Judge Not, Lest Ye Find Yourself Copping a Feel On Facebook

You know how juvenile court records get sealed because a young punk has a better chance of becoming a non-punk if the record of his punkdom doesn't follow him forever?

It's a smart law. But in light of the Miss New Jersey brouhaha, I'd like to propose a 2007 update:

Seal Facebook.

Seal MySpace too, while we're at it. Let's come up with some way to erase all record of a person's stunningly stupid Web page the minute he or she turns 21 and realizes it is actually is not the world's coolest thing to pose for pictures while, for instance, biting someone's breast (particularly when that someone looks vaguely annoyed).

This law would certainly help any future Miss New Jerseys. As you're probably quite aware, the current one, Amy Polumbo, was recently the victim of a blackmailer who threatened to expose compromising pictures of her he'd grabbed off her private Facebook account.

Like most summer stories involving young women, beauty pageants and possibly soft-core porn, this story did not go quietly to Page 38. Early last week, Miss New Jersey appeared on "The Today Show" insisting the pictures, which she refused to show, weren't really bad. Later in the week, she was back again with Matt. This time, she showed the pics.

Really bad.

The most provocative one did indeed show her boyfriend biting her fully clothed breast. (NBC exercised its journalistic responsibility by keeping this image on air an inordinately long amount of time.) Another shot showed Miss N.J. with her legs — again, fully clothed — in a position that could only be called … non-vertical.

When the board of the Miss New Jersey pageant finally ruled that Polumbo could keep her crown on (along with the rest of her clothes), the matter seemed decided.

But it's not, because the rest of us are now faced with two choices:

We can continue to express our shock at Miss New Jersey's behavior. Or we can assume that pretty much everyone does something icky, if not downright illicit, in college, and that from now on, thanks to the Internet, we are going to see all sorts of pictures of them doing it. This being the case, we'll either have to write off pretty much everyone with a Facebook page as an utter degenerate. Or we've got to stop being so shocked.

Right now, I'm trying to do the latter.

The reason is not just that Miss New Jersey seems no worse than other young women her age (including the ones she posed with!). It's also that I just had dinner with my friend and her delightful daughter, who is heading to college this fall. When talk turned to the pictures on her Facebook page, however, her mom said, "Yeah, with her tongue out in all of them."

Really?

"Not all of them," the daughter said.

"Is your tongue, like, licking people?" I asked of the young woman I'd admired ever since she cut her hair off as a young teen and donated it to charity.

This otherwise perfect daughter blushed.

So here's the deal: If there are pictures of this lovely lass licking her friends on her Web page, and pictures of the young woman accomplished enough to become Miss New Jersey with her legs in the air, we just have to accept that everyone's Facebook is a fount of foulness, a citadel of shame that should be sealed upon graduation.

If that's technologically impossible (is it, Mr. Jobs?), let us at least agree not to judge folks by their Facebook follies. Otherwise, there will be no one left to hire, date, marry, elect to public office or crown Miss America.

There will, however, be plenty to party with.

Lenore Skenazy is a contributing editor at the New York Sun. To find out more about Lenore Skenazy (lenore@lenoretown.com), and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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