The terrors of technology are everywhere being manifest in the most extraordinary forms. An entire nation has been taken by storm at the spectacle of a couple of schoolchildren who chose to record their "extracurricular activities" on a cell phone camera, and to circulate the images - 2 minutes 37 seconds of grainy adolescent sex - among friends, with copies eventually "leaking" into the great marketplace of pornography which threatens to engulf the imagination of the minders of our country's morals.
Ignored in all this is the far greater pornography of the news coverage, of the prurient police "investigations" into the "moral depravity" and "adult perversity" of the "perpetrators", and of invasive - and widely reported - judicial processes. And all this titillating tamasha is about little more than a minor misdemeanour - what the Juvenile Justice Board has now quite rightly, though I must confess to a degree of astonishment at their sagacity, described as "a misadventure" and not, as the police were arguing, an act of "moral depravation".
What precisely is all the noise about? If it is about sex among schoolchildren, we are being plain hypocritical. There have been a number of recent surveys of sexual conduct among the urban young that claim that the "oral examination" the two adolescents were engaged in, as well as a wide range of other biological voyages of discovery, are not particularly extraordinary in this day and age - if, indeed, they were so in any other age or time. The only element of innovation was their choice to actually record the act on their hi-tech toy and their somewhat surprising choice to generously share their experience with others - but they would surely not be the first to have done this, though they may be the first to be "self-snared" in this manner.
The only "offence" in all this occurs where such pictures are taken or distributed without consent. The former, apparently, does not apply in the present case. The young starlet in the "school production", it is reported, was quite unfazed by the entire episode, since "everyone does it, what's wrong?" The young star has taken the precaution to destroy his camera and sim card, and it is apparent that he was, in the first instance, the proud purveyor of this amateur skin flick- whether or not he had the consent of his partner in passion is, possibly, a matter for investigation, but only in case she is, in fact, aggrieved by this action, which does not appear to be the case.