Peter was on the bus ride home from an away basketball game when he covertly pulled out his phone and called over a few of his friends. He pulled up an app that looked like a calculator and typed in a sequence of numbers—a password—that revealed a collection of photos he had stored in its “vault.” The pictures offered glimpses of different female body parts, and he divulged to his friends that they came from a number of their eighth grade female classmates. His friends were impressed.
The entire photo sharing session lasted only a few minutes, but it left an impression on Peter’s friends, including Harrison. Cool boys, it seemed, were both asking for and receiving nudes. And at least some of the girls in their grade were apparently game to send them.
Later that night, Harrison asked his girlfriend to send him some sexy images. After all, if other girls were sharing with boys in their grade, shouldn’t his girlfriend trust him enough to?
But the photographs on Peter’s phone hadn’t really come from his female classmates. Peter simply found the pictures online and cropped them in ways that supported his story. It didn’t matter: the faked collection suggested to Peter’s friends that asking girls for nudes was acceptable.
When adults talk about sexting, we tend to gloss over the reasons teens end up entangled in sexting dilemmas in the first place. Sexting behaviors are shaped by teens’ natural sexual interests and by peer pressures. Apps provide new tools for sexual exchanges, but longstanding features of adolescence underpin how and why youth tap them—even when they are well aware of the risks. When we ignore the reasons teens sext, we misunderstand the calculus of their decision-making as they grapple with whether to request or “snap and send” a racy picture. And when we dole out only panicked admonitions (“never, ever, ever sext, period”), we slip into a digital age version of abstinence-only education, leaving teens without sufficient information to support complex, real-world decision-making. Notably, various studies show that abstinence messages are largely ineffective at stemming sexual activity and risk-taking.1
By the time adults are aware of an unfolding sexting scandal, the situation has often escalated to a crisis point. Our responses can default to a specific mode of victim-blaming: she (it’s often she in the stories we hear) really should have known better than to send that picture or video. We then rush to warn the teens in our lives, “See! This is why you should never send a naked picture to someone else. It could ruin your reputation.” “Once you hit send, you can’t take it back!” “Sending inappropriate pics is illegal and dangerous.” Important messages, but are they enough?
Some adults do go a step further in their discussions with teens. They think to caution boys (and often, it is boys) against asking for nudes. Such warnings carry the crucial message that it’s not okay to pressure others for sexts. Still, these messages fail to acknowledge the counter-messages those teens are hearing from peers, who often hold more sway than adults. As in the preceding story, a repository of nudes can be an alluring status symbol, like a digital collection of trophies in the adolescent world.
Research also shows that sexting “scripts” or narratives among adolescents portrays sexting as normative and boys as the typical askers.2 But, to be clear, large-scale analyses show that most teens are neither asking for nor sending sexually explicit pictures, videos, or messages. And yet: around one in seven teens has sent a sext. About one in three has received sexts. A smaller number, in the ballpark of around one in ten, have forwarded on others’ sexts.3
Adults tend to use just one word—sexting—to describe a broad range of behaviors most adults would prefer teens avoid all together. But data reveal important differences.4 Sexting can be consensual and wanted by both parties. Sexts can be pressured or even actively coerced: the result of one person feeling uncertain about how else to navigate requests or even trapped by threats or blackmail. Sexts can also be shared without permission, as in the case of pictures that are sent to one person and then shared further without consent from the person who is featured.
Sexting also takes different forms. The term “sexting” can refer to erotic text-based communication, nude or semi-nude pictures (think: full-body mirror pics, “dick pics,” “ass pics,” “bra pics”), or videos that feature sexual imagery or acts like masturbation. In this chapter, we focus on visual content—photos and videos—because of their graphic and often identifiable nature. Visual content poses unique privacy risks and can persist as part of a teen’s long-term digital footprint. In our most recent research, teens most often used the term “nudes” to talk about this kind of content.
Teens can play multiple roles in sexting situations: they can be the askers who request sexts from others, they can be the asked person, from whom sexts are requested, and they can also be the recipients of others’ sexts. When teens are recipients of others’ sexts, they may be willing or unwilling audiences, and the pictures may have been sent with or without permission of the person they feature. Teens may receive dick pics they neither request nor want; this experience can be deeply unsettling (“the most disgusting thing”; “polluting my phone”). Some teens may resist telling adults because they fear adults will misinterpret what has unfolded or immediately take away their phones or both.
