The warnings about sexting (mainly directed toward women) center around the worst-case scenario—your nudes being posted publicly, like on a revenge porn site. This is presented as something that will follow you for the rest of your life and haunt your career and future relationships. I don’t think that will happen to me, but if it does, I like to think the viewers will draw the obvious conclusion—that I am a sexually confident woman who made a video for someone she cared about. If someone I knew saw the images and judged me negatively for making them, I feel confident that the problem is with them, not with me . . . So when I sext with my boyfriend, the main goal is to get us off. But it’s also my little way of reassuring myself that I decide what to do with my body, and I get to decide which risky behaviors are worth taking.
This view is becoming quite common among young people, particularly teens. For the generation that grew up in a smartphone culture, sexting has become a common step in the journey toward becoming sexually active. Along with a first kiss, now, at some point, there is often a first sext.
When the journalist Hanna Rosin examined a high school in central Virginia where rampant sexting and promiscuous image sharing sparked a police investigation, a surprising number of the kids she met expressed confidence that the situation was no big deal.3
When an officer questioned some girls about their concerns about the photos being disseminated online, he was shocked when one insisted, “This is my life and my body and I can do whatever I want with it,” while another said, “I don’t see any problem with it. I’m proud of my body.” Some girls, he discovered, had taken naked photos of themselves specifically for sharing on Instagram. The idea that this should be treated with shame or that it would come back to haunt them seemed absurd.
Regardless of how you or any officer sees the risks and rewards of sexting, it’s becoming more and more of a common practice. And, as we’ve seen with other aspects of modern romance, what seems insane to one generation often ends up being the norm of the next.
CHEATING
Of course, sending naked photos is not the only sexually charged behavior that smartphones enable or make easier. Consider infidelity. In the past, men and women who were cheating could flirt only in person or over a landline. People would have codes: “I’ll let the phone ring twice, then hang up. That’ll be your signal to go to the window, and there you’ll see a zip line. Take the zip line down to the tree house and I’ll meet you there at 10:30 P.M.”
Now you can be in bed with your spouse and ask, “Hey, honey, what are you looking at on your phone?” She could reply, “Oh, just reading this op-ed in the Times,” when she’s actually sending your neighbor a photo of her Mrs. Pouterson.
Have all the increased romantic options and the technology to access them led to more people straying? I remember reading the Anthony Weiner Facebook messages. Seeing the way he was just messaging random women all over the country and watching the messages quickly escalate from innocuous to very sexual was unbelievable.
This is a transcript of a chat session he had with one of these women, a lady named Lisa from Las Vegas.4 Weiner and Lisa, sorry to bring this back, guys, but it is fascinating:
For me, the most offensive part was that he used the word “wackadoodle.”
Also, did you catch that sly, almost subliminal, blink-and-you-might-miss-it allusion to sex? It was when she said they could have mad, passionate sex.
That last message basically signaled a shift in their Facebook chat and opened the floodgates for all sorts of sexual messages and infamous penis photos.
? ? ?
What fascinates me most, though, is that this is something that simply could not have happened thirty years ago. Sure, he might have still wanted to sexually stray from his relationship, but the privacy of Facebook, the ease of access to potential people to cheat with, and the ability to flirt with caution via the medium of chat—that perfect storm for temptation is undeniably a new development.
Given the sensitivity of the subject and the potential judgment that would occur in an in-person focus group, we used the privacy of the Internet to gain insight into people’s real-world experiences with cheating and social media.
I posed these questions in our subreddit: Has anyone started an affair or cheated on someone through social media? If social media didn’t exist, would something like this have happened anyway?
One gentleman said that he started a relationship through a social media site. It initially began as harmless chatting but, like the Weiner chat, over time it escalated. Though not as aggressive as the Weiner chat, it started getting flirty and the two began sharing their innermost feelings and problems.
It certainly wouldn’t have happened without social media, as my wife had successfully cut me off from most of the non-family women in my life. I don’t necessarily see it as a completely bad thing either—without my talking to the other woman (and the sort of honesty that relative internet anonymity provides), I wouldn’t have realized just how fucked up my relationship was with my then-wife, and the numerous things that I always thought were normal, and were really her doing her best to control every aspect of my life, and generally make me unable to leave her.
Another user said that he started an affair that he simply wouldn’t have had the gumption to start without Facebook.