Sexting – just say no: It is never okay!

Perhaps it’s just my generation. I cannot get my head around sexting. When I was a teenager, the closest we came to sexting was with Polaroid pictures. People who tried to take pictures with conventional cameras, often had their developed pictures and negatives turned over to the police, who then charged the amateur photographer with breaking “common decency” laws. Of course these pictures did receive unauthorized circulation from the minimum-wage employees who ran off extra prints at the print shop, before calling the police, and then secretly sold them to their friends or customers. Those pictures did get out there – kind of like what is happening with sexting today.

But with Polaroids, it was different. This was a playful activity between two consenting adults (or one adult who was trying to impress another adult). The Polaroids were almost never duplicated since that would mean creating a negative and then risking exposure by the clerk doing the prints from that negative. This meant there was one, and only one original and no copies. On breakup of a relationship, the person who did not want their naked bits shown to others would demand the pictures back. The pictures were returned, no copies existed and therefore no possible future embarrassment. If return of the photos was problematic because both parties appeared in compromising situations, then a mutually witnessed destruction, like burning all the Polaroids, could also provide closure. But no weapons of mass destruction exist for digital pictures conveyed by sexting, and so potential participants should just say, “No!”

In a UK article, “Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange” (Ringrose et al.), the authors end the report by asking, “What would it mean for us to live in a world where teen girls could unproblematically take, post or send an image of their breasts to whomever the wished” (Ringrose et al. 320)? In a world were teenage boys collect and trade pictures, like my generation used to trade baseball cards, a feminist stance is not going to fix this. If the nude pictures are out there, they are going to get traded and collected.

The report “Sexting as a media production: Rethinking social media and sexuality” (Hasinoff) tries instead to understand why teenagers and adults sext and also addresses the matter of consent. The author argues that “If social media content producers have ownership over their private images, then the focus of sexting safety campaigns should clearly be to reduce unauthorized distribution” (Hasinoff 460). Reproduction or distribution of these images then becomes a matter of copyright violation, but enforcement would become difficult and costly.

Sexting becomes a messy problem when the party (usually men) who demands the pictures (usually of women) decides to use them in ways that were not consented to at the time they are sexted or afterwards. The pictures become embarrassments and the “distributors”, usually only concerned with raising their own popularity currency, happily collect and trade more pictures of more women. Unfortunately there is never just the original and no copies, and a ritualistic bonfire to destroy them all is not possible.

The safest bet, as stated earlier, is just say “No!” No sexting, no pictures, no embarrassment. But I will send you an amusing picture of me (fully clothed) and my zen-cat, and you can think of me and smile whenever you look at it. And I promise you I will never ask you to sext me – and if it happens by accident (and I have heard of cases where teenage girls accidentally did sext pictures to their father), I promise I will completely delete the message, pictures and block and de-friend you to prevent it ever accidentally happening again.

Works Cited: 

Hasinoff, A. A. “Sexting as Media Production: Rethinking Social Media and Sexuality.” New Media & Society 15.4 (2012): 449–465. Web. 

“Teen Girls, Sexual Double Standards and ‘Sexting’: Gendered Value in Digital Image Exchange.” Feminist Theory 14.3 (2013): 305–323. Web.