Teens who are asked for nudes describe requests from at least four possible sources: significant others with whom they are in committed relationships, earlier-stage romantic interests (i.e., people they are “talking to” or flirting with), people they consider “just friends,” and strangers. These different categories of requesters raise distinct puzzles as teens consider whether and how to respond. A request from a stranger is creepy and unsettling, often best handled by blocking or reporting the asker. A request from a “friend” is challenging in a different way and blocking the asker can feel like it will cause different problems. Requests from romantic interests or partners—people with whom teens are quite motivated to convey intimacy and trust—require weighing these desires against potential risks if images are saved or later leaked. Of note, teens who are asked for sexts by their significant others (boyfriends, girlfriends, etc.) do tend to comply.5
Teens who identify as LGB appear to engage more frequently in sexting than their non-LGB identifying peers and to engage in more mutual (two-way) sexting.6 Researchers have noted that sexting may provide LGB teens with a valuable, nonpublic avenue for sexual identity expression and exploration.7 At the same time, survey data suggest that queer youth are more likely to report being pressured for nudes, suggesting they may also face heightened risk of pressures and sexting victimization.8 Being outed and/or harassed just for their sexual identities on social media is a corresponding threat that can add another layer of stress.9
When teens consider whether to sext, their calculus includes a number of considerations beyond the risk of leaks or potential long-term consequences.
The way adolescents’ brain systems mature skews focus toward near and immediate concerns over more distant future possibilities. It works like this: the brain’s arousal systems and regulatory systems mature at different speeds. During adolescence, the neural systems that drive emotional reactivity and a focus on immediate rewards outpace development of the frontal lobes, which fuel the kinds of logical thinking that help keep impulses in check. These asynchronous developments shape decision-making in ways that can seem nonsensical to adults. As adolescent development expert Larry Steinberg describes:
Behavioral data have often made it appear that adolescents are poor decision-makers (i.e., their high-rates of participation in dangerous activities, automobile accidents, drug use and unprotected sex). This led initially to hypotheses that adolescents had poor cognitive skills relevant to decision-making or that information about consequences of risky behavior may have been unclear to them . . . however, there is substantial evidence that adolescents engage in dangerous activities despite knowing and understanding the risks involved. Thus, in real-life situations, adolescents do not simply rationally weigh the relative risks and consequences of their behavior—their actions are largely influenced by feelings and social influences.10
Adults often assume that teens who send nudes simply fail to appreciate potential stakes and consequences. Accordingly, their approach is to talk with teens in ways that emphasize the dangers—especially the risk that images will be shared with other audiences and follow them into their futures. But understanding the trajectory of neural development helps to clarify why a sole conversational focus on the consequences of sexting is destined to fall short. If adults want to intervene in ways that will really shift adolescents’ behaviors, we need to understand the more immediate feelings and social influences at play.
Decontextualized from actual situations where they are being asked to send or weighing sending a nude, many teens are impressively alert to risks of sexting. They are patently aware of the permanence of digitally shared pictures and get that “once u send it everyone can see it.” They recognize that “the pictures can go viral and that would be scary and embarrassing.” Even if the asker promises not to save it, they might create and leak a copy (“if you send any inappropriate pictures to anyone . . . they can take a screenshot and show everyone”).
They know, too, that “these pictures that are sent can ruin your future” and that “the person who receives this now kind of has control over you because they can post those pictures anywhere without your consent and you are powerless over that.” And yet, as noted, some teens are sexting: according to one meta-analysis of studies totaling more 184,000 adolescents, one in seven teens has sent a sext.3 What’s more, sexting is only becoming more frequent.3 While the behavior was framed as deviant a decade ago, studies that explore the prevalence of sexting over time signal a trend toward normalization among teens and young adults.11 It’s likely the pandemic hastened this shift, too, as suggested both by survey data of adults12 and our own mid-pandemic focus groups with teens (who noted that sending nudes had become more common in their social circles amid stay-at-home orders and mandated social distancing).
If teens know the risks, why do they send nudes anyway? Taking a closer look at their perspectives is revealing. The following are some of the most salient motives documented in prior research13 and echoed in our surveys, interviews, and focus groups with teens. Importantly, these “9 Reasons Why Teens Sext” are not mutually exclusive:
Teens are assessing their own desires and concerns, their perceptions of the recipient’s trustworthiness, and even their feelings about their own bodies. They’re drawing on their impressions of social norms among their peers, including whether they think the popular kids they know are sexting. An interesting finding from a study of over six hundred adolescents: high schoolers who think popular kids are sexting are themselves more likely to sext.14
A developmental phenomenon called the personal fable is likely relevant too.15 In short, the personal fable is a sense during adolescence that one is special and unique—so much so that a teen can reason that they are personally less vulnerable to risks (“Even if sexts are often leaked, that wouldn’t happen to me”).16
If they’re considering turning down a request, teens are weighing their ability to say no to the asker alongside real or imagined fears about what it will mean for them. Often, short-term outcomes are front of mind and seem guaranteed. These include outcomes teens want to ensure (like attracting a crush) or avoid (like being called a prude). Longer-term potential consequences certainly loom but are often ambiguous and uncertain. These variables are often invisible to adults but weighty for teens. Importantly, many of the “9 Reasons Why” suggest that decisions to sext can fall short of consent. Consent turns out to be a valuable frame for thinking about teens’ experiences with sexting (see the “Let’s Talk about Consent” box).
