'Friends with benefits'

It's unsettling but important reading, this week's look inside "the [US's] under-age sexual revolution, where causal sex is common, online ratings are scrutinized, everybody wants to be so detached, and boys still get what they want on Saturday night" in the New York Times Magazine. Here are some observations writer Benoit Denizet-Lewis makes just about the role the Internet plays in this "revolution":

• Teens flirt online first, then decide whether to continue in "real life."
  
  
  
• They spend a lot of time in sites like FaceTheJury.com (1.2 million members), HotorNot.com (4.3m members), and buddyPic.com, rating each other, updating their profiles, chatting, "asking the questions they might not dare to in real life," and deciding whether or not to "hook up" (for no-strings sex) with someone local they meet in the site.
  
  
• Cell phones and the Net offer teenagers "an unparalleled level of privacy, making hooking up that much easier...."
  
  
• A teenage boy says, "Who needs the hassle of dating when I've got online porn?"
  
  
  
• The Internet has made it possible for heterosexual teenagers to act the way "most of straight society assumes gay men act."

This is a thoughtful piece, with plenty of anecdotal material, some statistics, and historical context, finding some parallels between this generation and teenagers in the 1930s and '40s. It addresses gender questions, and factors in feminism, the abstinence movement, the Coalition for Positive Sexuality, perceptions about marriage, and other influences on teenagers' social lives. As for the rating Web sites teens reportedly flock to, here's another Times article focused just on them, the most innocuous of which is HotorNot.com. Some are more cruel than others, one psychiatrist told the times, adding that these sites feed on the narcissism increasingly pervading US culture.