Sexting

Open Access: No.

Abstract

Often focusing on permission to act or not to act, debates about sexual consent are multifaceted and enduring. The pervasive presence of digital technology in young people’s lives has added new complexities to ‘sextual’ consent. Drawing on qualitative small friendship group interview data with school-aged young people in Aotearoa New Zealand, this article provides insights into their understandings of consent surrounding the creation and sharing of intimate images. Through navigating the nuances of sextual consent, young people are forming their own informal norms and expectations. These informal norms are strengthened by competitive masculinity which disadvantages young women at all stages of the process, resulting in gendered harms and victim blaming. Many young people expressed views that unsafe sexting, in terms of pressure, coercion to produce the image, the image being shared without consent and the resulting fall out, could be avoided with an enhanced programme of digital literacy. While digital literacy has merit, it should not be at the expense of conversations around gender, power and culture, desire, victimisation, or how young people from different socio-cultural backgrounds navigate these relations.

Relevance

“The young people who participated in this research often justified boys’ actions, both requesting and non-consensually sharing images, as biological and out of their control” – a “culturally pervasive” assumptions about gender that is simplistic “and without nuance or impact of power relations.”

“Intimate images were almost always categorised differently. Female images were nudes, usually requested, male images were dick pics, often unsolicited. Girls were expected to include their faces in the images” which could lead to “greater harm if shared non-consensually later on. Dick pics, which lacked the boy’s face, thus have “emotional disconnection” and “deniability.”

“Women’s images were often viewed as gifts, relationship bonds or as proof of love, whereas unsolicited dick pics were understood as mainly confirming the sender’s masculinity through online territory marking.”

Some of the young women, but typically not men, are pressured to send nudes, which the boys are expected to share.  The images of the young women are exchanged nonconsensually, and so “become social currency within the school setting.”

“Sharing images without consent was undoubtedly more harmful for the young women. Female victims were subjected to bullying, slut shaming, reputational damage, loss of social status and cultural capital.”

“The vast majority of young participants felt that blame for an image being shared non-consensually should to some degree rest with the creator, especially if they were a girl as they should have ‘known the risks’. Being labelled ‘stupid’, ‘dumb’ or a ‘slut’ is one of a myriad of ways through which girls’ subordination to boys is reproduced. Victim blaming allows those who forward the images without consent, to avoid blame, shame and resultant consequences. Instead, the victim is doubly impacted…Victim blaming was routine and compounded by self-victim blaming.”

Citation

Meehan, C. (2022). ‘I guess girls can be more emotional’: Exploring the complexities of sextual consent with young people. Sexualities, 25(5-6), 821-841. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460721999275