I’ve been peeved all month about the latest panic: “sexting.” More and more states are bringing child-porn charges against teenagers who take racy pictures of themselves and send them electronically to lovers or pals. Child pornography is a far more serious crime — in terms of penalties, anyway — than is having actual sex. Sentences run to years per image, and after prison the person must register as a sex offender, a kind of life sentence in itself.

You might call sexting a dunderheaded act — who knows where your immortalized nipples might end up — but also a victimless “crime.” Yet here is the amazing part: Child-porn law is based on the minor’s inability to consent to being photographed; the model is ipso facto a victim of the photographer. Sexting, in which the model is also the photographer, is a crime in which a person can be both perpetrator and victim at the same time.

U.S. sex law is like a black hole: Once reason falls in, it can never re-emerge.

Can all this get any stupider? Just as I was asking myself this question, a post arrived from sex therapist Marty Klein’s blog, Sexual Intelligence, confirming that it could:

Massachusetts state representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein (D-Revere) has introduced a bill making it a crime for anyone over 60 to pose nude or sexually for a film or photo. The person taking the photo — whether a lover, artist or commercial porn maker — would also face jail time.

Adding insult to injury, the proposal amends a bill designed to punish those who make child pornography. It treats fully functional adults who happen to be over 60 the same as children under 18; it explicitly takes away their right to consent to be photographed in a lascivious way.

What Klein doesn’t mention is that the bill precludes consent not only by “an elder” but also by “a person with a disability.” Massachusetts law defines an elder as someone over 60; a “disability” is “a permanent or long-term physical or mental impairment that prevents or restricts the individual’s ability to provide for his or her own care or protection.” The bill is an obvious violation of the First Amendment, says Florida Constitutional lawyer Marc Randazzo, who notes that among the consent-stripped could be his own mother, whom he describes as a 60-plus sexually active “knockout” with a lung condition. Representative Reinstein, by the way, is 38.

We can hope this idea languishes in committee — and, if not, is ridiculed to death. Yet, once impassioned, Reinstein does not rest. Her 2006 proposal to honor the Fluffernutter as the state sandwich failed; it is back on this session’s calendar. Now that senior advocacy groups have informed her “elder exploitation and pornography is on the rise,” she told the Boston Herald, the necessity of her new bill is a “no-brainer.” This is an indisputable fact.

It is axiomatic that anything you want to outlaw is widespread, on the rise or both. Once reported, the proliferation of said pernicious activity will be re-reported until it becomes “fact,” with or without substantiation. Like elder porn, sexting is alleged to be widespread and increasing. Among many others, CBS News recently told its audience that “roughly 20 percent of teens admit to participating in ‘sexting,’ according to a nationwide survey by the National Campaign to Support Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy.” It called sexting “shockingly common.”

Is 20 percent shocking or common? Is the number even accurate? Journalist Debbie Nathan did what every reporter should: She checked the source. Turns out the datum was derived from a grand total of 653 survey respondents ages 13 to 19. These kids were among a randomly selected subgroup of a self-selected pool of 375,000 teens and young adults who have told a polling outfit called TRU that they’re willing to answer online surveys. Of the young people TRU sent questions regarding their electronic sex lives, 90 percent chose not to respond. But 653 teens were moved to disclose, and about one-fifth said they sent sexy self-portraits to lovers and friends.

Bill Albert, the Campaign’s chief program officer, defends the survey’s credibility but stresses that it “represents just one point in time. For all we know, the practice could be decreasing.” Yet sexting prosecutions are proliferating as fast as sexting is rumored to be. And by the time Reinstein’s bill reappears, granny porn will also be recognized as a serious public safety threat, warranting strong laws to combat it. Mark my word.

It is easy to make fun of the Keystone Komstocks who write and enforce vice laws. Yet this recent pair of virtue-rescue missions deserves serious attention because the same misguided principle lurks behind both efforts.

That is, anyone who displays her body in a sexual way cannot possibly be doing so on her own volition. Somebody somewhere must be coercing her to remove her clothes, dance around the pole or aim the camera and press “send.” That the disrober-aimer-sender is usually female only compounds the suspicion that she is not in possession of her own mind and body.

Nearly three decades ago, pro-sex feminists defeated two municipal ordinances enshrining the idea that pornography is violence against women. Adults generally have refused to be protected from self-exhibition for fun or profit. Voyeurism is also a popular entertainment: Commercial pornography, one of the enduring legacies of the sexual-liberation movement, is flourishing. Sexting, you might say, is a 21st-century offspring of both these phenomena. For better or worse, pornographic tropes, including the defining elements of exhibitionism and voyeurism, are part of the lingua franca of teen sexual self-expression. And the digital revolution has turned every girl, boy, woman, man or transperson into a potential pornographer.

