The turn to trust: adult women, hetero-sexting, and the use of trust as sexting risk mitigation

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article explores how women use and understand trust as risk mitigation when sexting with men—also known as hetero-sexting. Drawing on interviews with 44 women aged 18–38 and based in Cambridgeshire, England, it takes as its starting point the fact that participants distinguished between trust as “implicit” and grounded in their current feelings for their sexting partner and as a more explicit, strategic means to gain control over the distribution of their private sexual images into the future. Focusing on the latter understanding of trust as control, the article explores what this understanding of trust can tell us about the changing nature of trust, and about the forces that inform how trust is performed and perceived in the context of hetero-sexting. It demonstrates how the logics of postfeminism or “gendered neoliberalism” informed participants’ understandings of trust as control, and how this understanding resulted in the generation and expectation of their engagement in “trust work” to protect themselves from having their private sexual images shared without their consent.