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ABSTRACT
Both mobile phone communication and the genre of sex advice writing are often criticized, the former as unkind and the latter as sexist. Yet some research indicates that digitally mediated communication may have some advantages, particularly when disinhibition might confer benefits such as personal expression or resisting coercion and sexual harassment. This paper investigates whether consent is discussed differently in popular online sexting tips articles as compared with a similar set of general sex advice articles. I find that while general sex tips infrequently address consent and offer communication as an optional practice, sexting tips stress the importance of consent more often and warn sexters about the potential harm an unwanted sext might cause to a recipient. I suggest that this may be due to the particular affordances of mobile phone communication, including lack of physical proximity, asynchronicity, and the reduction of unconscious nonverbal communication. Because this discourse about consent appears in a popular format, it may have the potential to serve as a model for a broader cultural shift towards the normalization of explicit communication about consent for all sexual acts.
Acknowledgments
Amy Adele Hasinoff would like to thank Kate Harris, Brandon Mills, the editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments.
Notes
1. Deborah Gordon-Messer et al., “Sexting among Young Adults,” Journal of Adolescent Health 52, no. 3 (2013): 301–6.
2. Amy Adele Hasinoff, Sexting Panic: Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015); Kimberlianne Podlas, “The ‘Legal Epidemiology’ of the Teen Sexting Epidemic: How the Media Influenced a Legislative Outbreak,” Pittsburgh Journal Of Technology Law And Policy 12 (2011): 1–48.
3. Abstinence messages for young people are well intentioned but typically blame victims of privacy violations and shame girls for their sexual expression. Döring's examination of ten educational campaigns about sexting for teens found a focus on abstinence and the frequent use of scare tactics. She notes that only one of the ten campaigns offered any “safer sexting” advice at all. Nicola Döring, “Consensual Sexting among Adolescents: Risk Prevention through Abstinence Education or Safer Sexting?,” Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace 8, no. 1 (2014). See also Hasinoff, Sexting Panic; Lara Karaian, “Policing ‘Sexting’: Responsibilization, Respectability and Sexual Subjectivity in Child Protection/Crime Prevention Responses to Teenagers’ Digital Sexual Expression,” Theoretical Criminology 18, no. 3 (2014): 282–99; Nora Draper, “Is Your Teen at Risk? Discourses of Adolescent Sexting in United States Television News,” Journal of Children and Media 6, no. 2 (2012): 221–36; Randy Lynn, “Constructing Parenthood in Moral Panics of Youth, Digital Media, and ‘Sexting,’” (Atlanta, GA: American Sociological Association, 2010); Kath Albury et al., “Young People and Sexting in Australia: Ethics, Representation and the Law,” ARC Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation/Journalism and Media Research Centre, http://jmrc.arts.unsw.edu.au/media/File/Young_People_And_Sexting_Final.pdf (accessed August 16, 2015).
4. Many studies examine correlations between sexting and other perceived risky or unsafe behaviors, such as alcohol consumption and unprotected sex, and the links to undesirable personality traits, such as impulsivity. Döring found that 79 percent of the existing studies on sexting emphasize the risks and link sexting to negative outcomes. Döring, “Consensual Sexting.”
5. Poorna Bell, “Sexting: Tips, Tricks, Dos and Some Really Important Don'ts,” HuffPost Lifestyle, http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2013/08/08/sexting-top-tips_n_3724433.html (accessed August 16, 2015); Ariel Nagi, “Sexting 101: How to Send Dirty Messages without Ugly Consequences,” Cosmo Latina, http://www.cosmopolitan.com/cosmo-latina/how-to-sext (accessed August 16, 2015); Jessica Leshnoff, “Sexting Not Just for Kids,” Sex & Intimacy: AARP.org, http://www.aarp.org/relationships/love-sex/info-11-2009/sexting_not_just_for_kids.html.
