Phones, Photos, Phallus and…4-H?

WHITE COUNTY 4-H GIRLS MARCH DOWN MAIN STREET OF HELEN GEORGIA, NEAR ROBERTSTOWN, WITH A BANNER PROCLAIMING THE CHANGING ROLE OF THEIR ORGANIZATION, July 1976. Photo by the National Archives at College Park, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

I am an alumnus of 4-H. An eleven-year member who went on to receive a milestone pin commemorating another five years of service as a leader in the organization. The things I learned in the 4-H program contributed to many scholarships that covered my college education. 4-H is a great organization for developing young people. Even nearly thirty years later, I’m grateful for experiences that contributed to my intimate knowledge of proper parliamentary procedure, enthusiasm for public speaking and civic engagement, and allowed for fraternization with adolescent boys adept in skills like cattle castration and equine insemination.

I have to admit that there is something to be said for the benefits of “coming of age years” that were enhanced by knowledge acquired through animal husbandry. Conceding that the current alternative for today’s teenagers to acquire similar sexual information includes smartphones and easily accessible internet porn, I’d recommend the beef cattle project all day long and twice on Sunday. Attention young ladies: get a 4H boyfriend, or better yet, breed cattle yourself! And relax dads: that 4H boyfriend has to get up early to go hay cows. He’ll have her home by eleven, and if he doesn’t, feel free to casually mention that your banding tool is in need of repair.

I really wanted to participate in the market steer project in 4-H. It is what all the cool kids did. Although we had the land, and my father had a background that included cattle ranching, he made an astute assessment of my willingness to get kicked and stepped on by a twelve-hundred-pound animal and adeptly steered me towards the Rabbit Project. “Honey, it’s still livestock! Just smaller!” I raised Rex rabbits–which are preferred for their fur and meat–and was christened the Kansas State Fair Rabbit Judging Champion of 1990. There is still a three-foot tall trophy somewhere in our basement storage room to prove it.

After my freshman year of high school, I participated in a two-week long bus trip to Washington, D.C. On the way, we made stops at the St. Louis Arch where we stood underneath and spelled out “4-H” with our bodies while someone took a photograph from the top, and Churchill Downs where we learned even more about equine insemination and the definition of a “teaser pony.” While in D.C., we stayed at the National 4-H Conference Center in Chevy Chase, Maryland and participated with other 4-Hers from Wisconsin and Oklahoma in mock-government simulations interspersed with a visit to the Capitol, an evening performance at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and a nighttime tour of all the monuments. For some of the kids, it was the farthest they’d ever been away from home. And the longest.

The highlight of our trip was sitting in the gallery while the Senate was in session and getting to meet Senator Bob Dole. We all wore our best suits: the boys had to wear ties, and the girls had to wear nylons and make sure our arms were covered. After taking a picture with Senator Dole (who was our home state Senator and the Minority Leader at the time), he invited us all to his office use the phones and call home. We’d been gone over a week, and it was the first time we got access to communicate with our parents, although I think I had mailed a postcard from the Arch because my mom told me postcard stamps were cheaper than stamps for letters.

After jockeying for a place at the front of the line and dutifully calling my mom and dad, I used my 4-H-acquired ingenuity and gumption to sneak back in the queue to call my boyfriend at home. I remember thinking how generous it was for Senator Dole to let thirty teenagers use his phones—those were the days of long distance!–but now I must acknowledge the rather genius political maneuver of facilitating a rare phone call home to his agriculturally minded constituents from their far-flung offspring. I wonder if Bob Dole was in 4-H? Apologies to the recently departed Senator, my high school boyfriend was not old enough to vote at the time, but to his credit, my father never had to threaten him with a calf bander.

A week without a teenager making a phone call. Not to my parents, and not to my boyfriend. In this day and age, that would be unheard of, but even then, it was kind of rare. It was a time of knowing all your friends’ phone numbers by muscle memory, spiral cords that stretched across the kitchen and disappeared under pantry doors, or—if you were lucky, and I wasn’t—a listing beneath your dad’s name in the White Pages marked “Teenagers Telephone” with a separate number. With the fondest of memories for that trip, I pray they ban phones on it now. If they aren’t, hopefully at least the kids make TikToks under the Arch this time.

My children are not in 4-H, but they are getting to an age where we are discussing when would be appropriate for them to have phones. I admit to being resistant to it. Not only with concern over what they might see, but for how it might erode their own growing sense of accountability to not rely on a parent always being a few texts away. Even adults fail to use phones responsibility. How can I allow my boys to fit in with their friends while still developing them into confident and capable young men equipped to navigate the larger world respectfully? If there is a two-week, phone-free bus trip to D.C. that I can send them on, I’d gladly sign them up.

