexually explicit photos are often later distributed throughout the school with the use of the forwarding feature.

Many parents will find this alarming, but it reveals the need for moral formation, forged within the context of real intimacy, to engender the moral virtue not to participate in activities that others have no qualms about. The Enemy’s “parasite kingdom” continues to attach itself to technology that could also be used for so much good. The same photo and text messaging feature that allows students to take spontaneous shots of their friends having fun, pictures for an auto accident insurance claim, and so on, is also open to gross perversions like most things.

What are parents to do? Prevent their children from having camera phones? Not allow them to be around other students with camera phones? Not allow them to have the text messaging feature on their cell phones at all?

For those parents of children under five-years-old it can be frightening to think about what will be available technologically for your kids that will tempt them into immorality in ways unthinkable today. Who would have imagined, even 10 years ago, that there would come a time when high school students would send sexually explicit pictures of themselves back and forth to one another, on their cell phones, even during school hours? What’s next?

I ate a piece of blueberry pie a la mode and called it the grains group, the fruit group, and the dairy group, so I can justify anything. One thing I have not been able to justify is using a cell phone while driving. That may be because I have never owned a cell phone before, so I lack practice in justifying. But even we Luddites generally join in modernity at the end of the parade, and now my mother has given me a pre-paid cell gadget, which she considers part of the necessary accoutrements of a responsible single Mom.

It couldn’t have come at a worse time. As of November 1^st, Pennsylvania has finally come around to the line of thinking I was espousing from the beginning regarding the glorified walky-talkies, joining Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, California, and Washington, in banning the devices in traffic. The late-in-coming policy may be based on the astounding triumph of common sense over convenience.

Or lawmakers may have read the findings of the University of Utah study published in the June 2006 issue of “Human Factors: The Journal of Human Factors and Ergonomic Society.” “Having a cell phone pressed to your ear while behind the wheel is the equivalent of driving while intoxicated….The level impairment is very similar,” says the study’s lead author.

I feel my self-justification powers shifting into high gear.