The AARP has finally figured out a way to deter all those crazy tweens from sexting their chastity away: Inform them that a bunch of totally old people are doing it, too. In the November issue Online at AARP.org, reporter Jessica Leshnoff interviews a handful of first-name-only seniors who admit to sending photos of their boobs to other old people through text messages.

There's Roger, the 59-year-old divorcé who need only tell a date that she has "amazing breasts" to be rewarded with an unsolicited photo of them. There's Jill, 50, who suggests sexting dirty thoughts while "sitting in a restaurant waiting for your food . . . and no one knows what you're doing." And then there's sexting-skeptical Richard, 66, who received a sext while "with a group of colleagues after hours at a restaurant," and "surprised himself by being less than thrilled."

These aging sexters have got a good half-century on the subjects of most sexting paranoia pieces, but their story is the same. The "old people are sexting" trend story operates under the same premise as the teenage sexting story. Find a group the public doesn't enjoy considering being sexually active (minors, the elderly). Reveal that they are sexually active. Then, add technology—the second-scariest topic next to sex— and voilà—something else for David Brooks devotees to clutch their pearls over.

The AARP isn't slut-shaming the elderly here, but it does insert a good deal of skepticism into the piece. After all, it wouldn't be a "sexting" article without a degree of alarm. Elder sexting can't be policed through the traditional avenues—you can't ground them, and you can't threaten to slap them with absurd child pornography charges. But surely, there must be some way to convince old people that sending dick photos may not be the way to spend their lunch hour? "But beware, the experts warn," Leshnoff writes. "Sexting has its dangers, too, especially when it comes to people in the dating world."

Those dangers? "False advertising." "Too much, too soon." "Not everyone likes receiving a sexually charged text." Someone could steal them and put them on the Internet. And in a sick twist of fate: "the possibility of your teenage kids innocently flipping through your texts." The article ends on a downer, via Richard: After actually receiving the money shot, "It was like the fun kind of went out of it," he says.

But despite the pitfalls, the AARP has recognized that old people will probably send photos of their genitals anyway, so we may as well help them sext safely. Their tips: Slowly transition from "I still want to go to the prom with you" to "Forget chocolate, I am craving the taste of you!" Take care to periodically delete nude texts every once in a while. And always remember to "keep expectations based on sexting in check."

I really like that. Our culture has a tendency to infantilize men and women "of a certain age," and that includes treating their sex lives as either an unspoken taboo or an inflated cause for concern. I get it: My parents get AARP magazine, and I don't want to think about them giving these sexting tips a text ride, either (except for the part where they delete the evidence). And the idea of my grandmother sending a perfectly chaste text message is hilarious to me. That being said, aging can present some pretty specific challenges to a person's sex life—and, like with teens, the worst we can do is refuse to talk about it.

Photo via Ethan Prater, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Drumming up a good teen sex scandal for the nightly news ain’t what it used to be. A couple decades ago, a news anchor could scare the shit out of some parents by just turning to the camera and posing a question: “It’s 10 o’clock. Parents, do you know where your children are?”

Nowadays, the advent of e-mail, cell phones, and GPS has ensured that parents always know where their children are. And so, local news reporters have been forced to dig a little deeper than that old rhetorical question for their parental scare tactics. Below, how to engineer a teen sex scandal using only a cell phone, a pair of blue jeans, and a few good "experts."

NBC Washington: “Gossip Site Causing Concern, Controversy in Montgomery County”

Rumors: Is your child spreading them? NBC Washington reports on this concerning new trend, noting that Montgomery County high school students “call each other names, spread rumors, and recently, a former Whitman high school student posted death threats.”

What’s to blame? A dangerous element that lurks, unseen, around us all: the Internet.

Andrew Ship, a high school counselor and “Internet safety expert,” walks solemnly down a high school hallway as he explains to parents the grave dangers of kids spreading rumors. “There’s nobody monitoring this stuff.…There’s no Internet police,” Ship says.

There is no “Internet police,” but there are real police—and like NBC Washington, they’re surfing teen boards, too. NBC reported that cops have “temporarily shut down the Web site twice in the last five months after a photo of a topless underage teen popped up.” Police have since monitored the site for illegal behavior. What the report fails to mention is that the new teenage forum for circulating gossip is actually far more regulated than schoolyard note-passing ever was—now, parents are let in on the notes, too.

In that way, the move from mail to message boards has actually encouraged teen sex scandals: It puts underage improprieties only a Google search away from a local news reporter hard-pressed for a sex story. Now, kids aren’t the only ones who can spread rumors about kids on the Internet!

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Fox 5: “What Texting Acronyms Are Kids Using?”

Leather: Is your child lusting after it? Last month, Fox 5 D.C. published two stories on its Web site covering a list of online chatroom “codes,” titled “50 Acronyms Parents Should Know.” The acronyms included such standard kiddy fare as “A/S/L” (Age/Sex/Location), “POS” (Parents Over Shoulder), and “FOL” (Fond of Leather). This teen sex scare is constructed of a delicate local news logic: Teens use acronyms on the Internet. Sadomasochistic leather fetishists use acronyms on the Internet. Could your teen be couching his sadomasochistic leather fetishism in intricate abbreviated text-speak?

