‘Sexting,’ sharing and social networks
**I read two unrelated articles lately exploring the contemporary role of the internet in relation to sex. The first was about “revenge porn”, the practice of putting explicit photos or videos on the internet to humiliate someone. **
“Sexual networking” meanwhile, is an effort to incorporate frank, “real-world” sex into the megalopolis of online sharing.
Together, they illustrate a new frontier for an old problem: how to remove taboo from sex while also protecting dignity. Is sharing the answer?
Despite the seemingly obvious risks, those who promote sexual networking talk about tackling immaturity, prohibitions and misplaced shame.
While revenge porn has no such advocacy, it demonstrates one pattern very clearly: almost invariably, those who upload sexual content onto the web are men, and those uploaded are women.
There are old debates here about how the different sexes treat ex-partners and why men’s sexual exploits make them ‘studs’ while women’s make them ‘sluts’. Our online identities raise a new question: why is sexual exposure so much more damaging for women than men?
Neurological research suggests that after seeing sexualised images of women, the male brain struggles to perceive real women as people rather than pictures.
Moreover, the male and female brain tends to see a woman’s body in parts and a man’s body as a whole, making it easier to see the man as a person. Given the prevalence of images in the modern world, this sounds like bad news. Revenge porn hurts women because it dehumanizes them in a way it wouldn’t for men; even worse, it’s merely one tip of a sociological iceberg.
How to counteract phenomena like revenge websites is therefore harder than it sounds. Some call for uploaders to be named and shamed, website owners to be sued, and domain providers to be litigated against.
That would be a futile exercise in tackling symptoms rather than causes. The internet must remain open – if you’re unsure on that, look up the story of Aaron Swartz. Besides, punishment and blame are of limited use in any case.
How about tightening the law on what images can be published at all? Please. Even if someone could spin that as not completely socially regressive, can anyone imagine the letter of the law not being made a mockery of? I can already see the state of the poor law firm charged with ratifying exactly how many centimetres of cleavage count as “provocative”.
More helpful would be to look at the assumption that progressiveness means getting sex caught up with online sharing. Social networks may be here to stay, but we don’t have to accept them unthinkingly.
Sharing in general is making us more lonely, more envious, less sociable, and less confident. It encourages people to share only the most attractive elements of themselves.
Obviously, the most attractive elements of people are great. (On that note, it seems a shame that attraction is only ever written about in politicised terms – imagine for a moment how immeasurably poorer humanity would be if we didn’t find each other appealing to look at.)
However, if the networking of things as mundane as eating meals or seeing friends is actually making us antisocial, it seems that putting the most intimate area of one’s life online might not be too clever.
Perhaps it’s not about how much we share, but simply how we share it. Words like restraint, humility and unselfishness are pretty unerotic in any context, but they might be key to not just a genuinely progressive stance towards sex, but also healthier socialising as a whole.
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