Lauren Greenfield
speaker
81 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Lauren Greenfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For decades, for generations, teenagers have probably looked at girly magazines or some kind of book from their parents' library or whatever that sexy thing was. But now the kids talked about as early as third grade seeing hardcore pornography and that just being available on computers or on their phones.
And that was a revelation to me that the new sex education was actually pornography and social media.
Absolutely. I mean, that was one of the things that really shocked me as a parent, but also just as a human. to see that BDSM was a trend and not just like a trend among some, but something that all of the kids were familiar with. Like that was the thing about our group discussion is you could really tell when something was, in like the minds of the whole group. And like the BDSM thing was one.
Not that everybody was participating, but everybody knew about this trend and knew that it was a trend and had been exposed to it in some way. And I remember going home and saying to my boys, like, these kids are talking about this. Like, is this just in my group? Is this just in the school? And they were like, no, we know about this. This is what we hear girls like.
And then I asked the 20 somethings in my office and they were like, yep, That's what's happening. And I think what's really scary in episode four, which is the sex episode, is you start to see a connection between the violence depicted in these sexual scenes in social media and in pornography and real violence among kids.
I... I agree with you that it's really unbelievable that adults allow this unregulated world when everywhere else in the world, TV and movies, you know, there's ratings and there's restrictions. And should we or should we have sex ed in school? And meanwhile... we're not in control of it anymore. And nobody is taking care of that.
And even they don't want to see what they're seeing, and they can't control what they're seeing.
I think there's a really big difference between how adults and parents respond to it and how young people respond to it. Parents are really disturbed by what they see and kind of scared to watch. In the show, in episode one, Sydney's mom says, I don't know if I even want to know what's on her TikTok. And she kind of knows that Sydney's being very sexy on her social.
When young people watch it, there are a lot less surprises. They feel seen and they feel like their world is represented. The kids in Greece were like, it's the first time I've seen a show about us.
They're, you know, obviously not L.A. kids, but they're seeing the same kind of media. They're dealing with the same kind of issues. I think one of the things that's been really exciting is young people really want to talk about it. And they really want their parents and adults to know. Like, after we premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, this 22-year-old And her mom came up to me.
The 22-year-old said, my mom doesn't know anything about my life, and I'm really glad she does now. A friend of mine just said she watched it with her teenage daughter and when they got to the sex episode and somebody said they saw pornography in third grade, she was like, is that really true? And her daughter was kind of like, yeah. It's like, it's hard if you don't know what to ask.
No, because our project wasn't political at all in that sense. It was like completely experiential. We were just filming what was happening and the kids were so incredibly honest. I mean, there weren't any like pros and cons. There were no arguments. It was just like a discovery.
And... They say, you know, after all of this looking, after all of this exploration, after all of this discussion, could we just get off of our phones?
And then one of them says, but would we exist if we're not on social media?
It's like the new existential question. And they were like, no. People forget about you. And I think that's where the quandary was. Like, you can't live without it. You can't live with it. Like, Jonathan says... It's our lifeline, but it's also a loaded gun. I think from my point of view, it's not a binary. Like, there are of course a lot of great things about social media and technology, but
We also would not allow loaded guns around either, where people could just pick them up and accidentally fire them off. And I think that we have to remember that these apps are engineered to do exactly what they're doing, and they don't have to be that way.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the kids in the show say they're worried about their siblings and they would not let their kids be on social media. And of course, we've all heard stories about
in the tech world, like in Silicon Valley, a lot of tech professionals sending their kids to schools where they're not allowed to be on social at all or like not letting their kids have phones at all because they know exactly how it's engineered. I think that, yeah, they point to a problem. They also point to some solutions.
And I think that's what is happening with this collective discussion that's going on And I think all we have to do is listen to the kids in the show and they're saying exactly what's going on. And it's empirical. They're not doing it from a study, but it's very clear. Now, we're seeing a lot of schools ban phones in schools.
We're seeing groups of parents decide that they're going to wait for their kids to have phones. And... They all say that when they're big groups doing it, it's fine. Like they love being without a phone in our discussions. I thought that was going to be a big deal. I thought they were going to be like tweaking for their phones.
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