‘Technology,hormones,and stupidity’: The affective politics of teenage sexting

Signs of a sex(t) panic

The sociology of moral panic has been both a productive and contentious enterprise. Sociologists have identified a range of rhetorical and discursive tactics typical of moral and sex panics. These have become standard explanatory concepts for interrogating discursive outbreaks of public sentiment. Among these tactics and concepts are the branding of folk devils, scapegoating, the displacement (or, misplacement) of fears, exaggeration, distortion (and even fabrication), and the repetition of provocative scripts (Cohen, 2011: 25–34; Irvine, 2008; Jenkins, 1998: 6). ⁴ Eschewing a rehearsal of the various debates around these explanatory concepts, I follow Janice Irvine’s lead in rethinking them through theories of performativity. In so doing, I set aside any question of the reality or proportionality of fears, anxieties, and other emotions publicly articulated. I consider, instead, the work being performed when these tactics are deployed with, and in the broader social context of, certain emotional scripts.

Media reporting, information kits, and educational videos are strikingly alarmist, fear-based, and negative in tone and content. Sexting is framed almost exclusively as a dangerous activity and a serious social problem. The two examples in Figures 1 and 2 of fact sheets distributed by the NSW government in Australia and the National Crime Prevention Council (NCPC) in the US epitomize the overarching themes. Indeed, the framing of the New South Wales Government information sheet (Figure 1) neatly captures the tenor of community responses to teen sexting: ‘SAFE SEXTING: No such thing.’ OPEN IN VIEWER

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Figure 2.

Sexting: How teens can stay safe. USA National Crime Prevention Council leaflet.

In both brochures the central narrative concern is with safety and the protection of young people from harm. Like the NSW Government example, the NCPC factsheet also suggests that the only way teens can remain wholly safe is if they ‘Never send or post sexually provocative pictures.’ Setting aside the affective dimension for the moment, the absolutist, categorical and universalizing nature of these statements ought to give us pause. The claim that there is no form of safe sexting is dubious at best. A number of surveys have been conducted in an attempt to determine the prevalence of the practice. The infamous Cosmogirl Sex and Tech survey of 1280 teenagers, which Kimberlianne Podlas argues is the basis of claims of a teen sexting epidemic (Podlas, 2011: 16) asserted that almost 20% of teens are sexting (NCPTUP, 2008). Other surveys have reported similar findings (between 19% and 24%), ⁵ however, some have challenged these statistics. A report by Pew Research Center found that 5% of 14–17-year-olds have sexted imagery of themselves and 18% have received such imagery, and the Crimes Against Children Research Center national study proffers even lower figures. Of 1560 10–17-year-olds surveyed, 9% reported having created or received nude or nearly nude images, and 1% of having created images of themselves that show breasts, genitals, or bottoms (Mitchell et al., 2012: 17). Part of a 25-country study, the EU Kids Online project found that 12% of 11–16-year-old teens have seen or received online sexual messages, although this decreases to 4% of that group within the past year (Ringrose et al., 2012: 11). Accuracy and incomparability of surveys notwithstanding, even if only 5% of 14–17-year-old teens are sexting, this is an enormous number in the US let alone across Anglophone countries generally. It is scarcely conceivable – and there is no evidence to suggest – that all such incidences have been (or ‘are’) unsafe or have resulted in harm. If the categorical, absolutist and universalizing imperative of ‘SAFE SEXTING: No such thing’ is not descriptive of any reality, it would appear that it serves other performative strategies, which I will take up shortly.

In his examination of sex crime panics, Philip Jenkins notes how ‘claims tend to be exaggerated and distorted’ (Jenkins, 1998: 6). To claim ‘safe sexting’ as a contradiction in terms is doubtless a form of exaggeration and distortion. However, other forms of exaggeration and distortion inflect prevailing media stories and educational and informational texts, and these have as one of their functions the generation of fear and bolstering of the categorical imperative of ‘no sexting is safe sexting’. This is especially noticeable in representations of the potential consequences of sexting. Catastrophic and damaging consequences are almost the only things stressed, such as criminal prosecution, sexual assault, humiliation, psychic trauma, cyberbullying, serious damage to university and job prospects. Even suicide has been widely cited in media reports as a potential risk. What ‘can seem an innocent joke or flirtatious fun [can turn] into a potentially devastating experience’ (Figure 1). This is followed by the list of devastating consequences such as public humiliation, cyberbullying, sexual assault, criminal convictions. ‘Sexting between minors is a felony and can have serious legal consequences. You could be charged with a crime’, declares the NCPC. ‘If convicted you could be labeled as a sex offender for the rest of your life.’ Yet, as the authors of one study of around 3477 cases of sexting handled by US law enforcement agencies concluded, ‘it appears that most youth who simply produce or transmit images are not being treated as offenders’ or child pornographers (Wolak et al., 2012: 9). Sex offender registration is rare, and usually has been the result of a serious aggravated (i.e. non-consensual) sexting offence, not private consensual sexting. Dire warnings of these extreme and uncommon consequences, and the conflation of non-consensual and consensual sexting, are then repeated over and again in media and pedagogical texts. ⁶ As Irvine notes, sex ‘panics depend on repetition for their power’ (Irvine, 2008: 23).