Consider two stories that concern consensual sexting, both shared with us by teens who are close friends of the people involved. In the first case, Josephine was a high school freshman, dating a guy who was a year older. He never explicitly asked for a nude, but he had implied his interest. She decided to send one. For Josephine, sending the picture was a signal of her trust in him. She also hoped it would deepen their connection and intimacy.
Her boyfriend apparently thought Josephine looked hot, and he sent the picture to a couple of friends. His friends sent the picture on to other classmates. When it wound up in the hands of a few girls who had never liked Josephine, they seized the opportunity and spread it around further. It became a painful case study of replicability and scalability in action.
Josephine was mortified. She also felt completely betrayed. Josephine knew when she sent the picture that it could be leaked. But she had trusted her boyfriend enough to believe he would respect her body and her privacy. His actions had done irreparable damage to that trust. So, on top of managing the social aftermath of her “exposure,” Josephine was thrust into a sudden breakup that she painfully initiated.
Josephine’s feelings of betrayal didn’t end with her boyfriend either. Some of her so-called friends had circulated the picture too—and she decided that marked the end of those friendships. A number of those girls were Josephine’s soccer teammates. She decided to quit the team.
Josephine eventually moved forward. She joined a new friend group and leaned into other sports. Her new friends knew about her experience with the circulated nudes, but they hadn’t actively seen or sent them.
Second, we have Anya’s story. A few years ago, when Anya’s boyfriend wanted nudes, she took a few pictures and sent them to her best friend for consultation: did she look hot? Should she retake them at a different angle? Once assured that the pictures were sufficiently flattering, she sent them on. A year or two later, when the COVID-19 pandemic began, Anya and her boyfriend weren’t seeing each other in person, and they started getting sexual over FaceTime. Anya made no effort to hide this from her friends; she wasn’t embarrassed and didn’t seem to think there was any reason she should be.
By the time we heard this story, considerable time had already passed since Anya first sent her boyfriend nudes. There had been no leaks, no scandals, and no betrayals. Maybe it will take a negative turn, but maybe not. For younger teens, the likelihood of unwanted circulation and the nature of others’ reactions to a leaked nude elevate the risk and social consequences of sexting. By contrast, for older teens, consensual sexting may be fairly low-risk: research with eighteen-year-olds who sent nude pictures suggests that in most cases—for as many as 92 percent of “non-pressured sexters” in one study—sending a picture didn’t cause any problems at all.19 In another study, researchers specifically asked college students who had sent nudes whether they regretted it. About one in four felt regret or worry about the decision; most did not. Young women in the study (though not men) were more than twice as likely to report regret when the pictures were sent to casual partners versus in the context of committed relationships.20 Though not a focus of the college student study, privacy risks are amplified for people whose sexual identities are not public and would be revealed through sexting leaks.21
As we listened to teens’ perspectives on sexting, we heard enough stories like Anya’s to know that, for some teens, the calculus about sending nudes takes on board the possibility of zero bad consequences. These realities stand in stark contrast to what teens describe as alarmist school assemblies with “condescending” messages, “shaming us” through anxiety-provoking stories that leave them feeling “exhausted [and] . . . ashamed for potential choices we might make,” as one teen put it. Again and again when we asked teens to weigh in on sexting issues, they raised considerations about consent and trust. “As long as sexting was consensual with both parties, it’s cool”; “if it’s two consenting teenagers at a decent age, it’s okay for them to explore that kind of sexual connection”; “Maybe they are dating and have lots of trust towards each other.”
