Abstract
This article is concerned with women’s digitally mediated practices of creating and sending private sexual images to men, here referred to as ‘hetero-sexting’. Drawing on material from individual interviews with adult British women about their experiences of hetero-sexting, the article develops an understanding of women’s hetero-sexting practices as a form of female-conducted ‘mediated intimacy work’, constituted by a constant negotiation of female risk taking and male trustworthiness. In doing so, it shows how the women relied on and made active use of the sexting-related risk of digital image abuse as a means to establish and enhance trust and, as such, stress the significance of their hetero-sexting activities as performances of intimacy. Sexting-induced vulnerability was therefore both drawn on and dismissed within the very same accounts of hetero-sexting, as it was applied as a means to perform a new form of normative femininity, namely that of the agentic intimacy worker.
Highlights
I think sending like explicit pictures, you have to have like ultimate trust with the person that you’re sending them to. [ . . . ] they’re so like vulnerable and they’re so intimate that it’s like; it’s a lot to think about. – RubyThis article is focused on women’s heterosexual ‘sexting’ practices, here understood as the digitally mediated practice of creating, sending and receiving self-made private sexual images.1 the article is concerned with women’s accounts of their creating and sending of private sexual images to men, which I will refer to here as a form of ‘mediated intimacy work’ constituted by a constant negotiation of risk and trust
The level of risk that they were willing to take in creating and sending private sexual images – rendering themselves vulnerable – was generally used as a means to indicate how much trust they had in their male partner, and how close they felt to him. The more vulnerable they were willing to make themselves in their private sexual images by, for instance, including identifying characteristics like their face, the more significance they granted these images as mediated intimacy work
I have shown how my interviewees operated with a complex understanding of sexting risk, both as a negatively loaded possibility to avoid and as a resource on which to draw in order to enhance the significance of their hetero-sexting as mediated intimacy work
Summary
I think sending like explicit pictures, you have to have like ultimate trust with the person that you’re sending them to. [ . . . ] they’re so like vulnerable and they’re so intimate that it’s like; it’s a lot to think about. – Ruby (late teens). A significant proportion of the existing research conducted in this area consists of qualitative empirical research and discourse analyses concerned with sexting practices as they take place in relation to notions of risk (Amundsen, 2019c; Döring, 2014; Setty, 2019) This focus on sexting risk can be explained by sexting’s common association with the non-consensual further online distribution of private sexual images in public. There is limited data to demonstrate precisely how common digital image abuse is, but – as a recent report from the UK shows – those affected by this are ‘disproportionally female’ (Sharratt, 2019: 5) This gendered element of digital image abuse is reflected in most of the existing research on sexting and risk, which is marked by a predominant focus on the sexting practices of children or ‘youth’ – generally defined as young adults up until the age of 25 (Amundsen, 2019a: 480–481). Some of the participants in the research project that this article stems from – but not quoted here – both stressed that it was their choice to engage in certain sexting activities and that they felt pressured into sexting due to societal or partner expectations (Amundsen, 2019b)
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