These truths are evidently disturbing to America’s upholders of decency. Turning their attentions from adults to children, they’ve vastly expanded the universe of minors in need of supervision. Everywhere, the sexual age of consent has risen from 13 or 14 to 16 or 18. Clipped at the bottom, the age of sexual majority might now be shorn at the top — at 60 — and around the edges, where bodies and minds have differing abilities.

Older and disabled people have long been infantilized, and sexual neutering is part of it. They (or should I say we; I’m 56) are considered cute, weak and dim — also attributes of innocence, which is to say ignorance and incompetence. This condescension shows itself in various forms of discrimination, which has led to the designation of the disabled and people over 40 as “protected classes” — legal categories of people, such as racial or religious minorities, who may suffer discrimination based solely on who they are.

But legal protection often is distorted into legal protectionism. As in anti-sexting and elder-porn laws, that usually means protecting people from themselves.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine a 16-year-old taking a semi-nude picture of herself and sending it to her 17-year-old boyfriend would be prosecuted under child-pornography laws,” Bill Albert told me. Neither, apparently, did Vermont’s legislators. They are now scrambling to carve out an exception to state child-porn laws that decriminalizes the consensual exchange of graphic images between people 13 to 18 years old.

Although skeptics are already worrying that “predators” will get in on the sexting game, I predict the amendment will pass. Vermont has been more lenient to juveniles than have other states. But at the same time, we can expect to see more sexual behaviors criminalized — and more classes of people protected from what might be their own desires. This year, in clauses regarding sex-crimes victims, the phrase “or a person with a mental illness or disability” has been inserted after “a child 13 years of age or under.” That could be a good thing, guarding people who really need it, and Vermont’s legal definition of mental disability is far narrower than Massachusetts’. But who will define the consent of the disabled? And what will we be shielded from next? Baby-boomer porn?

And then, what will the next legal do-over look like, as the state attempts to scrub its politically motivated, unnecessary and harmful sex-crimes laws of their unintended consequences?

This column originally ran in Seven Days.

“Sexting” may be the latest invented scary youth trend — a name for adult hysteria about the alchemy of teen sex and technology. The Internet and other wireless means of mysterious kid-to-kid communication, are the 21st-century version of the corrupting Street, which I talked about in Harmful to Minors.

The  story, casting doubts on “sexting,” originally ran in the SF Chronicle.

The good news about “sexting” is that it is finally getting the ACLU off its ass to take on the rampaging enforcement of ever-broadening child pornography laws, something it has been shamefully reluctant to do for the last 25 years. The organization is assisting in a lawsuit against Pennsylvania for civil rights violations in the prosecution of some teenage girls who took naked pix of themselves & the boys to whom they sent them.

Amateur porn stars with Amazon Indians.

I refer to Fuck for Forest, the brain- (and bod-) child of a pretty, young Norwegian couple named Leona Johansson and Tommy Hol Ellingsen, who describe their project as “concerned humans” who “use their sexuality and love to direct attention to and collect money for the earth’s threatened nature.”

Fuckforforest.com, founded in 2004, is an “ecological porn site.” It recruits tree-hugging exhibitionists to donate photos and videos of their pleasure-taking, signs up subscribers at $15 a month, and sends the proceeds to rainforest conservation and reforestation efforts in Ecuador, Costa Rica and Brazil.

For a site dedicated to wild nature, FFF is pretty tame. Skinny, pierced and tattooed white people cavort in leafy settings. The occasional vegetable is introduced, as is mild fetishism. In one video, Leona in a blue wig employs an enormous leek to flagellate another woman. On the homepage, a woman in a gas mask kneels before a floating chainsaw. It’s all rather . . . Norwegian.

But Fuck for Forest is also an unprecedented hybrid. Leona and Tommy probably don’t know it, but their project represents the bridging of a historic divide between two political discourses, two heretofore separate spheres of activism. If we are going to save the Earth, it’s a gap worth closing.

On one side of the divide are the discourses of desire — the politics of sexual liberation and personal freedom. These are the values of the Age of Revolutions, including our own, with its inalienable right to pursue happiness. For better or worse, they’re also the values of capitalism, with its confederate desire, its promise gratification, and its job to cycle the two in endless escalation.

On the other side are the discourses of restraint, where environmentalism resides. Here, need — as opposed to desire — and limited resources are assessed; a just and sustainable balance of the two is sought. Economically, restraint is closer to socialism than to capitalism, or at least to regulated capitalism than to unfettered free markets.