In a timely editorial published in the Journal of Adolescent Health, one of the leading researchers on sexting concluded a brief recap of sexting studies with an instructive parallel: “Adults often ask what can be told to youth to completely stop them from sexting. The short answer is probably nothing. In the short term, sexting appears to have a psychological profile similar to that of adolescent sexuality. Like sexuality, with the right partner, sexting apparently can be a positive experience; with the wrong partner, it can be very damaging.”22
Sexting is not an inherent evil: among adults in committed relationships, consensual sexting is even, in some cases, associated with positive outcomes like relationship satisfaction.23 It’s understandable to cringe at the thought of teens exchanging sexts of any kind. But consensual sexting is best understood as an extension of developmentally expected desires to explore sexuality and intimacy. The behavior undoubtedly carries a constellation of potential risks for teens—and, as with sex, the risks of negative experiences and consequences are certainly heightened for younger adolescents.24 Crucially, when the sexters are minors, legal issues can arise, as we will touch on later in this chapter. Nonetheless, wanted and consensual sexting exchanges occupy a meaningful place on the spectrum of teens’ sexting behaviors.
As reflected in several of the “9 Reasons Why,” teen sexting isn’t always consensual. Young people also send nudes as the result of pressure, one-sided persuasion, or worse. Data from more than eight hundred sixth to ninth graders who had been in romantic relationships revealed that roughly one in eight had been pressured to send sexual messages or photos.25 As you might expect, girls were significantly more likely to be the ones pressured to sext, while boys were more likely to be the ones applying pressure. Still, this doesn’t mean boys never feel or face pressure to send.
In our own data, the word “pressure” abounds.
I don’t want to feel pressured into doing something that I know is not right. I also know that it will be on the internet forever so it could mess up my life later on. (eleven-year-old girl)
They pressure you and I would get in a lot of trouble. (thirteen-year-old boy)
I don’t want to be pressured into sending something i don’t want to send. (thirteen-year-old girl)
I do not want to be in a situation that pressures me to do something that could ruin my future. (fifteen-year-old boy)
Boys can pressure girls, [in my] personal experience, to send photos of themselves. (fifteen-year-old girl)
For some teens, just being asked is enough to evoke discomfort and a feeling of pressure. The request “is very awkward and it makes me uncomfortable,” one fifteen-year-old explained. Others concur: “It just puts you in an awkward situation. You always have to be paranoid in the circumstance” (twelve-year-old girl). Such feelings can stem from a worry that declining a request will damage a teen’s relationship with the asker. If the asker is a partner or crush, the person might lose interest if nudes aren’t shared. If the asker is a “friend”—for example, someone in their friend group who is interested in them but for whom feelings aren’t reciprocated—the concern is different. As thirteen-year-old girl put it, “If its someone I’m really close to, I don’t want us to just stop being friends because I didn’t send them a picture.” Another girl, also thirteen, echoed a similar concern: “If you’re pressured but don’t want to, you might risk having someone as a friend or not.”
Recall that, developmentally, the adolescent impulse to protect and preserve peer relationships is strong. It’s stressful to think that a relationship might be in jeopardy, and even more so if a teen feels like she could have done something to prevent it. Ideally, teens will recognize that a friend who pressures them is not such a good friend after all; in the wise words of one sixteen-year-old girl, “I feel the peer pressure from the people that ask and when I say no, I worry that I will lose them as a friend. But, then I consider, are they actually my friend?” And yet, another acknowledged that sometimes teens do feel “it’s easier” to just acquiesce rather than “ruin the relationship they have with the person by being like: no. And so they just send it.”
Pressures to send can also stem from real or imagined fears about how the asker will react to being turned down. “I get asked to send nudes a lot and it always makes me uncomfortable,” one fourteen-year-old explained, “I’m afraid the other person will hurt me when i say no.” These cases can cross a line into cyber sexual harassment.26 And yet again, context matters: where misogyny and sexual harassment appear rampant, teens describe how spurned requests spill over into aggression:
When boys get rejected, they turn into the most hostile, violent people you’ve ever known. I’ve known girls will get bottles thrown at their heads for rejecting somebody. I’ve known girls who get cussed out and get exposed on social media and get, like, the screenshot of their chat exposed . . . it can really turn out terribly for the girl. . . . [Boys] feel so entitled that it’s like: how dare you say no to me? And so oftentimes I feel like it’s nothing but violence and verbal assault that comes after that. Like that’s pretty much all I’ve ever known it to be.
Girls’ concerns also veer into fears about coerced sexting and sextortion: askers threatening to publicly circulate nudes to manipulate someone into activities like sending more sexts or engaging in sexual activities.27 Some portray requesters as relentless: “once you send it once, bruh, they never stop, they literally going to be coming at you back to back to back and forcing you like, ‘yo, I’ma send this out if you don’t send me this.’”
