June 1, 2023

"None of this is new behaviour, it has been exacerbated by technology but it is not new behaviour. Sharing consensual imagery..."

"... was the norm when I was growing up, the difference was it was a disposal camera. Whereas now it’s 'aye, alright I’ll do it,' and you click that button and you think 'I wish I hadn’t done it.'"

Said Daljeet Dagon, programme manager at Barnardo’s Scotland, quoted in "Young people sharing indecent pictures online has ‘become the norm’" (London Times).

She said "teenagers are 'pestered again and again and again' to share pictures with many believing it is '“better to get it over and done with.'"

A "disposal camera" is,  I presume, what we called a "disposable camera," that is, a type of film camera, a type associated with the 1980s and 90s. Because you needed to get the pictures developed and printed, you had time to think about whether you really wanted to share them. Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.

50 comments:

Dave Begley said...

“ Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.”

Now do tats.

Dave Begley said...

Kids make all sorts of mistakes when they are pressured. This trans business is at the top of the list.

Michael said...


Forty years ago had a friend in college who worked for one of those 1 Hour Photo processing labs. You'd drop your film at a kiosk, a courier would rush it to the Lab where he'd process, then your prints would be shipped back to the kiosk. Although they were never to make an extra copies and take them out of building, the rules weren't strictly enforced. Dude had quite the collection ranging from cheesecake to full on focking.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now."

Geez Louise you could literally apply this quote to how they vote too.

Kevin said...

I have yet to come across a movie where the heroine shares a nude picture of herself and regrets it.

What is Hollywood telling us?

Walter said...

You know, it’s just a body. We all have them.

Walter said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Fritz said...

For a lesson in shifting cultural norms, listen to the words of the 1960 song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini" from my youth, and then go take a walk on any popular beach in summer. I'm not objecting, mind you, but times have changed, indeed.

Owen said...

“Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.” The ego naturally seeks to justify and defend itself. If one is confronted with too much irrefutable evidence of one’s shameful past acts, one will partition one’s mind, suppress the evidence and minimize its meaning . Perhaps the result of this defensiveness is unmanageable madness but more likely it will be an angry defiance. Regret? Not so much. Regret is a chance to reflect, correct oneself, grow a little more humble and less stupid, to make amends. It will become harder to experience real regret and grow wiser from it.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

A “disposal camera” is the streaming of a landfill… the waterboarding of an environmentalist really.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Women's liberation: young men presume they can pester a girlfriend for nudie shots until she gives in. No one too worried about dispersal on the internet. I think at one time Germain Greer was suggesting that if men are to be granted the privilege of sex with a woman, they can learn coitus interruptus like certain Eastern mystics. How's that workin' out for ya?

gilbar said...

Elon Musk gets interviewed by the Boys at the Babylon Bee
FULL INTERVIEW: The Babylon Bee Talks With @elonmusk
at Twitter HQ


Lots in there about posts. Here's a funny Elon quote (that i just heard as i as reading Ann's post)
X marks the Spot
X is where the treasure is..
XXX is where the porn is

gilbar said...
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Big Mike said...

I beg your pardon, Professor, but Polaroid cameras became cheap and widely available in the 1970s, or about the time the Boomers in the middle of the demographic bulge were in high school and college. Girls could pose topless, or even nude, for their boyfriends knowing that the clerk down at the drugstore who developed rolls of film wouldn’t be able to make a private copy.

My point being that there are probably women in their sixties and seventies who know that there are guys possessing grainy Polaroid photos of them from a half century ago in some state of undress.

mikee said...

As with all previous sexual revolutions, this is an example of the toxic male patriarchy gaining and maintaining power over women and their bodies. Curse the males!

That is how the issue will be handled in future, with the recipients of female nudes vilified and the senders of dick pix vilified. Note that both categories will include almost exclusively only biological males. Exactly ow transgender men sending dick pix and demanding nudes are to be vilified is yet to be determined.

Sending nudes will become another example of minimizing female agency in favor of a notional female empowerment of some vague sort, just like the 1960s sexual revolution. This game is played so if the coin flip is heads, men lose, and if tails, women win. But men don't mind being vilified if they get sexual gratification, and power over women, in return. So everyone is happy.

Either that, or sending nudes can be dismissed with a mere, "Everyone was doing it, and didn't I look great at that age!" This would be both more logically defensible and self-empowering for women.



Randomizer said...

“trying to police the unpoliceable”

Young people do stupid stuff all the time. Why would any parent think it is imperative to give their child the ability to take photos, share photos, get asked for photos and to see that everyone else is doing it?

Of course it is unpoliceable. The article fails to suggest that parents stop providing that powerful and dangerous device to their children. Does any child need anything more than a flip phone?

