Published
Sexting, as a category, covers a wide and uneven territory. A working definition, for our purposes, should be generous. It includes the photograph (culturally known as the nude), as well as the typed exchange, the voice note, the video, the staged live stream, and the entire genre of messages that are technically clothed but raw in other ways. After experimenting with all of the above for over a decade, I can tell you that the appeal between formats is remarkably consistent. You can be specific without being seen. You can be naked without being vulnerable. That, more than anything else, has always been the appeal. To me, at least.
I sent my first sext in middle school to a twerp named Brandon, who promptly forwarded it to the entire eighth grade. It was a photo of me in a bra. For two days, I tried to deny it was me. But the telltale sign was a Tiffany key necklace that no one else at school wore. It didn’t really bother me that he’d leaked it. What bothered me was everyone else’s reaction. The way girls whispered, wondering if I was okay or upset. I remember being genuinely confused. Upset about what? That people had seen me? I’d taken the picture. I’d pressed send. Of course I knew that consent is a quintessential part of sexting, but sometimes betrayal begets movement. In some corner of my brain, I was a little thrilled.
In high school, I started camming with boys. Plural. Mostly serial, occasionally overlapping in friend groups, sports teams, chemistry classes. I didn’t care if they told other boys, because when they did—and they did—it just meant I’d cam with them, too. The pipeline was efficient. Word of mouth marketing. When I told one of my friends, she called me "crazy," and asked "What on earth are you doing it for?" It was hard to explain. I was getting something, though I couldn’t have told you what at the time. In hindsight, it was the attention I craved, but wasn’t gutsy enough to actually receive.
When I moved to New York, I discovered livestreaming and the whole thing scaled. My quest for digital male validation could now come with an audience! Hundreds of eyes at once. On a now-defunct site called Parachute, I'd shave my legs on camera, wash my face in a tube top, pluck my eyebrows in a towel. Things that simulated nudity without being it. Things calibrated precisely to the edge, so that in case my mother ever discovered it, I could say: well, at least I wasn’t naked!
For most of my life, my relationship with my body has been complicated. I was never around people who taught me how to value it, or who seemed to value their own. It was the bag of skin and bones that got me through the day. On most days, I wished it were a different bag. Sexting, I've come to realize, was one of the few activities where the bag became useful. It was when being looked at converted, however briefly, into being chosen.
I positioned my body how I wanted. I picked the lighting, the angles. I picked which parts of me showed up and which parts stayed in the shadows, and there was no risk of someone walking around to the other side of me and seeing the rest. I could be seen how I wanted to be seen. Only that way, and only for as long as I choose. In real life, you don't get that. In real life, people see your back when you’re not looking.
When you spend enough time doing anything, the habit becomes a desire, and then the desire becomes a need. The boys stopped being people I happened to be talking to and started being more like internet boyfriends—parasocial, tele-social, lopsided arrangements that I would have described, if you'd asked me, as men who lived inside my phone. I knew their schedules and which ones came online drunk and eager. The relationships existed in a closed loop of notifications.
My favorite subject—I can’t really think of what else to call him—and I had a good thing going. A little trick. It was here that my sexting tipped over into a form of creative expression for one man’s eyes only. His enthusiasm and inspired replies made me want to try harder, better, put more heart into it. And I did. For a while, it felt so collaborative that I almost forgot we were in a transaction. Sexting makes you brave. Or it makes you feel brave, which is close enough.
with someone. The relationship cannot and will not deepen, because the deep things have already been spent (and sent). The language you invented together does not translate into any of the rooms where people who love each other actually live. In hindsight, I miss him. I do. Perhaps had we not blown up our phones with each other, we could have had a great life together. At the very least, a great summer.
After imploding the relationship, or whatever that was, my desire to feel seen in that way faded. I swore off the craft until my most recent revenant fell into my lap. One in the shape of a burly man inside my Instagram DMs. And I relapsed into a deep sexting hole that I can really only define as regressing. It drained me and my phone battery. I’d surface from hours of kinky messages with my eyes dry in the Mexico City airport and a mild dissociative buzz. The same kind I used to get at sixteen, at eighteen, at twenty-one, at twenty-four. I am an adult now. A woman. Disproportionately fearless, sometimes to a fault, but one who has accepted and is grateful for the body she has—pinched nerves, slow digestion and all. I’ve made peace with the bag. So when this old dog picked up her old tricks, the grooves were still there, but I couldn’t slide back into them like I used to.
There's a version of this story where I tell you I was subverting something. That by choosing what parts of myself to show, and when, and to whom, I was taking the male gaze and turning it on its head: making it mine, weaponizing it, whatever the current buzzword for it is. And there's a bit of that I believe. I was the one choosing. I was the one directing. I was the one with the camera. That's not nothing.
But I think the truer version is that I was simulating attention. Manufacturing it, on demand, at the dosage and vulnerability I could tolerate. A woman my age has access to more eyes than any woman in history, and approximately none of them are looking at her the way she actually wants to be looked at. The math doesn't work. So you build your own economy. You set your own price. You take the gaze that was going to land on you anyway, your whole life, no matter what you did, and you at least get to pick the frame it falls inside. You tell yourself this is freedom. Sometimes, it is.
What I have been chasing since middle school, when Brandon hit forward, is the version of intimacy where I could withhold and share without fear of being too withholding or too honest. Where I could give exactly as much of myself as I wanted. Where nobody would ask if I was okay, because nobody would have any reason to wonder. I don’t think I want that anymore. I think I want to be asked. But the urge is still there, and on the days I am tired or lonely or low on grace, my thumb knows the way back.