Indeed, teens speak to tactics that range from manipulative flattery to direct threats or blackmail (“Some people would send threats when I didn’t [send nudes]. And I wouldn’t send them”; “They always try to blackmail you into sending and it’s just so annoying”). Some girls worry specifically about being blackmailed into sending pictures by the asker threatening to “hurt people I care about.” Even among teens for whom physical violence isn’t a concern, the decision to turn down a request can cause considerable anxiety about potential harassment, name-calling, cyberbullying, or false rumors. Recent studies unsurprisingly show that coerced sexting predicts psychological distress.28 Pressured sexting can be an aspect of “digital dating abuse,” too, which is “a pattern of behaviors that control, pressure, or threaten a dating partner using a cell phone or the Internet.”29
In short: while sending nudes can lead to consequences like public humiliation or getting in trouble, turning down requests can feel equally riddled with other near-term repercussions.
Recall Josephine, the teen who shared a photo with her boyfriend and then had her pictures circulated. She initially shared her nude voluntarily (without direct pressure or any coercion). But then it was forwarded on and the situation changed instantly.
Sharing others’ pictures without permission is a major violation of consent: it is a breach of trust that is understandably traumatic for the person whose picture was shared. Again, there is a gendered dynamic here: girls experience more social shaming and trauma in such scenarios.30
Data are at once reassuring and concerning. Though reports vary somewhat across studies, between 7–12 percent of adolescents say they have forwarded sexts.31 This suggests that a minority of youth have forwarded others’ pictures. It may, however, be an underestimation of current prevalence given that (1) sending, receiving, and forwarding sexts have all become more common in recent years; and (2) the focus on forwarding overlooks nonconsensual sharing that happens in other ways, like Peter (in the opening vignette) showing his friends nudes in person. Indeed, a 2018 survey of 800 Canadian young people aged 16–20 that asked about if people had ever shown, shared, or forwarded another person’s pictures found that about one third had done so and that showing people others’ pictures in person was the most common method.32
Who shares others’ pictures without permission, and why? Sometimes the motives are malicious, as in the case of the girls who seized the chance to embarrass Josephine or a guy who leaks pictures as a form of “revenge porn” after a fight or breakup.33 Pictures may also be leaked as part of ongoing coercion (recall the teen who described guys threatening to release pictures to elicit new nudes). Sometimes, money may even be involved—meaning, nudes are sold via peer-to-peer payment apps.
Pride, a desire for clout, and camaraderie building can all motivate nonconsensual sharing too. Josephine’s boyfriend apparently wanted to brag about his hot girlfriend; we never interviewed him, but boys in our research explained that nudes are sometimes shared to show off a girl or because the nudes themselves are like “trophies.” It’s “an accomplishment” to get them and showing nudes to close friends can be a way to prove success. This idea is documented in prior research as well.34 At the same time, teens also suggest that sharing can undercut the “value” of a girl’s nude, which is relevant if the nude photo is of someone a teen is still talking to or dating (“You don’t gain anything out of showing everybody what you have.”) More generally, sharing nudes widely is described by some older teens as immature and “childish.”
When Dame was in high school, one of his best friends routinely shared with Dame any nudes he got. They never circulated the images further; they had a mutual understanding that the pictures should be kept private between them. Still, Dame—now a college student—reflects that “it was kind of messed up.” To be sure, their arrangement violated consent expectations from the initial sender. Sending nudes to a group chat—or even air dropping them to nearby friends—are similar practices that are routine in some teens’ social circles. Such distribution can be a way to stake a claim over a girl, or it may be an invitation to assess and compare the nudes to a growing collection of photos from other girls. While teens may share photos with friends voluntarily, they can also face pressure from friends who request and, in some cases, even expect to see them.
Research finds a connection between teens’ beliefs about traditional gender stereotypes and propensity to share others’ nudes. In one study, adolescents (especially boys) who believed more strongly in ideas like “men should be more interested than women in sex” and “a woman cannot be truly happy unless she is in a relationship” were more likely to have shared another person’s sexts without their permission.35 Cultural beliefs about both gender and sexuality shape teens’ ideas about sexting, which is likely why the prevalence of sexting varies in different countries and contexts.36
Unsurprisingly, teens’ behaviors are also related to their views of broader peer norms. This is crucial to consider since those norms may also be changing. Teens’ own sexting behaviors are influenced by how common they think sexting is among their peers. Teens are also more likely to share others’ sexts if they feel their friends expect it. Moral disengagement appears relevant too: young people who shared others’ nudes rationalized their decisions as either not harmful or “not as bad” as other lapses like cheating on a romantic partner.37
Because norms matter so much,38 it’s encouraging to see teen-driven efforts to shift them in positive ways—like a 2021 TikTok trend that featured teen boys rejecting the culture of sharing nudes. Each video showed a single teen playing dual roles of a guy sharing nudes and his friend’s reaction: “Damn yo, look at my girls fire nudes.” The response: “Get that shit out of my face.” followed by “Wtf is wrong with you.” One re-creation shared by “@jordanlicausi_” was viewed over 3.9 million times. The video prompted a series of mocking spinoffs, but still serves as a cultural artifact documenting the way some boys push back. We heard reactions of a similar sort from boys who were quick to label Peter’s behavior (showing his friends nudes on the bus) as “messed up” and “just rude, honestly.”