Even Fox 5 can’t be sure. The first story on the acronym blow-up, published May 23, took a novel approach to the teen sex scandal: reporting the trend while simultaneously debunking it. “Many people who see the list wind up howling with laughter, since many of the terms are completely unknown to most people, teenaged or otherwise,” Fox reports, before blaming “some local TV news reporters” for furthering the scandal.

In the second story, published May 25, “some local TV news reporters”—also from Fox—take a more traditional approach to the trend. “It may be an old list, but it doesn’t change the fact that parents want to decipher what it is their kids are reading and how they’re communicating online,” Fox reported. “Erin Jansen, founder of NetLingo, acknowledges that not all of the terms on the list are used by everyone.”

So, are your kids secret Internet sadomasochistic leather fetishists, or aren’t they? There’s only one way to be sure: Don’t ask them.

Combined, the two stories quoted the following sources: PC Magazine editor Sascha Segan; NetLingo’s Jansen; several Digg commenters; 21-year-old Arizona State University junior Jason Parks.
None of these people are teens. But many did think the list was ridiculous. “It looks like a lot of them come from online sex chat rooms, and not just any chat rooms, but sadomasochistic ones,” Segan said, in the second story.

What does a local news station do when even its adult “experts” won’t help further its teen sex scandal? Remember that a picture can say 1,000 sadomasochistic online acronyms—even if your kids don’t know any of them. Fox paired its overblown warning of youth Internet use with a shot, plucked from Flickr, of three blond-haired children gathered conspiratorially around a laptop. All are several years shy of tweendom—and decades away from serious leather play.

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Fox 5: “Jeans May Cause Tingling Thigh Syndrome.”

Jeans: Are your teens suffering from them? This recent Fox 5 story is a typical “hidden danger of teen trend” piece: This time, wearing fashionably skinny jeans may make your thighs tingle.
If you’ve noticed your teen suffers from a compression of the “lateral femoral cutaneous nerve,” he may have been donning these super-tight, sexy leg coverings—under your own roof. The condition, known as meralgia paresthetica, or “tingling-thigh syndrome,” “usually affects obese people or manual laborers.” Now, numb thighs are beginning to afflict a demographic you actually care about. Tingling-thigh syndrome “is cropping up in younger people,” Fox reports.
How long has this condition been “cropping up” in younger people? Since you, too, were a younger person. “Skinny jeans are not the first pants to cause the condition,” Fox reports. “Super-low-rise jeans, popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s, were linked to meralgia paresthetica; and in the 1970s, there were rumors that snug jeans caused infertility in men and yeast infections in women.”
Older people lucky enough to have escaped sterilization by skinny jeans now have a new set of young denim enthusiasts to worry about. That is, until they reach the end of the story, which completely invalidates its premise. “Salon.com does counter that the condition may not be affecting very many people.”

WJLA-TV: “Sexting: New, Dangerous Teen Trend”

Teens: Do you hate raising them? Published May 15, this teen sex scandal story broke on WJLA-TV a full year after teen “sexting” hit the scare cycle. Sexting, or sending explicit photographs via cell phone, evolved from a centuries-old teenage pastime: creating and sharing nude depictions of sex partners. This tactic preys on society’s weakest—those who think their children are far more difficult to raise than any generation before them.

WJLA-TV works hard to make millennial parents feel sorry for themselves, calling the trend a “new” and “dangerous” “risqué game” that has “invaded middle schools.” According to WJLA-TV, “the phenomenon is raging as wildly as their hormones,” and boy, are modern hormones wilder than ever. This ostensibly local adaptation of the national teen sex trend story is devoid of place, names, or evidence of sexting. Of the 10 12-year-olds surveyed by WJLA-TV’s Julie Parker, half had “heard” of sexting. None had actually sexted.

Thankfully, a couple of anonymous parentals—who declined to stand by their boilerplate shock on the record—provide the necessary outrage. “It’s alarming. They’re not protected,” says one. “It’s really disappointing! It’s hard to be a parent today,” whines another. But not as hard as it is to be a local news reporter in search of underage smut.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

Ribeiro's partner-in-crime is young enough not to have his name released to the papers, but he's still old enough to be charged with child porn.

The "sexting" trend was only recently declared a Very Scary Teen Trend by the newsmedia; now, authorities are cracking down. The two Spotsylvania teens allegedly "had nude pictures of underage girls on their cell phones," which they acquired by asking the girls "to take explicit pictures of themselves" on their own phones, "then text the pictures to the suspects." The suspects then "sent the photos to various other people." One, two, three, sexting!

Though one of the "underage girls" is actually older than the youngest suspect—she's 16—another of the victims is considerably younger—only 12 years old.

The ABC 7 story on the arrest follows up with the obligatory quote about why this Very Scary Teen Trend is actually a widespread epidemic. "County residents and parents say they fear sexting is becoming more and more common. 'Nowadays, it happens a lot more than people would think. A lot more,' said Eric Dent, a Spotsylvania County resident."

Spotsylvania police said they "seized a total of seven cell phones," and that "more young people could be charged in the case." Stay tuned as the case of the first busted sexters unfolds.