This article explores women’s accounts of receiving unsolicited dick pics from men. Drawing on material derived from in-depth interviews with adult British women, its focus is on how these ...interviewees relied on a postfeminist discursive framework in order to make sense of such experiences, and on how this rendered them more likely to recognise unsolicited dick pic practices as acts of sexism. As such, these women also felt encouraged to respond to their receiving of unsolicited dick pics by engaging in humorous practices of anti-sexist resistance. Still, the article also shows how the interviewees’ drawing on a postfeminist discursive framework rendered them more prone to approach unsolicited dick pic practices and sexism in individualised and decontextualised manners, meaning that they failed to recognise and critically address the broader social structures that enable dick pics to circulate online as acts of sexism in the first place.
This article is concerned with women’s digitally mediated practices of creating and sending private sexual images to men, here referred to as ‘hetero-sexting’. Drawing on material from individual ...interviews with adult British women about their experiences of hetero-sexting, the article develops an understanding of women’s hetero-sexting practices as a form of female-conducted ‘mediated intimacy work’, constituted by a constant negotiation of female risk taking and male trustworthiness. In doing so, it shows how the women relied on and made active use of the sexting-related risk of digital image abuse as a means to establish and enhance trust and, as such, stress the significance of their hetero-sexting activities as performances of intimacy. Sexting-induced vulnerability was therefore both drawn on and dismissed within the very same accounts of hetero-sexting, as it was applied as a means to perform a new form of normative femininity, namely that of the agentic intimacy worker.
This article explores how women use and understand trust as risk mitigation when sexting with men-also known as hetero-sexting. Drawing on interviews with 44 women aged 18-38 and based in ...Cambridgeshire, England, it takes as its starting point the fact that participants distinguished between trust as "implicit" and grounded in their current feelings for their sexting partner and as a more explicit, strategic means to gain control over the distribution of their private sexual images into the future. Focusing on the latter understanding of trust as control, the article explores what this understanding of trust can tell us about the changing nature of trust, and about the forces that inform how trust is performed and perceived in the context of hetero-sexting. It demonstrates how the logics of postfeminism or "gendered neoliberalism" informed participants' understandings of trust as control, and how this understanding resulted in the generation and expectation of their engagement in "trust work" to protect themselves from having their private sexual images shared without their consent.
This article contributes to the existing literature on sexting and the "sexualisation of culture" by examining how women make sense of their sexting practices by thinking through pornography frames. ...In doing so, it draws on interview material collected for a study on adult women's experiences of using digital technology in their romantic and/or sexual relationships. To the women in this study, their private sexual images-as created for the purpose of sexting-were acts of communication that could be both not-pornography and pornography depending on the private and/or public contexts in which they were shared and consumed. They did not distinguish between sexting and pornography based on the content of the images, but based on where they occur and who consumes them. Indeed, they argued that the same private sexual image could take on different meanings, as the predominant conventions within the given context of display and consumption guide the audience's interpretation. A key argument put forward in this article is thus that, in aiming to understand complex social phenomena like sexting and pornography, we should look to how different types of sexual representations gain meaning within particular contexts as marked by certain conventions.
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