In the media, stories of sexting often portray a decidedly gendered narrative: boys are positioned as the askers and girls as the senders whose photographs are shared. Some studies indicate that boys are indeed more likely than girls to be the requesters, asking for sexts from others.39 Interestingly, however, the large meta-analyses we cited earlier—including the most recent analysis of data from 79 studies and more than 184,000 youths—found no evidence of gender differences in the rates of sending sexts, receiving sexts, or forwarding sexts.40 There are several possibilities for this apparent discrepancy between the research findings and dominant public narratives about sexting. As several authors of a large meta-analysis suggest, it’s possible that the rates of sending sexts are similar because boys preemptively send sexts in the hopes of eliciting sexts in return.41
It’s also possible that the behaviors occur with similar frequency, but the stories that garner attention distort our perceptions because girls are more severely shamed when their photos are leaked. There is compelling evidence that this may be the case. Peggy Orenstein’s book Girls and Sex provides a powerful account of how girls experience a double bind related to their sexuality.42 Girls are expected, even pressured, to be attractive, sexy, and responsive to male sexual desire. At the same time, they are vulnerable to being labeled a “slut” if they acquiesce. This is a lose-lose scenario for girls, whose own sexual desires are minimized or even irrelevant.
The themes Peggy Orenstein describes readily play out in how boys and girls experience sexting. Sexting researchers Julia Lippman and Scott Campbell describe boys as “virtually immune from criticism for their sexting practices” while girls are—as noted—“damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”43 In our own data, we see that girls (especially middle school-aged girls, roughly ten to thirteen years old) are significantly more likely than boys to report that being asked for pictures is their top worry about digital life. What’s more, a recent survey of nearly a thousand high schoolers conducted by Lauren Reed and her colleagues44 also revealed that girls report feeling more pressure to sext, and more negative feelings related to sexting: girls were more likely than boys to say being asked for sexts and receiving them made them feel annoyed, creeped out, turned off, embarrassed, scared, and disappointed. In contrast, boys were more likely than girls to report feeling amused, happy, sexy, turn on, excited.45
In short: we think it’s fair to say that girls are more pressured and shamed when it comes to sexting and nudes. However, it would be a mistake to assume only one of these roles (i.e., asker or sender) applies to adolescent boys versus girls. Of course many teens identify at other points on the gender spectrum. We have much more to learn about the opportunities and stresses nonbinary and transgender youth face related to sexting.
Our data do suggest that boys can feel distinct pressure related to sexting too. In addition to the kinds of social pressures already discussed, they may have their own body insecurities that are in tension with a perception that they should want to sext. Sixteen-year-old Pablo noted that some guys feel self-conscious about nudes because of penis size; Dante (also sixteen) acknowledged that musculature, hair growth, puberty stage—and considerations of girls’ preferences related to all these things—can lead teen boys to worry, “Whoa what if I’m not right?” or “What if I’m not good enough?”
As our account reveals, the landscape of sexting can be a minefield for girls. If they decide to share nudes, protecting themselves requires inventiveness. Some girls use strategic moves to try to guard against damaging exposure. Teens told us that savvy girls know to crop out their heads, remove any identifying jewelry, and check the background of the shot for identifying details. Some even go further with steps like watermarking photos with the recipient’s name in tiny text. This will be used as proof—if it’s ever needed—of who is to blame for a leak. An age-old strategy, word of mouth also helps girls identify (and then warn each other about) boys who can’t be trusted not to leak nudes. Girls learn: “You don’t send to that person, you don’t, like, interact with them. Because they’re creepy, they’re kind of sketchy . . . you learn to stay away from [them].”
Another strategy: If a girl feels especially uncertain whether the asker is trustworthy, she may find a body-only picture online that looks conceivably like it could be her. As Michelle explained, she’ll want to take a screenshot that clearly shows the picture in a search result. Then, she needs to send the screenshot to a few trusted friends to ensure they can vouch for the picture not being hers. If the boy ever leaks the pic, she then has deniability: she can honestly say it isn’t her. If people don’t believe her, she and her friends have the receipts to back it up. This might seem like a lot of effort and admittedly involves duping the requester, who may be looking for intimacy and have no intentions of leaking an image. But when girls feel like they have no good choices, they get creative.