As a 4-Her, I remember taking over the phone bank at the local Savings and Loan (pre-S&L crisis, of course) and working the Annual 4-H Phone-a-Thon. We were instructed on proper phone etiquette, and told to ask for the man or lady of the house (presumably a former 4-Her) while requesting monetary donations to be used for college scholarships and county fair premiums. A fair premium is the money that would be awarded for projects entered at the fair. For example, I earned a whole $1 for having a blue-ribbon rabbit, but shamefully walked away one year with only fifty cents after receiving a white ribbon for a pair of “MC Hammer Pants” I sewed in Clothing Construction. A young, female voice asking “may I please speak with” the largest landowner in the county might raise the eyebrows of his wife at home unless I remembered that introducing myself to whoever answered was key to successfully—and more importantly respectfully–landing a big fund-raising donation, like $25.00. Perhaps I’m too much of a traditionalist: I have a definite nostalgia for strict adherence to phone manners.

That whole process…phone etiquette, it’s a lost art: learning to answer with a “Hello?” Or a “Lastname’s Residence?” And remembering to cover the receiver before hollering for someone else to pick up an extension. None of these things is even necessary anymore: it’s rare that a call from an unrecognized number is answered, everyone has their own number, and no one yells down the hallway so the whole family can hop on the call.

Public scandals involving text messages, encrypted Whatsapp calls, and tawdry details of things like “sexting” demonstrate that people have embraced the anonymity and casualness of digital communication but fail to recall—or never learned–the decorum of the no longer recent past. I really don’t look forward to warning my sons about the downsides of a world where everyone carries a camera in their pocket, has quick ability to upload to livestream, or could save their every embarrassment to post later online. The flip side is true too: I know that the possibility exists that my own children—who are not perfect—could wind up victimizing another person with their future phones. But I think it’s irresponsible parenting to pretend those risks aren’t real and avoid having the conversations at all. I may be a nostalgic traditionalist, but I’m not in denial of reality.

I recall a conversation a couple of years ago with a friend who had recently purchased a smartphone for her daughter. She was back on the dating scene after a divorce and lamenting the practice of “Snapchatting” with men who would request “nudes” from her. She complained about receiving unsolicited pictures of male…nether regions…as a sort of digital foreplay, as if the only thing she could do about it was continue seeing them and complain about the images. I asked her if she was going to talk to her daughter about the risks presented by phones with cameras, or if she worried that the men she was reluctantly dating would use her pictures in a way she might object to. She was incredulous. No one would do that! It wasn’t something she had to worry about because the pictures on Snapchat are safe. The app “disappeared” the pictures once viewed!

I was shocked at my friend’s naiveté and apparent lack of awareness of how the “screenshot” feature functions on a phone. In 2018, Jeff Bezos scandalously texted his own racy crotch shots to his wife’s friend. Which—after his phone was hacked by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia and he was extorted by the National Enquirer—was widely reported alongside the eventual dissolution of the Bezos marriage. If the richest man in the world, who founded Amazon, owns the Washington Post, and runs the most globally prominent cloud computing platform known to man, could let down his guard enough to be digitally manipulated by a middle-eastern royal and a supermarket tabloid, my girlfriend should most definitely have a frank sit-down with her daughter and be more discriminating about the men she trusted with photos of her hoo-hah. It is interesting to consider the evolution of phone concerns across my lifetime: I wouldn’t dare ask to speak to a man without first introducing myself to his wife on the telephone three decades ago, but now an interest uniting suburban moms, e-commerce titans, and Saudi royalty alike is whether pictures of genitals shared electronically are only viewed by their intended audience.

Coincidentally, 4-H actually benefitted from Mr. Bezos’s digital dalliances. MacKenzie Bezos, now Mackenzie Scott, was awarded 25% of Amazon stock in her divorce from the internet-entrepreneur-turned-space-cowboy and is currently worth approximately $45 Billion. Now known as a generous and prolific philanthropist and author, Ms. Scott has given away nearly $9 Billion in the two years following her divorce, more than four times the amount of money ever given by her former husband. She recently pledged $50 million to the National 4-H Council, the single largest donation the youth development organization has ever received.

The 4-H Motto is “To Make The Best Better.” I’d like to thank MacKenzie Scott for a financial gift that will make an already worthy organization that much better. Some of the most advantageous and valuable experiences of my life are a credit to 4-H. I am glad to know that many more American kids will benefit similarly. I am also just really thankful I didn’t have to work the phones for what eventually functioned as the “Jeff Bezos 4-H Phone-a-thon.” While the four H’s stand for Head, Heart, Hands, and Health, after years of being around cattle barns and horse stables, I am reasonably confident in speculating that, in the case of Mr. Bezos, they do not also stand for hung.