Content Notice: Victim blaming, slut shaming, misogyny.
In 2014, a study came out of Drexel University that found around 50% of college students admitted that they had sexted prior to the age of 18. Now, as a person who is sex-positive, I see selfies–and sexy selfies in particular–as affirmations of healthy self image, and sharing them with a person who consents to receive them can be fun and exciting. Where the conversation is typically derailed is framing sexting between minors, who are peers, texting images of their own bodies, as child pornography. But the original intent of child pornography laws was to take into account that children can’t give informed consent to adults, because of the implied power differential regarding influence and manipulation. Sexting ones own body to consenting peers lack this differential, and shouldn’t qualify as child pornography, or even more generally a sex crime unless coercion or force could be demonstrated.
Ed Bull, an Iowa county prosecutor, disagrees. He has threatened a 14 year-old with a lifelong sex offender charge because she texted a suggestive image of herself that someone else picked up and distributed.
nted the histories to tower over me. On either side of the avenue stood scowling sentinels, snow-peppered witnesses to drunken revelry and crime of desperation. So too did they bear witness to hapless little me, waltzing straight into the black widow’s web. I traced my steps past her apartment, the grocery store we’d walk to, the drug store where she’d buy her stupid “all natural” this and that, the corner where she first called me girlfriend, the pizza parlour we had our first date at, the restaurant of our second date, the pub where we celebrated with friends, the place where we celebrated Valentines, the bus stop where we’d await our public chariot to the local dungeon.
