In January 2009, six teenagers faced child pornography charges for taking photos of themselves and being in possession of the photos. Three fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls from their high school in Pennsylvania had sent seminude photos to the three sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys. School officials seized the phones and reported them to the police, leading to the charges.{107} In Florida, a sixteen-year-old girl and her seventeen-year-old boyfriend, Phillip Albert, were charged with possession of child pornography. Albert, who is now twenty, sent a nude photo of his ex-girlfriend to seventy people out of anger after a fight with her. He was sentenced with child pornography charges and required to go on the public sex offender’s list. He was kicked out of school, he struggles to find a job, and he can’t even live with his father because his father lives near a high school, something Phillip is no longer allowed to do.{108}
But is sexting really worthy of such extreme policing? There has been much hesitating and changing minds in the courts, which suggests that we might be overreacting, typical of people’s fears surrounding teenagers and sex.
Let’s take a look at the data. In the 2008 study “Enhancing Child Safety & Online Technologies,” by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, researchers found that risky behavior online was generally in cahoots with risky behavior offline. Those who engaged in sexual acts away from their phones and the Internet tended to do so on their phones and the Internet as well. Indeed, almost half of sexually active teens tend to be involved in sexting and cybersex as well.{109}
Turned around, though, the statistics change. Sexting and sexual Internet activity does not seem to lead to real-life sexual activity among those who don’t already engage in it. Regardless of all the increased access to sex online, teen sex rates haven’t skyrocketed. In fact, they’ve lowered some during the past decade.
In my mind, we are missing the point regarding what to panic about. The issue isn’t the “dicey mix of teenagers’ age-old sexual curiosity, notoriously bad judgment and modern love of electronic sharing,” as Riva Richmond called it in a New York Times article.{110} One could argue, in fact, that sexting is not only safe but also keeps kids safer than if they were having real-life sex.
No, the issue is that many girls—you guessed it, loose girls—use sexting and cybersex to try to feel wanted, and just like when they use male attention and sex in similar ways in real life, they don’t get what they’re after. When I asked the girls I interviewed why they sexted, their answers all pointed to a desire for connection. Amelia said, “It makes what is basically impossible to me possible, which is a hot guy liking me and wanting me in all ways.”
“All ways?” I asked.
“Well, sexually, I guess,” she said.
Amelia uses sexting and cybersex to pick up boys she likes who she meets in school or online, but is too shy to speak to in person. She contacts them and is immediately flirtatious. Within one or two exchanges, she starts in on the dirty talk. She engages in this way with them obsessively, and if they stop responding, or reject her in any way, she feels crushed.
Mariah has regularly had cybersex since she was in the eighth grade. When she discovered sexting, she started doing that regularly, too. Like the majority of females who report having sexted, she initially felt pressured to do so by the boys with whom she was texting. Over time, though, she grew to like the easy attention. Sexting and cybersex have pretty straightforward scripts, too, which only made it easier for her.
In real life, Mariah is still a virgin. She says she doesn’t act the same way in person as she does via text and Internet, so boys don’t realize the things she knows about sex. I asked Mariah what she felt she knew about sex, and she said, “Just that boys like it when girls act like sluts.” Mariah doesn’t connect her sexting and cybersex behavior with her own sexual arousaclass="underline" the two hold completely different purposes. One is to get male attention, and the other is something private and personal, unrelated to how she might act under a boy’s watch.
The danger here is not necessarily that girls are victims of predatory males. It’s that they are victims of very narrow definitions of sexual desirability, and in many ways, sexting is one more way girls wind up viewing sexual behavior as completely removed from their own desires. Girls believe that a girl’s desirability comes not from her personality or her coolness or how fun she is. It comes from her ability to fit into a male-defined stereotype of a sexually willing girl.
A recent national survey by the Girl Scouts Research Institute found that girls age 14–17 tend to describe themselves on social media sites as “fun,” “funny,” and “social,” and they downplay the idea that they might be smart or ambitious, or otherwise less appealing to boys and popular cliques.{111}
Pornography sets a similar standard. Readers may be surprised to hear that lots of adolescent girls watch porn. There are no reliable statistics for this, of course, because girls are hard-pressed to admit it, but anecdotally, in my work and interviews with women and girls, about half have admitted to watching porn, some of them even watching regularly, as teens.
As with sexting and cybersex, there is no solid scientific evidence that exposure to pornography leads to widespread or predictable negative psychological effects, so again, we need to be careful where we put our energy regarding concerns about such exposure. In my experience working with teenage girls, they watched pornography partially because it turned them on and was an exciting avenue for masturbation, and partially because they wanted to know how to have sex.
The problem here is that girls think they are learning about sex, but really they’re learning what men want. Shaved vaginas, asses in the air, facials—these are all male fantasies, not sex defined by females. Like Mariah noted, boys like girls who act like sluts. Porn just reinforces that. As Judith Levine writes, “In my opinion, the problem with sexual information on the Net is not that there is too much of it but that too little of it is any good”—and she wrote that in 2002.{112}
Almost a decade later, we can say that’s changed some. There are a number of excellent websites intended to provide real information about real sex to teenagers (see the appendix for a list of these), sites that give teenagers answers to real concerns, and that don’t exist for titillation.
And, then, there are the social sites—Facebook being the most influential. This is where hundreds of thousands of girls post pictures of themselves in bikinis or underwear to get attention from men. One guy wrote on the website Facebook Horror Stories, “Dear cute girls of Facebook, thank you for posting almost naked pictures of yourselves. I no longer need to look at porn since I have hundreds of photos of you in bikinis to whack off to. Thank you for inserting yourself into my spank bank.”{113} This guy has caught on to the wave of loose girls looking for attention. Facebook has become an easy way for a loose girl to act out.
Cate has a bunch of photos of herself in her underwear in her album on Facebook. Every time she posts a new one, she told me, at least a couple guys who have been out of touch contact her again. It makes her feel good to know people think of her. I asked her what she thinks they contact her for. “I think that’s pretty obvious,” she said. “They just want to have sex with me. But it still makes me feel good.”