6. Nicola Döring, “Feminist Views of Cybersex: Victimization, Liberation, and Empowerment,” CyberPsychology and Behavior 3, no. 5 (2000): 863–84; Kaveri Subrahmanyam, Patricia M. Greenfield, and Brendesha Tynes, “Constructing Sexuality and Identity in an Online Teen Chat Room,” Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology 25, no. 6 (2004): 651–66; Julie Cupples and Lee Thompson, “Heterotextuality and Digital Foreplay: Cell Phones and the Culture of Teenage Romance,” Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 1–17.
7. Annie Potts, “The Science/Fiction of Sex: John Gray's Mars and Venus in the Bedroom,” Sexualities 1, no. 2 (1998): 153–73; David Machin and Joanna Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse: The Case of Cosmopolitan,” Discourse & Society 14, no. 4 (2003): 453–71; Rosalind Gill, “Mediated Intimacy and Postfeminism: A Discourse Analytic Examination of Sex and Relationships Advice in a Women's Magazine,” Discourse & Communication 3, no. 4 (2009): 345–69; Panteá Farvid and Virginia Braun, “‘Most of Us Guys Are Raring to Go Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere’: Male and Female Sexuality in Cleo and Cosmo,” Sex Roles 55, no. 5–6 (2006): 295–310; Panteá Farvid and Virginia Braun, “The ‘Sassy Woman’ and the ‘Performing Man’: Heterosexual Casual Sex Advice and the (Re)Constitution of Gendered Subjectivities,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 1 (2013): 118–34; Amy Adele Hasinoff, “It's Sociobiology, Hon! Genetic Gender Determinism in Cosmopolitan Magazine,” Feminist Media Studies 9, no. 3 (2009): 267–83.
8. Cindy Royal, “Framing the Internet: A Comparison of Gendered Spaces,” Social Science Computer Review 26, no. 2 (2008): 152–69.
9. Using a cultural studies methodology of discourse analysis, I use work that builds on Foucault to understand how texts produce, reinforce, and transform culture. See, for example, Kent A Ono and John M Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1978).
10. Laura Juntunen and Esa Väliverronen, “Politics of Sexting: Re-Negotiating the Boundaries of Private and Public in Political Journalism,” Journalism Studies 11, no. 6 (2010): 817–31; Hasinoff, Sexting Panic; Karaian, “Policing ‘Sexting’”; Draper, “Is Your Teen”; Albury, Crawford, Byron, and Mathews, “Young People.”
11. Given that visitors might be referred by other sites rather than search engines, website traffic data would potentially offer a more precise way to determine which sites are the most popular, but such data are inconsistent and not readily available.
12. Google Trends provides an average score out of 100 for the relative popularity of each search term in comparison to the others I chose. The score was 64 for “how sexting,” 50 for “sexting examples,” and 23 for “sexting tips.” The search “what sexting” was also very popular (relative score of 42), but I eliminated these results because most of the sites gave a definition of sexting rather than providing advice on how to sext. Other search terms, such as “safe sexting,” “sexting etiquette,” “sexting rules,” and “sexting advice,” were far less popular, with relative scores of one or zero, so I did not include the results for these search terms in the study.
13. The same search terms were popular when data are averaged from December 2008, the start of widespread media attention to sexting, to the present, but in a slightly different rank order.
14. Hasinoff, Sexting Panic; Podlas, “The ‘Legal Epidemiology.’”
15. Bing Pan et al., “In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12, no. 3 (2007): 801–23.
16. Nine articles appeared on the first pages of more than one of the search terms.
17. These websites consisted primarily of magazine-style articles offering descriptions of how to perform particular sexual techniques (for example, “Sex Tips from Guys” on cosmopolitan.com), along with a couple of documentary films and a book.
18. Around a third of the sexting tips results appeared on pages that served a niche audience (such as puatraining.com) or lower production-quality websites without brand recognition, which were often related to dating and relationships (such as romanceways.com and yourtango.com).
