Sexting as media production: Re-thinking social media (draft now available)

I’ve uploaded a draft of a paper that’s currently under review. It’s about thinking through sexting as a form of media production. The idea for the paper came from reading Mary Celeste Kearney’s excellent book, Girls Make Media. She argues that there is inherent value in girls’ media production, regardless of the content they produce. I wondered, how far could I push that claim? What would it mean to apply it to sexting? The paper also comes from my reading of the technology studies literature on the unique benefits and opportunities new media can offer women, girls, and other marginalized populations. We already know that sexting can go wrong. But in this paper I wanted to consider, what could be good about sexting? What are we missing when we just focus on the risks instead of the opportunities?

Ultimately I argue that not only does thinking about sexting as media production lead to better responses to sexting (abstinence, for example, clearly will not work), it also demands that scholars add consent to their models of social media and media production. Here’s the abstract:

Many adults are struggling to find appropriate responses to teen sexting: they are blaming the victims of nonconsensual sexting, using harsh child pornography laws against minors, and giving teenagers the ineffective message to simply abstain from sexting. While some scholars champion girls’ media production practices, mainstream discourses since the early 2000s typically portray girls’ media production as irresponsible, dangerous, and out-of-control because it involves sexual content. In this paper, I illustrate and challenge the dominant mainstream assumptions behind some of the major concerns about digitally mediated sexuality by drawing on scholarship that examines the benefits of youth media production and digital social interaction. I argue that viewing sexting as a form of media production would lead to models of social media production that could account for sexuality and consent.

Great critique of Australian anti-sexting PSA

This critique of an Australian anti-sexting PSA points out that shaming girls for sending sexts is neither fair nor effective. Instead, it argues that educators need to start broader conversations about online privacy and bullying.

Anti-Sexting (HUNGRY BEAST) from Elmo Keep on Vimeo.

via MW

Seizing the means of representation

In mass media and art, women and girls are usually represented by adult men. The culture industries are all dominated by male producers, artists, and authors, and often the representations they create routinely and mundanely objectify women. Female characters often are spoken about rather than doing the speaking, they are often positioned on camera to be looked at rather than looking or doing something.

I am re-reading Girls Make Media, and I keep thinking, but wait! girls who sext are authors of their own images and representations too! So this is my latest book title:

Sexting panic: The reaction to girls seizing the means of representation

What does it mean to use sex to sell the “youth sexualization” debate?

The cover of this week’s New York Magazine promises a look at “Porn and junior high culture.” The opening paragraph of the article describes author Alex Morris surfing the web to find an image of one of his interview subjects, Cristal, 14:

[She's] in a teeny, tiny skintight dress posing like a Vargas girl with back arched and leg raised and bust swiveled to face the camera. Her waist is narrow. Her lips are full. She’s a pretty thing, and from the number of provocative images and Cristal’s pout in each of them, it appears that she knows it.

He describes some girls as having “the fawnlike quality of girls on the cusp of adolescence” and writes that a girl’s chest is “perky and ample.”

The photos that accompany the article by artist Evan Baden re-create netporn images with young-looking models who, the reader is cheekily assured by a caption, are at least 18 years old.

What will it take to get past this familiar combination of lusty drooling over teenage girls’ “fawnlike” and “perky” bodies with hand-wringing about their sexual behavior and exposure to inappropriate materials? While the magazine offers to assess the damaged caused by the sexualization of youth by online pornography, it seems to be completely unaware–or perhaps unconcerned–with its complicity in the marketing and selling of young female sexuality.

The article does speak to girls, which is a nice change from the usual approach of stories about youth, technology, and sexuality, but Morris uses their voices to  illustrate a portrait of girls jealous of the attention boys seem to pay to their rivals who post photos online:

“I think it makes her more popular,” Precious says of the photos. “That’s probably why she did it.”
“Yeah, ’cause, like, she gets all the boys.”
“Like, all the attention now.”
“When she cries, all the boys go up to her: ‘Oh, what happened?’ or whatever.”
“Girls don’t like her,” Precious counters, matter-of-factly.
“Yeah.” Tania weighs the social odds. “So she’ll become less popular for the girls but more popular for the boys, because the boys will want to go out with her more, because they probably like her pictures. Like, they don’t like you for your personality,” she sniffs. “They like you for your body shape and stuff like that.”

This doesn’t seem to be fundamentally any different from the sentiment in “Are You Popular?” (1947):

Ginny thinks she has the key to popularity: parking in cars with the boys at night. When Jerry brags about taking Ginny out, he learns that she dates ALL the boys, and he feels less important. What about Ginny? Does that make her really popular? … No, girls who park in cars are not really popular. Not even with the boys they park with.

That said, Morris still gets credit for noticing this:

The Internet can be as effective a venue for sexual retaliation as it is for sexual exploration—and that girls, as always, are damned if they do and damned if they don’t.

How could writers explore this tension without sexualizing and demeaning the people they are trying to examine? Could articles examine how boys use the internet for self-expression (not just as a source of dysfunctional porn addiction)? Could they ask girls about the benefits of expressing their sexuality online, not just the risks and pitfalls?

There is a lot more to examine about the relationship between sexuality and technology, but by asking the same questions and reproducing the same familiar narratives, the conversation so far seems to have stagnated.