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

In my experience it was the Polaroid instant photos that were allowed because they couldn’t be easily duplicated back in the day. Somewhere stuffed in one of these hundreds of books in the den there still might be a few. Hmmm.

Sebastian said...

"I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now."

Doesn't just apply to photos, does it? In the olden days, you could leave your past behind; now, it trails you for life.

And even if you didn't make any mistakes, it's easier for malicious actors to make them up through virtual slander. Ask Brett.

Readering said...

What's the difference between disposable and regular film camera? I thought that's what Polaroid was for.

Many years later more will look back on youthful photos with nostalgia than regret.

mezzrow said...

Technology evolves more quickly than human desire.

People have always done stupid shit and regretted it later. The flavors of stupidity have increased exponentially with more advanced technology. Who knows what we'll come up with in another hundred years. I can only predict it will be profoundly embarrassing.

Saint Croix said...

Snapchat is the disposable camera of the 21st century.

If you need a defense of capitalism, people trying to make money see problems ("opportunities!") way quicker than academics.

Saint Croix said...

There's still the problem of everybody walking around with a camera and taking photographs of you when you fuck up. Like that time in high school when I got drunk at a party and took (almost) all of my clothes off. Thank God there was no iPhone, or Facebook, back then.

In today's world, strangers, enemies, and maybe even "frenemies" would have photographed me and put the photos up online. And many potential employers would look at that shit and not hire me.

So we're living in a surveillance society, and there are a lot fewer secrets than there used to be. The internet makes for a more open culture, but there are (of course) drawbacks to a lack of privacy.

I have a theory that in heaven, we have no secrets from anybody. That's why Christians are taught to confess their sins. Maybe in the afterlife everybody sees everything you do in this world. Don't let shame drive you from heaven. Confess your screw ups, admit your humanity, ask for forgiveness, and enjoy a new day.

Saint Croix said...

“Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.”

Now do tats.


or "sex changes"

nudie pics on the internet are pretty damn innocent, really

we're in the 21st century and it's the actions that have been sanctified by doctors and lawyers that will really fuck you up

abortions and child castration

I cheer human reproduction and call on us to love each other!

tim in vermont said...

"Women's liberation was invented by horny teenage boys."

cassandra lite said...

My daughter confided to me that she'd sent her college bf some pix and wished she hadn't. I flew to Boston and told him that if he didn't immediately delete the photos, or that if any of them should happen at any time to show up somewhere, he'd pee sitting down the rest of his life. Voila.

MayBee said...

The University of Wisconsin women's volley ball team had taken a bunch of (consensual) sexually explicit nude photos of the team, and they got released. That seems especially stupid. I'm surprised they didn't get in more trouble. Can't imagine if it were a football team taking those pictures.

Temujin said...

"I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now."

We all make mistakes and I'll be the first to tell you I made a lifetime full of them by the age of 23. But none of them were at the level they seem to be these days.

I never sent photos of my cock. Just didn't seem necessary. Never made the decision to change my gender and have hormones stopped and body parts cut off. These can be big mistakes. While tattoos were around, very few back then decided to tat every square inch of their body. Or, at the very least, their entire arms and legs. Today it's almost boring how often you see it. (In my years, our parents were still of the WWII generation that fought actual Nazis- not people who wanted school choice. For Jews coming out of that era, getting a tattoo by choice, was, and for many still is, an abysmal mistake.)

Being a vegan might give you brownie points among those reading your posts, but it'll make you weak and exposed to getting sick. And suicide is something that should be discussed more among the young. Rates are higher than ever. And some (if not many) are encouraged by what they are told on social media platforms. It's cruel, awful, and a mistake that cannot be corrected.

We just smoked a lot of pot, had a lot of sex, and talked about how we'd change the world. We didn't. So then we just got to work and worked our asses off for the rest of our lives until we got to the point when we could comment on those coming up behind us.

s'opihjerdt said...

I suspect that "disposable camera" is a misnomer. He probably never used the British word for Polaroid during his youth in India, or during his adulthood after Polaroid went the way of the dodo.

MadisonMan said...

I recall that on my paper route -- in the earlyish 70s -- I found a polaroid on the ground of someone fully nude. No face. I took it home and hid it. But after not many days I put it in the trash.

rehajm said...

Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.

The culture so so different now isn't the assumption there will be future regret erroneous? With our society moving toward government intervention intended to promote the acceptance of pedophilia how much regret of a skin pic will there be?

hombre said...

"I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now."

They will have to apologize to their CCP masters. All will be forgiven when "the clock strikes thirteen."

Krumhorn said...