19. PageRank thus reflects the preferences of people who choose the links for websites rather than the average user searching for information. Google explains that the ranking of search results reflects algorithms that combine over 200 factors, including PageRank, the newness of the page, the key terms on the page, and factors specific to the user such as language and region (Google, “Algorithms,” Inside Search, http://www.google.com/insidesearch/howsearchworks/algorithms.html) (accessed August 16, 2015).
20. I used a VPN masking my IP address and the Incognito window in Chrome to try to mitigate the fact that my personal search history would normally impact my search results. Using IP addresses that identified my computer as located in Hong Kong or Switzerland, for example, also resulted in very similar search results displayed in a different order, which Ørmen points out is due to a uniformity of results for searches in a particular language. Jacob Ørmen, “Historicizing Google Search: A Discussion of the Challenges Related to Archiving Search Results,” in Society of the Query Reader: Reflections on Web Search, ed. René König and Miriam Rasch (Amsterdam: The Institute of Network Cultures, 2014), 189–202.
21. Rachel Kramer Bussel, “Beyond Yes or No: Consent as Sexual Process,” in Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World without Rape, ed. Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008), 43–52.
22. Kate Lockwood Harris, “Yes and No: Documenting Consent and Rape” (Orlando, FL: National Communication Association, 2012). Another criticism of the affirmative consent model is that it can potentially criminalize conduct with complex practices of consent, such as some SM edgeplay. See Ummni Khan, Vicarious Kinks: S/M in the Socio-Legal Imaginary (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2013).
23. Michelle Oberman, “Regulating Consensual Sex with Minors: Defining a Role for Statutory Rape,” Buffalo Law Review 48 (2000): 703; Lise Gotell, “Rethinking Affirmative Consent in Canadian Sexual Assault Law: Neoliberal Sexual Subjects and Risky Women,” Akron Law Review 41(2008); Susan Estrich, Real Rape (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); Lois Pineau, “Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis,” Law and Philosophy 8 (1989): 217–43; Michelle J. Anderson, “From Chastity Requirement to Sexuality License: Sexual Consent and a New Rape Shield Law,” The George Washington Law Review 70 (2002): 51–162.
24. Nicholas J. Little, “From No Means No to Only Yes Means Yes: The Rational Results of an Affirmative Consent Standard in Rape Law,” Vanderbilt Law Review 58 (2005): 1321–64.
25. Ibid.
26. Gotell, “Rethinking Affirmative Consent.”
27. “When Yes Means Yes,” New York Times, September 9, 2014, A28.
28. M. Carmody and K. Carrington, “Preventing Sexual Violence?,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Criminology 33, no. 3 (2000): 356.
29. Men's Health, “The 50 Hottest Sex Tips All Women Wish You Knew,” Men's Health, http://www.menshealth.com/sex-women/50-hottest-sex-tips-all-women-wish-you-knew (accessed August 16, 2015).
30. Bussel; Miri Mogilevsky, “‘Consent Is Sexy’ Is Useful but Also Kind of Sketchy,” Brute Reason, http://freethoughtblogs.com/brutereason/2013/02/16/consent-is-sexy-is-useful-but-also-kind-of-gross/ (accessed August 16, 2015).
31. Justin Hancock, “How to Have Sex,” bishUK.com: Sex, relationships, and you, http://bishuk.com/2009/07/31/how-to-have-sex/ (accessed August 16, 2015).
32. Ibid.
33. Sam Biddle, “A Complete Guide to Sexting,” Gizmodo, http://gizmodo.com/5920542/a-complete-guide-to-sexting.
34. Holly Martin, “15 Sex Tips from the Bedrooms of Real Women,” Men's Fitness, http://www.mensfitness.com/women/sex-tips/15-sex-tips-from-the-bedrooms-of-real-women?page=2.
35. Cosmopolitan, “Sex Tips from Guys,” Cosmopolitan, http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/tips/#category2–-2 (accessed August 16, 2015).