A further consideration is potential legal ramifications for minors, especially since some of the content we’re talking about falls under the category of child pornography. The headline is: It’s complicated and frustratingly unpredictable. As of this writing, there are no U.S. federal laws on sexting. Laws vary by state: about half of the states have laws on the books that explicitly address sexting, while the remainder do not.46 To further complicate things, there may be discrepancies between what is technically possible to prosecute and what law enforcement officers are actually doing. For example, a given state’s laws may be written in such a way that a teen taking a naked photo of himself and sending it to his girlfriend can arguably constitute creation and distribution of child pornography. Under current Massachusetts law, minors can technically be charged with a felony offense (distribution of child pornography) for sending nudes.47 Much is left to the discretion of the investigating officers and the district attorney, which makes it hard to predict what will and won’t land teens in legal trouble.
Nonconsensual forwarding of others’ pictures is a bit of a different story, at least in terms of legislation. Almost all fifty states are considering or have already passed laws that recognize the seriousness of what is commonly referred to as “revenge porn” and provide paths for legal recourse.48 In 2017, Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker proposed a bill focused on distribution of explicit photos without the subject’s consent and with intent to cause emotional distress. Penalties for minors include a mandatory “educational diversion program” and potential filing of felony charges, at the discretion of the district attorney.49 With legislation like this either in place or on the horizon, distributing others’ pictures is not only a moral issue, but also potentially a legal one. But how adults talk about these uncertain legal risks with teens—and to what effect—is key. Especially as sexting becomes more prevalent, heavy-handed messages about worst-case scenarios may amplify anxiety or regret without equipping teens to navigate the real sexting pressures they face.50
The messages that well-meaning parents and educators convey about sexting, and the ways we respond when sexting situations arise, often place emphasis on the person who sent a sext in the first place. Teens hear: “Sharing inappropriate photos with someone can have lasting effects if those photos are shared online.” “Never, ever put anything online/send anything that you wouldn’t want everyone to see.”
These cautions are understandable since many parents worry about their own teens playing featured roles in a sexting scandal. Yet in so doing, we may unwittingly contribute to a “blame the victim” mentality. In our surveys of more than 3,600 U.S-based youths, most teens (59 percent) agreed with this statement: “If someone sends a naked picture to someone else, it’s their own fault if the picture ends up getting shared with other people” (25 percent of teens disagreed and 16 percent were undecided). This aligns with multiple studies that suggest victim blaming is widespread in cases of sexting.51 Perhaps teens who blame the sender reason that because creative strategies exist, senders who fail to use them are irresponsible. Or perhaps they reason that privacy is forsaken in a networked world and leaks are par for the course. Or perhaps they simply get caught up in the scandal. Importantly, young people who tend toward victim-blaming mentalities are also more likely to forward on others’ images without consent.52 It’s not hard to see how the thinking goes: if it’s your fault for sharing the picture in the first place, I’m not to blame for simply passing it along.
We also asked teens to respond to a dilemma about a parent who accidentally sees a series of private and sexual messages on a teen’s phone, including whether it would be okay or not for the parent to tell the other teen’s parents. Tweens were the most in favor of adult involvement but had a lot to say about how. We heard a plea for adults to slow down and clarify the situation before jumping to assumptions or rushing to alert authorities or confiscate devices: Was this consensual, wanted, pressured? If pressured, then what might be at risk and how could adult intervention help versus amplify teens’ stress?
Many adolescents see a place for adults in helping them manage sexting. Middle school girls in our study described their inclinations to turn to trusted adults in the face of unwanted sexting requests. Understandably, the roles teens hope adults will play change as teens get older. Especially where tech and sex are concerned, older teens (appropriately) crave more privacy and autonomy over their relationships. But this doesn’t mean there’s no need for positive adult support.
Relevant here is a powerful set of insights from research by Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Kahn. Based on their in-depth study of sex and sexual assault on a college campus, Hirsch and Kahn unpack the varied and often complex reasons for engaging in different sexual activities. Young people’s sexual decision-making, they find, can have a fraught “trial and error” quality to it; at times it’s pleasurable, at times it induces regret and shame.53 Adults are implicated in the latter. The young people they interviewed described their parents as downright avoidant of conversations that acknowledged sex as a meaningful or valuable aspect of life. In so doing, these adults missed opportunities to discuss the moral dimensions of different sexual endeavors and how they might fit or depart from personal values.54 Young people turned to other sources of information to fill the gap, namely peers and pornography. Hirsch and Kahn offer an expansive vision of how peers, parents, educators, schools, and policies can support “sexual citizenship: the recognition of one’s own right to sexual self-determination and an equivalent right in others.”55 This vision is all about both respecting rights and creating a sense of agency, which applies to sexting and more.
