Shaping Sexual Behaviors & Sexual Scripts
Contrasting Experiences: Two Case Studies on Teenage Boys’ Perceptions of Unsolicited Dick Pics and Gender Dynamics at Two Schools.
Open Access: Yes.
Abstract
The present article examines teenage boys’ perceptions of the practice of sending unsolicited dick pics and gender dynamics among peers at two lower secondary schools in Sweden. Drawing on focus group interviews as well as individual and pair interviews with ninth-grade students (14–15 years) from a rural working-class area and an urban middle-class area. The study indicates that class habitus has a significant influence on the boys’ perceptions and practices. In the rural working-class school, the boys had a humorous attitude towards the practice of sending unsolicited dick pics and were not aware that unsolicited sexting could be experienced as sexual harassment. In the urban middle-class school, one the other hand, the boys clearly distanced themselves from and expressed their strong disapproval of unsolicited dick pics, mainly due to their fear of girls’ power to portray boys as sexual harassers.
Relevance
This article showed that how male students talk about and perceive the phenomenon of unsolicited dick pics was shaped by social class context.
At the rural working-class school, “boys did not seem to see any problem with sending unsolicited dick pics to girls in an attempt to get them to send nudes photos in return. Not all boys understood that such behaviour could be classified as sexual harassment … Sending dick pics was described as an expected hetero-masculine behaviour.” Unsolicited dick pics were met with humous, which “downplay[ed] the seriousness…and help[ed] legitimize the practice of sending them.” These rural working-class boys were governed by an ideology of “masculine power and female subordination” and “traditional patriarchal discourses” which “makes some of them perpetrators of digital sexual harassment without reflection.”
At the urban middle-class school, the boys’ attitude towards unsolicited dick pics “was the complete opposite.” All the “boys interviewed clearly distanced themselves from and expressed strong disapproval of the practice” and the “boys were afraid of the girls’ power to portray boys as sexual perpetrators at school.” These boys were dominated by a more “gender-equal masculinity.”
Citation
Berndtsson, K. H. (2024). Contrasting Experiences: Two Case Studies on Teenage Boys’ Perceptions of Unsolicited Dick Pics and Gender Dynamics at Two Schools. YOUNG, 32(1), 61-77. https://doi.org/10.1177/11033088231204818
