
Masturbating in chatroulette is being unfaithful to your partner?
Unfaithfulness is a terrible word to use to describe the combination of emotions that accompany an experience like this. You don't want to describe it as adultery, but it is simply unbreakable. People have described it to you as 'having their nose out for attention'. It's a really hard word to use, because it conjures up images of someone who is selfish and egocentric. I don't think either of those things exists. So I think that's why I used unfaithfulness. I think that using the word adultery as a shorthand to describe a video chatroulette experience that is intentionally provocative and voracious is both sloppy and wrong.
We could say that sex is a young person's medium of expression, and chatroulette is an extraordinarily fast and unmediated way of conveying ideas to an adult. But I think that would be limiting. It would suggest that teenagers are incapable of expressing themselves. To say that sex is a young person's medium of expression is not to say that it's not capable of being affected by adults. It's the rapidity and the explicitness of the communication that I find enormously appealing.
Conversations on chatroulette are, by and large, one-way conversations. They're either masturbation is or it's not, and there is no gray area. The vast majority of conversations on chatroulette are either masturbation is or it's not, and there is no gray area. You either do it or you don't do it. And so I think that conversation would be missing the point. What I would like to see on chatroulette is for us as adults to step back and have a real, honest, honest, honest conversation. Because the vast majority of teenagers do not have adult experience with sex.
I'm not saying that teenagers cannot have wonderful, healthy, fulfilling lives. But I do believe that having conversations about what is best for teenagers -- conversations that include experience, respect, desire -- is going to require that we as adults step back and let teenagers be teenagers. Because as teenagers, we still have a huge amount of learning to do. As adults, we can help teenagers make better informed decisions about their own lives. We can help teenagers understand the complexities of adult lives. And I would even argue, we can all learn something from teenagers. Because as adults, we can all learn something from teenagers.
And that something could be about safe sexual practices.
We can do better than this. We can force teenagers to engage with the material they are seeing on chatroulette. We can force teenagers to read and understand the explicit material that is being shown at their site. We can require that all sex-chat websites that we connect teenagers to must include a policy that prohibits obscene, filthy, humorless or otherwise unappealing communication. We can require that all sex-chat websites include tools to detect and report sites that