Understanding that teens’ sexting decisions are made amid a complicated mix of desires, tensions, and pressures is crucial. Even in cases where a teen’s sexting is consensual and wanted, there may be good reason for conversation—at a minimum to discuss the many ways the digital context can undercut their ability to control and consent to who sees the pictures. For example: even if they trust their partner implicitly, a picture might be stored indefinitely on an app’s server or accessed and leaked by another person without their or their partner’s permission. Acknowledging both inherent digital risks and the reality that teen sexting may happen regardless has prompted some experts to advocate teaching safe sexting practices. Echoing what we heard from teens: avoid sending photos with your face or identifying information; turn off location and delete other metadata that might attach to photos automatically; and collect evidence of being pressured or blackmailed if possible.56
When we initially wrote this chapter, we mentioned porn only in passing. Largely due to our study design, we had little direct data from teens on the topic. One discussion with our teen advisory council surfaced the view that pornography can fuel an interest in sexting: “It’s an addiction from adult videos. So from watching those so much, they get bored of it. And they’re just like, ‘I want more. I’m bored now, like this isn’t interesting no more.’ So, then they go and they start asking for nudes or sending theirs.” But we had little else to share about teens’ perspectives, and we worried about speaking beyond our data.
Then, we had a wakeup call. We attended a virtual conference where pornography expert and researcher Gail Dines spoke about the landscape of Internet porn and how it’s changing teen sex.57 Frankly, we were stunned at how much we had missed by not more intentionally exploring “the porn crisis.”58 Kids and teens have easy access to free, hardcore porn and many find this content for the first time by accident.59 What they see is dominated by violence and aggression. Content analyses of porn scenes reveal that nearly 90 percent contain aggressive acts toward women.60 Dines pointed to research that found gagging, strangulation, rough anal sex, spanking, hair pulling, and more as routine features of porn.61 Women are typically the targets of physical aggression, and they rarely exhibit negative reactions to it on screen.62 Consent is portrayed as murky, often nonverbal, and assumed in the absence of explicit resistance or a verbal no.63
Practically, this all means that curious teens who are seeking content like naked bodies or breasts may quickly become audiences for violent depictions of sex and ambiguous messages about what counts as consent. Watching porn can distort sexual expectations and shape perceptions that aggressive behavior is just part of sex.64 At age nineteen, singer Billie Eilish offered a poignant personal reflection about this very phenomenon. In her words: “I started watching porn when I was like 11. . . . I feel incredibly devastated that I was exposed to so much porn. . . . The first few times I, you know, had sex, I was not saying no to things that were not good. It was because I thought that’s what I was supposed to be attracted to.”65
Pornography is a notable feature of the digital landscape. Teen interest in sexting and the way it plays out—pressured, consensual, or nonconsensual—may be shaped by messages absorbed from their own (or their peers’) exposure to porn. This amplifies the importance of intentional sex education that incorporates media literacy and explicit conversations about consent, respect, and agency. Don’t overlook porn in conversations with teens: they need to know about its lasting, distorting impacts on their sexual expectations.
Teens want from adults a recognition that sending nudes is, in some contexts, “part of teen culture.” They need us to acknowledge the difference between consensual and nonconsensual situations, and to recognize that sexting becomes nonconsensual the second a picture is seen by an unintended viewer.
Teens want us to know that they find it “ignorant,” “not practical,” and “not realistic” when adults say, “Just don’t sext!” It’s not that they want adults to leave it all alone—to the contrary their advice to adults on this front is clear: “just ignoring it—that’s not going to help anything.” But they need adults to enter these conversations with an openness to seeing the real complexities they face. This includes how vexing it can be to say no, and how real the consequences might be for them when they send and when they don’t. Girls especially want us to appreciate the no-win situations that can leave them feeling trapped. They want parents of boys to emphasize the unacceptability of asking girls for nudes.
Teens want adults to know that the social consequences of leaked nudes are bad enough without adults layering on further punishments for the person whose picture was shared; what that person truly needs is support. As one teen put it: “the focus should be on why would [someone] send around somebody’s pictures? Why would you do that? Because that is, I think, a greater evil.” In that spirit, teens want “better privacy laws” when it comes to pictures forwarded without consent.
In the meantime, they ask that we go beyond alarmist “don’t sext!” school assemblies and provide more comprehensive interventions. In their view, it would help for all teens to understand legitimate risks and learn strategies that build agency for responding to real sexting dilemmas.