I was at a dinner party recently and a man showed me a picture of his vagina. Okay, not his vagina, but a vagina with which he was intimately acquainted.
He was flicking through photos of the new woman he's dating – a woman I've never met – and her vagina came up by accident. "Here she is at her birthday lunch," he was saying. "Here she is in Barcelona, and – ah! – here's her vagina. Lovely, isn't it?" He grinned and laughed as he flicked past. I tried to look relaxed but my smile was rigid. I felt like I did when I was 12 years old and a kissing scene came on while I was watching The Love Boat with my dad. Basically, I wanted the room to swallow me whole.
Then I realized that I wasn't 12 and this man wasn't my dad (thank God!). So I said, "Shouldn't you delete that?"
He looked perplexed and seemed genuinely confused. "Why would I? She sent it to me. It was before we'd slept together. It came on a text with the caption, 'Someone's looking forward to meeting you.' "
"She calls her vagina 'someone?' "
"Don't you?" he asked.
"No!"
"Look, what I'm trying to say is, she's not shy! She's 26 for Chrissake – it's perfectly normal."
"I'm sure it is perfectly normal," I pointed out, trying (and failing) not to sound like the village church lady collecting money for a new tin roof. "But I'm sure she didn't intend me to see it."
He looked defensive. "It's not like she Snapchatted it. She WhatsApped it, which basically means she doesn't mind who sees it. Besides," he made a little-boy pout, "I like to look at it sometimes when I miss her, you know?"
No, I don't know. I have spent the past five years in a relationship. Because of this, I haven't done much dating (by which I mean any) since the rise of smartphones. And smartphones are the reason why sexting is now – as my friend emphasized – a perfectly normal part of the sexual discourse. It's foreplay, basically. A bit like heavy petting without the sweaty palms and tangled bra straps.
A casual poll of my single friends revealed that everyone who is dating is either doing it, has done it or has been asked to do it. As one recently divorced girlfriend of mine who keeps a library of hot, topless selfies of herself on her phone just for this purpose observed, "It's not really that big a deal."
She means the act of sexting itself, of course. The selfies themselves are a very big deal, and she admits, rather sheepishly, to working for hours to get just the right lighting and angle to accentuate her rather Kardashian proportions. She showed the pics to me and I have to admit they look amazing. I'd totally Tinder her (if that's a verb). The point is, sending and receiving naked selfies of your whole self or even certain parts of yourself is no longer the practice of perverts and sex addicts. It turns out Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, despite being crappy husbands and political hypocrites, were pretty much normal.
As sexting creeps into the mainstream of sexual etiquette, there are a number of important things to pause and consider. Legality, for one. In Britain recently, a former schoolteacher was fined nearly $50,000 in civil court for sexting one of his former students while she was still a pupil. Apparently the young woman (who is now 23) was traumatized by her former teacher's penis tableaus and aggressive demands for naked photos in return. And who can fault her? If any of my high school teachers had sexted me, even verbally, I'd still be throwing up in my mouth today.
And herein lies the problem: Sexting functions at a necessary remove, which leads people to misuse and abuse it – and by extension risk doing harm to the people they are sexting with. Take my friend, who was sure his new girlfriend wouldn't care if I saw her vagina. Does he know that for sure? I doubt it.
I can't help but feel that a violation has occurred in my seeing it without her permission, but maybe that's just me being a bourgeois church lady. Is using WhatsApp rather than Snapchat – which "disappears" your photos after a designated time – really implicit consent to have your private photos shown in public? I don't think so. But like I said, I'm a bit clueless in this new digital erotic Wild West.
I do know this: Unlike most things we do sexually, sexting happens without the other person in the room, which means consent is even more tricky to determine given the lack of eye contact, body language and, most crucially, explicit verbal communication. And of course this is all the more true if you happen to be sexting after a few drinks – which I hear is a thing as well (thank you, single friends).
I get why sexting is sexy (I'm married after all, not dead). But I also see how sending or requesting naked pictures from someone you've just met carries a set of moral complications that go far beyond those presented by a drunken snog in the back of the cab, i.e., old-fashioned foreplay. I'm not saying keep your vaginas and penises in your pants, ladies and gents, but I am saying to consider carefully who might be seeing them once you press send.