Girls, Sexting, and Gender Politics

Abstract

In the previous chapter I provided a close reading of some common heterosexy profile decorations and images used by young women in a context of feminine self-representation on social network sites (SNSs). The dominant discourse perpetuated about such imagery in public debate, news media, and some scholarship is that such images equate to physically and mentally risky “self-sexualization” or “self-objectification” (Hall, West, and McIntyre, 2012), and thus serve as evidence of young women’s vulnerability to negative media influence in sexualized postfeminist media cultures. This dominant discourse about sexual self-representations and their meaning for young women as indicators of vulnerability and psychopathology is currently most evident in debates and panic about youth sexting. This chapter examines the issue of youth sexting. Dominant pedagogical messages about youth sexting, and young people’s own framing of the gender politics of digital sexual self-representation, highlight a key contradiction in postfeminist cultures between the positioning of girls and young women as empowered and powerful postfeminist sexual subjects, and the positioning of girls as “at risk” and vulnerable to the harms of cultural sexualization. I argue here that scholars, stakeholders, and activists concerned with the well-being of young people need to slow down (Henderson, 2008) when it comes to sexting, and reconsider the way it is currently approached.