36. Richard La Ruina, “Sexting Tips for Guys: 3 Dirty Texts You Should Send a Girl If You Want to Make Her Horny,” PUA Training: Natural Mastery with Women and Dating, http://www.puatraining.com/blog/sexting-tips-for-guys-dirty-texts-you-should-send-a-girl (accessed August 16, 2015).
37. Oliver Hambling-Jones and Andrew John Merrison, “Inequity in the Pursuit of Intimacy: An Analysis of British Pick-up Artist Interactions,” Journal of Pragmatics 44, no. 9 (2012): 1115; Amanda Denes, “Biology as Consent: Problematizing the Scientific Approach to Seducing Women's Bodies,” Women's Studies International Forum 34, no. 5 (2011): 411–19.
38. Ruina, “Sexting Tips for Guys.”
39. In the general sex tips articles, I did not come across anything like the Pick Up Artist advice—though indeed it exists, it simply did not turn up in the first-page search results.
40. Romanceways.com, “100 Top Sexting Examples,” Romanceways, http://www.romanceways.com/100-top-sexting-examples.html (accessed August 16, 2015).
41. Chris Bucholz, “7 Tips for Sexting Someone You Barely Know,” Cracked: The Bucholz Discharge, http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-tips-sexting-someone-you-barely-know/ (accessed August 16, 2015).
42. Bell, “Sexting: Tips, Tricks.”
43. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.”
44. Romanceways.com, “100 Top Sexting Examples.”
45. Bucholz, “7 Tips.”
46. Nagi, “Sexting 101.”
47. Ibid.
48. Rob Fee, “Sexting Examples: Your Official Guide to Phone Sex,” Mandatory, http://www.mandatory.com/2013/04/05/sexting-examples-your-official-guide-to-phone-sex/ (accessed August 16, 2015).
49. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.”
50. Ibid.
51. Mish Way, “Sexting Etiquette: Have You figured out How to Sext Yet? ,” Askmen: Become a better man, http://www.askmen.com/dating/dating_advice_400/477_sexting-etiquette.html (accessed August 16, 2015).
52. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.”
53. While the marital exemption to rape is no longer enshrined in US law, such cases are often still not well recognized in court or in public opinion. Katie M Edwards et al., “Rape Myths: History, Individual and Institutional-Level Presence, and Implications for Change,” Sex Roles 65, no. 11–12 (2011): 761–73; Michelle J. Anderson, “Marital Immunity, Intimate Relationships, and Improper Inferences: A New Law on Sexual Offenses by Intimates,” Hastings Law Journal 54 (2003): 1465–1574.
54. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.”
55. Four articles were addressed specifically to men; two of those discussed consent. Nine articles were written either in gender-neutral language (e.g., “your partner”) or addressed both men and women separately in the same article; four of those discussed consent.
56. Potts, “The Science/Fiction of Sex.”; Machin and Thornborrow, “Branding and Discourse”; Gill, “Mediated Intimacy”; Farvid and Braun, “Most of Us Guys.”
57. Gill, “Mediated Intimacy,” 363–5.
58. Ibid.
59. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.” Elsewhere in this article, it is clear that the author recognizes that people will indeed send penis pictures.
60. Fee, “Sexting Examples.”
61. In all 21 of the sexting tips articles, I did not see any warnings that women should not send photos of their vulvas. Further research is needed to determine if this is because such photos are considered desirable or if writers assume that women would not send them in the first place. It is also possible that the vague advice that “less is more” in a photo, especially in articles aimed at women, substitutes for explicit advice aimed at men to avoid sending penis photos.
62. Nagi, “Sexting 101.”
63. Evelyne Coté, “Relationship News: 10 Ways to Become a Sexting Pro,” ELLE Canada, http://www.ellecanada.com/relationships/relationship-news-10-ways-to-become-a-sexting-pro/a/50656 (accessed August 16, 2015).
64. K. Aleisha Fetters, “Sext Your Way to Better Sex: Sexting Tips for Naturals and Newbies,” Women's Health, http://www.womenshealthmag.com/sex-and-relationships/sexting-tips-2 (accessed August 16, 2015).
