Joel Best

Kathleen A. Bogle

Winner of the 2015 Brian McConnell Book Award presented by the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research To hear mainstream media sources tell it, the sex lives of modern teenagers outpace even the smuttiest of cable television shows. Teen girls “sext” explicit photos to boys they like; they wear “sex bracelets” that signify what sexual activities they have done, or will do; they team up with other girls at “rainbow parties” to perform sex acts on groups of willing teen boys; they form “pregnancy pacts” with their best girlfriends to all become teen mothers at the same time. From The Today Show, to CNN, to the New York Times, stories of these events have been featured widely in the media. But are most teenage—or younger—children really going to sex parties and having multiple sexual encounters in an orgy-like fashion? Researchers say no—teen sex is actually not rampant and teen pregnancy is at low levels. But why do stories like these find such media traffic, exploiting parents’ worst fears? How do these rumors get started, and how do they travel around the country and even across the globe? In Kids Gone Wild, best-selling authors Joel Best and Kathleen A. Bogle use these stories about the fears of the growing sexualization of childhood to explore what we know about contemporary legends and how both traditional media and the internet perpetuate these rumors while, at times, debating their authenticity. Best and Bogle describe the process by which such stories spread, trace how and to where they have moved, and track how they can morph as they travel from one medium to another. Ultimately, they find that our society’s view of kids raging out of control has drastic and unforeseen consequences, fueling the debate on sex education and affecting policy decisions on everything from the availability of the morning after pill to who is included on sex offender registries. A surprising look at the truth behind the sensationalism in our culture, Kids Gone Wild is a much-needed wake-up call for a society determined to believe the worst about its young people.

From Rainbow Parties to Sexting, Understanding the Hype Over Teen Sex

Kids Gone Wild

"The peril is not preeminently to the nation's purse; it is to its soul. The danger is not so much that we will fail to protect our interests, it is that we will betray our historic ideals . . . . . There is no assumption made here that the nation has always lived up to its deals; it did, however, always look up to them. We believe that it needs to do so again." --from the Introduction In The Imperial Temptation, two eminent foreign policy experts warn that America has made a Faustian bargain in its quest for the leadership of a new world order. In its attempts to address the challenges posed by new global realities, the Bush administration, so argues The Imperial Temptation, has betrayed the fundamental ideals on which this country was founded. Criticizing the all-out military assault on Iraq as a disproportionate and inhumane response to the crisis, Tucker and Hendrickson argue that President Bush seized on the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait to crystallize its vision of a new world order that would reclaim America's position of world leadership. But, in choosing to wage war against Iraq when another alternative was available, the authors write, Bush made the use of force the centerpiece of his vision of world order. As a result, America has fastened on a formula that allows us to go to war with far greater precipitancy that we otherwise might while simultaneously allowing us to walk away from the ruin we create without feeling a commensurate sense of responsibility. By leaving Iraq in chaos, America has succumbed to an imperial temptation without discharging the classic duties of imperial rule. The Imperial Temptation makes an important--and what is sure to be viewed as controversial--contribution to the national debate over the future of U.S. foreign policy and offers a revealing examination of the classic ideas underlying American diplomacy and their relation to the nation's historic purpose.

Kathleen A. Bogle

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