If the pleasure people’s Utopia is Dionysian, the restrainers’ is Apollonian. It seeks satisfaction in rational moderation, and in saving some for later. Sustainability is by defintion a principle of delayed gratification.

There are aesthetic differences between the two, as well as a kind of culture-nature divide. Broadly speaking, the pleasure politicos embrace technology, fashion, the contemporary arts, media, speed, novelty. The restrainers prefer the rural; they like slow processes, durable, old things, things that are born, not made. John Muir, co-founder of the Sierra Club and widely seen as the father of American environmentalism, found spiritual and emotional succor in nature. Like many of his successors, he had less use for the products of human imagination. “One day’s exposure to mountains,” he wrote, “is better than a cartload of books.”

Neither side is monolithic or doctrinaire. Indeed, pleasurites are often critical of the consumer economy, especially its inexorable imperative to grow, obsolesce and discard. But they also take in stride the contribution that commerce makes to culture and community, identity and sexuality. Transpeople, for instance, are not above shopping the surgical and pharmaceutical mart to create bodies that match their self-images. And activists like FFF, the casual heirs of category-smashing movements from Pop Art to pro-sex feminism, regard as academic the lines between commercial and fine art, or porn and erotica.

For their part, some of the most sophisticated restrainers — such as Adbusters or Reverend Billy, whom I wrote about last month — humorously, even affectionately, twist the tropes of the mainstream media and use it to get the message across.

But there’s a strain of moral environmentalism that would throw the baby out with the gray water — that is, the imaginative, juicy, fun aspects of consumer culture with its devastating consequences. For such people, it’s not enough to love your bicycle; you have to hate your TV, too. It’s not enough to buy less and buy green; you have to condemn the whole enterprise of shopping as a crime and a sin and look down on shoppers (yourself included) as advertising-addled, instant-gratification-addicted zombies. Substitute a cartload of DVDs for Muir’s cartload of books and you get the gist.

So it was into this little DMZ that Fuck for Forest innocently stepped. There they discovered . . . a market niche! Green wankers! In its first year, 2004, the site raked in $100,000.

Then FFF got stranded on one shore of the divide.

No mainstream environmental organization would take their money. WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund) in Norway and the Netherlands declined. “[W]e cannot connect our brandname and logo to certain sectors of industry,” read the latex-protected prose of the latter. A San Francisco reporter calling American environmental organizations for comment on FFF met with “terse brushoffs.”

You could charge the envirocrats with plain prudery. Giving them more credit, you could countenance their worries that some constituents might consider FFF a pack of exploiters, even sexual assailants of women. But sex itself, even sexism, was probably not the whole of it (for one thing, many of FFF’s models are men). Nor could these organizations have honestly objected to hawking product. After all, WWF Netherlands was defending not its principles but its pocketbook — its “brandname and logo,” metaphor of both.

Seems to me that what made FFF’s lucre so filthy was the site’s cheerful marriage of sex and money. While Tommy and Leona were trilling about nature (sex) teaming up with nature (forests), their critics saw the commercial exploitation of naked bodies and the commercial exploitation of rainforests as a cynical alliance: Both despoil sacred nature for profit.

In response to these snubs, FFF expressed bemused exasperation. “What is morality when people are destroying the world?” Tommy asked the San Francisco reporter. The real obscenity, his comment suggested, is the rape of the emerald forests. But, good at getting it up again and again, FFF trekked south and found warm welcome among biologists and indigenous activists laboring to save both the nature and culture of the Amazon. Maybe these new beneficiaries are more relaxed about sex. Or maybe they just can’t afford to be picky.

Who’s right? In one sense, both. The important tension between the two — restraint politics focus on the public good, pleasure politics on the rights and desires of the individual — is almost three centuries old. And it’s not about to dissolve. That’s because it’s the tension at the heart of any live democracy.

But let’s not create conflicts where none exist. Some things are a matter of morality, others just of taste. I can compost my vegetables and still love watching “Deadwood.” You can titillate me with tits and ass and also move me with seed conservation. Go to FuckforForest.com. Get off on the picture of two bare butts ascending a tree. Pause for a cup of fair-trade coffee. Then spin another kind of fantasy gazing at the picture of a straw-hatted farmer tenderly planting a seedling.

POSTPONED: Environmentalist Bill McKibben and Judith Levine will have a public conversation about activism across the two-discourse divide on February 14 at 4:30 p.m. in Middlebury College’s McCardell Bicentennial Hall, Room 220. Free Info, 443-5355. POSTPONED UNTIL WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 21. CALL FOR INFORMATION.

This article originally appeared in Seven Days.