Regret is just not the same these days. I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.

Just ask Laura Schlessinger. When pictures of her were released, she had the second highest ratings to Rush. Everything went immediately downhill from there. Great pix though.

- Krumhorn

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

By the way, people missed the Polaroid as much as we miss James Garner's commercials so... they're back!

https://www.polaroid.com/en_us/collections/now-camera [copy & paste & go version]

And for the trusting here's an actual link to the Generation 2 "Now" camera Polaroid is selling...uh now:Now Camera

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Snapchat is the disposable camera of the 21st century.

What? No. No it isn't. They are easily captured and shared forever, just like other texted photos. It was sold as "self deleting" but those tech companies tend to lie about shit. A lot.

RideSpaceMountain said...

"My daughter confided to me that she'd sent her college bf some pix and wished she hadn't. I flew to Boston and told him that if he didn't immediately delete the photos, or that if any of them should happen at any time to show up somewhere, he'd pee sitting down the rest of his life. Voila."

Pay attention everyone, this is how you parent. Only thing missing is the daughter's penalty, which if I had a daughter would be pretty steep...

"I don't know who you are. I don't know what you want. If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money. But what I do have are a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you. If you let my daughter go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you, I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you." - Cassandra Liam Neeson (allegedly)

Jupiter said...

"Because you needed to get the pictures developed and printed, you had time to think about whether you really wanted to share them."

In the 80's and 90's? Nuh-uh. You took the shot and peeled off the cover, and there was your photo. My band used to cover a song called "Polaroid Spread Shots". Oh, the trees weep, in the bending wind.

Narr said...

What a boon that Polaroid was!

I made some more-or-less soft-core pix of my wife with a real camera long ago, and as far as I was concerned if the horny dweeb or dweebette at the photo counter wanted to add to their collection, they were welcome. (There's just something about a bubble bath.)

I only had to be careful to segregate the pix and negs before sharing. Still have them all.
She has likely forgotten.

Narr said...
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Narr said...

Forgive the doubling. Blogger being petulant.

Old and slow said...

Photo places in London used to return the developed negatives with no prints if the photos were considered indecent. My girlfriends and I used to drink quite a bit back then, and the photos probably were pretty scandalous.

pious agnostic said...

Reparations will be in order.

Big Mike said...

I wonder how today's young people will live with their old mistakes years from now.

The genre called “revenge porn” means that these days the mistakes need not be very old ones. Girl meets boy. Girl sends nude selfie to boy (in response to pressure or unsolicited). Girl breaks up with boy. Girl’s nude pictures get posted to a revenge porn website for all the incels to ogle.

Pixels are forever!

Christopher B said...

Shake it, shake it, like a Polaroid picture.

Saint Croix said...

Mike, you're right, I'm wrong. Thanks for the correction.

JK Brown said...

Twenty years ago, I speculated that the spread of surveillance cameras was just going to cause the young people to stop caring about being seen in situations that old folks worried about keeping private.

The selfie culture is just an extension. In the past, many would hesitate to take a film photo that was going to be closely seen by the processing employees. The Polaroid got around that.

Similarly, 20 years ago a model had some hope of enforcing a modeling release that governed how the photos might be used, but that is out the door with digital distribution.
The latter discussed by this model reflecting on her 20 years in the business.

The young women might need to be cautioned against open-leg modeling photos.

n.n said...

Devaluation of human life from conception to Planned Parent/hood, with boys and girls left in the wake of social progress as collateral damage. The Pro-Choice ethical religion, specifically diversity (i.e. color judgment, class-based bigotry) doctrine, and the normalization of human rites, reduces a human life to a sum of her parts.

JK Brown said...

Model reference in my earlier comment on her channel where she discusses aspects of the business on her youtube channel:

Ariel'sTwilightYears

n.n said...

Reparations will be in order.

America stood against the Nazis, empathasized with the Stalinists, colluded with the Maoists, lent a helping hand to Mandela to defeat the Zulu and native South Africans. Who will stand against the Dezis and Tranzis? The girls are being amended. The boys are being carved. The pathogenic spread through the black whore h/t NAACP is progressive with related medical prices. Our Marines are taking a knee by force to the social justice mob.

Marcus Bressler said...

I have a multitude of nudies from lady friends in print, on my hard drive, and in a few clouds. They were all happy to pose and some even suggested it. The one thing I will NOT do is share those pics. Now if someone was to hack some files, well.....
(I do take professional photos of women in the nude. I do good work. They sign a release and I give them a set of prints as compensation.)

MarcusB. THEOLDMAN

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Thanks for the correction

Ah, you'd do the same for me. But what did we learn from this? Don't trust Big Tech!