so i was online the other day trying, in the longest & most circuitous way possible, to find my little sister’s MySpace page. It only occurred to me after several hours of profile-scanning that, rather than typing in “Molly” and looking through 405 pages of thumbnails for “Massachusetts”, I could just put in HER FULL NAME. Would’ve saved me a lot of time.

But anyway.

In the process of scrolling through hundreds and hundreds of “Molly”s all over the country, I learned something very disturbing. Teenagers are way fucked up.

Some facts:

1) at least 45% of teenage Mollys now classify themselves as “bi”.

2) Many of the “straight” ones have apparently resorted to trolling the internet for beaus (not “activity partners”, whatever the hell that means).

3) at least 20% of Mollys have no idea that the internet is chock-full of freakish weirdos who are probably masturbating to their “16-y/o-bikini-fun” profile pics.

no shit. I saw pants so low as to assist, with great accuracy, the viewer’s pinpointing of the day and time of their last bikini wax. I saw a few girls flaunting piercings in *ahem* titillating areas, usually accompanied by a thoughtfuly placed tattoo or hot frames. I also saw one girl who was NAKED. N-E-K-K-E-D. (turns out she is an adult model, and 21, so PHEW, you know?)

Then, as if the suggestive, underage, soft-core porn pics aren’t enough, they give their screenname and are like “hey, cutie, let’s chat”. And in their screenname profile they probably have everything from their home phone number to their address to their blood type. I JUST DON’T GET IT. The internet is not a separate reality. in fact, it’s quite open! Online, people seem to think that they are somehow freed of the shackles of “normal life” and should to portray themselves however they like, which in the case of the Mollys seems to be “CUM GUZZLING VIRGIN SLUT”. The problem arises when the internet bites back in the form of some weird pedophile stalker that you just can’t get rid of and who JUST CAN’T STOP THINKING OF YOU IN THAT THONG WHY DON’T YOU ANSWER MY IMs.

ok. Maybe I’m overreacting. But I just don’t know what goes through people’s heads sometimes.

As i looked through more and more profile shots that would be better suited for “Barely Legal”, I was most relieved upon arriving at my sister’s page. For the record, she has no picture up and uses a design instead. Good girl.