65. Biddle, “A Complete Guide.”
66. It is possible that there is no commentary about privacy because the sexting tips are aimed at people who are seeking advice about sending sexts rather than at people who have received them. However, these articles consistently present sexting as a dialogue rather than a broadcast, so authors must know that many senders would be recipients as well.
67. Kath Albury and Kate Crawford, “Sexting, Consent and Young People's Ethics: Beyond Megan's Story,” Continuum 26, no. 3 (2012): 463–73; Amy Adele Hasinoff and Tamara Shepherd, “Sexting in Context: Privacy Norms and Expectations,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014): 2932–55.
68. Jesse Fox, Jeremy L. Osborn, and Katie M. Warber, “Relational Dialectics and Social Networking Sites: The Role of Facebook in Romantic Relationship Escalation, Maintenance, Conflict, and Dissolution,” Computers in Human Behavior 35 (2014): 527–34.
69. Ibid.
70. Bell, “Sexting: Tips, Tricks.”
71. Jennifer Barrigar, “Time to Care About Reputation: Re-Viewing the Resonances and Regulation of Reputation,” LL.D thesis (Ottawa: University of Ottawa, 2013).
72. Hasinoff, Sexting Panic.
73. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–44.
74. Meg Barker, “Consent Is a Grey Area? A Comparison of Understandings of Consent in Fifty Shades of Grey and on the Bdsm Blogosphere,” Sexualities 16, no. 8 (2013): 896–914; Dulcinea Pitagora, “Consent Vs. Coercion: Bdsm Interactions Highlight a Fine but Immutable Line,” The New School Psychology Bulletin 10, no. 1 (2013): 27–36; Jill D. Weinberg, “The Social Construction of Consent,” The Society Pages, http://thesocietypages.org/papers/consent/ (accessed August 16, 2015).
75. Text messaging eliminates all deliberate and unconscious nonverbal cues; even emoticons must be purposefully selected and sent. Sending photos back and forth may provide more nonverbal communication, and video chatting offers the most potential for nonverbal communication.
76. John Suler, “The Online Disinhibition Effect,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 2, no. 2 (2005): 184–8.
77. Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak, “Effects of Anonymity, Invisibility, and Lack of Eye-Contact on Toxic Online Disinhibition,” Computers in Human Behavior 28, no. 2 (2012): 434–43.
78. Chuck Huff, Deborah G. Johnson, and Keith W. Miller, “Virtual Harms and Real Responsibility,” in Social, Ethical and Policy Implications of Information Technology, ed. Linda L. Brennan and Victoria E. Johnson (Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2004), 98–117.
79. Michelle Drouin and Elizabeth Tobin, “Unwanted but Consensual Sexting among Young Adults: Relations with Attachment and Sexual Motivations,” Computers in Human Behavior 31 (2014): 412–18; Michelle Drouin, “Sexual Coercion 2.0,” Unpublished manuscript (2014). In the same survey, 48 percent of men and 55 percent of women reported engaging in unwanted but consensual sexting, while significantly more people reported engaging in unwanted sex (72 percent of men and 76 percent of women) and kissing (77 percent of men and 86 percent of women).
80. Döring, “Feminist Views;” Subrahmanyam, “Constructing Sexuality.”
81. Carrie Rentschler, “Rape Culture and the Feminist Politics of Social Media,” Girlhood Studies 7, no. 1 (2014): 65–82.
82. Carmody and Carrington, “Preventing Sexual Violence?”; Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, ed., Yes Means Yes!: Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World without Rape (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2008).
83. Lawrence Grossberg, Paula A. Treichler, and Cary Nelson, ed., Cultural Studies (New York: Routledge, 1992).
84. Kent A Ono and John M Sloop, “Commitment to Telos—a Sustained Critical Rhetoric,” Communication Monographs 59, no. 1 (1992): 50.