Sexting craze marks new trend
Last year, Jessica Logan, 18, from Cincinnati, Ohio, killed herself after bullying from fellow pupils became unbearable. The naked pictures she took of herself and sent to her boyfriend ended up the hands of hundreds of her fellow classmates. She endured months of painful insults online and in person, describing her as a “porn queen” and “whore”.
Technology and relationships go hand in hand so much so that I am almost convinced that Alexander Graham Bell had probably hardly had the time to install his telephone equipment before it rang and a ‘heavy breather’ tested its sound transmission. I have written about Facebook and how it tends to cause a few issues where relationships are concerned. We are, these days, experiencing what should be called the first truly digital generation, growing up completely at home with social networking, texting, blogs, vlogs, online dating sites and the online world and it is here that we also meet the new challenges regarding relationships.
Sexting is the practice of taking a risqué picture of yourself using a mobile phone and then sending it to your boyfriend or girlfriend. The thing is that being digital these pictures are easier to take and easier to distribute. While in the past a split between a boy and a girl would end up in nothing more serious than her cutting him out of the shots they took together, these days, more likely than not it ends up with digital shots of an explicit nature being distributed across inboxes and then published online.
While this is clearly part of the ‘growing up’ process and with maturity and reflection, not to mention experience, we will get a much better measure of self-control, as a practice it does erode many of those restraints which we use to ‘dress’ the way we connect with other people. Having half a dozen naked photographs permanently available online, there for anyone to see, tends to change the dynamic of how you see yourself and how others see you, plus it adds to what is an ongoing trend of eroticizing every aspect of our lives.
The problem I have with this is that while we seem to be awash in sexual imagery to the point that we no longer butt an eyelid when it comes to discussing porn or consuming it, the same cannot be said for our ability to find happiness in the relationships we form. That appears to be as elusive as ever and the risk is that our preoccupation with the more superficial ways of connecting and sexting has to be one of them, will only make it harder for us to turn our stare inwards and examine what we want in order to understand how to get it.