Another element of hyperbole and distortion concerns the apparent likelihood of damaging reputational consequences. That sexing might compromise job or university entrance prospects is endlessly offered to teens as a reason not to sext, as the brochures pictured in Figures 1 and 2 highlight. ‘Once the picture is out there, it will never go away’, warns the NCPC brochure. ‘Don’t risk your future college or employment hopes’ (Figure 2). Let us consider a scenario of this kind. Consider the first Australian sexting court case involving 13-year-old DS, who sent a full frontal nude picture of herself to a male friend. What are the chances of an unnamed sext of a nude 13-year-old landing on the desk of an employer or university committee, let alone being identifiable as DS when the child has turned 18 years of age or more and reached university or the job market. Exceedingly unlikely I would think. And in the Australian context, damage to university prospects is ever more unlikely, given that most courses are based solely on written scores – not in-person interviews – from the final year of secondary school. Yet educational material from Australia continues to advance this self-evidently. In one of the most widely used educational videos designed for teachers and students, Megan’s Story, teachers are encouraged to get students to reflect upon the potential damage sexting might cause to their university entrance prospects. ⁷ It must be said that in the course of researching the media and social science material published on sexting, I have not found any evidence of actual cases in which a teenage sexter has been refused employment or entrance to university. In their national sample of police cases, Wolak, Finkelhor and Mitchell found that nearly two thirds of all sexts were distributed only via mobile phone. ‘Pediatricians may be able to use this finding’, they suggest, ‘to reassure youth and parents that images in sexting incidents usually do not become generally available online’ (Wolak et al., 2012: 9). Doubtless such risks to career are infinitely greater if consensual teenage sexters are criminalized, which is a very good reason, as many have argued, for not bringing private, consensual sexting within the orbit of the law. ⁸

A feature common to moral panics is that the social fear is not only exaggerated, but also ‘wrongly directed’ (Jenkins, 1998: 7). Or as Stanley Cohen argues, the predominant societal reaction is ‘misplaced or displaced (that is, aimed – whether deliberately or thoughtlessly – at a target which was not the “real” problem.)’ (Cohen, 2011: xxxix). Notwithstanding critiques of Cohen’s assumption of a hierarchy of real versus apparent problems, there is in specific cases some explanatory value in the notion of displacement. Displacements of various kinds are very much evident in prevailing responses to sexting. Consider the much publicized and tragic suicide of Jessica Logan. Logan’s story became a cause célèbre of the teenage sexting panic. After breaking up with her, Logan’s former boyfriend Ryan Salyers forwarded a nude picture she had sexted only to him to others at her school, Sycamore Community School, and these students in turn circulated the image to a large number of others in Logan’s school and other schools. Logan was then subject to a vicious offensive of harassment and bullying. She went to a school peer counsellor, a professional counsellor of the school, and to the School Resources Officer, police officer Paul Payne, in order to address the bullying (Logan and Logan v. Sycamore, 2009). ‘She was being attacked and tortured’, said her mother. Lauren Taylor, one of Logan’s friends, told NBC news that ‘she would come to school, she would always hear, “Oh, that’s the girl who sent the picture. She’s just a whore”’ (Hastings, 2009). As recounted in the Civil Complaint and Jury Demand, Logan’s parents filed against the school for failing to respond appropriately to the bullying:

The students of Sycamore and Loveland High Schools would chastise Jessica with epithets and derogatory remarks, such as ‘whore’, ‘slut’, and ‘skank.’ She also received phone calls, text messages, and internet messages while at school from … students [known and] unknown to her, using similar slurs and epithets. Some peers went beyond verbal torment and threw things at her while she was at school and school-sponsored events. This severe and pervasive harassment continued when Jessica would leave the school building, allowing her no reprieve from her tormenters. This continued through the end of the school year (Logan and Logan v. Sycamore, 2009: 7).

Like the circulation of the image amongst Logan’s peers, the story of the suicide went viral on the internet and in newspapers around the world. ‘Sexting suicide’ became the governing trope for framing this event and the potential risks seen to accompany the practice of sending sexually explicit photographs amongst teens. As Podlas (2011: 33) notes, ‘Logan became a cautionary tale about sexting and proof of the threat that sexting posed to adolescents.’ Whilst most media reports articulate clearly the connection of the suicide to bullying and harassment, the overall framing of the apparent risks of sexting effect something of a displacement (or, distortion) of causal dynamics. In the Sunday Times report ‘Sexting youths dial up a storm’, the opening line establishes the connection between sexting and suicide. ‘“Sexting” is the latest teenage craze. Sending by text or email scantily clad photos of yourself to a friend may seem harmless enough, but in America it has apparently already driven one Ohio girl to suicide’ (The Sunday Times, 2009: 12). A linear causal chain is established from the sext to humiliation/harassment to psychic trauma and, in this case, to suicide. The act of private, consensual sexting is rhetorically constructed to embody the risks of bullying, harassment and psychic trauma, and the overarching narrative in the media and educational campaigns becomes one of the problem and danger of sexting. Yet by all accounts it was bullying and harassment that were at the heart of the devastating trauma. In order to illuminate this point, let us imagine an alternative scenario. A young, underage woman with fake identification goes out one night to an adult bar wearing a mini-skirt and revealing top. She is confronted by a group of girls and boys at her school who start calling her a ‘slut’ and verbally abusing her because of what she is wearing. She goes to the bathroom to escape the harassment. The group follow her and the boys gang rape her while the girls keep watch. This is the stuff of decades of feminist campaigning of violence against women. That the rape victim was wearing such clothes is certainly a component of this event, and entangled in the group’s reasons for harassing her. However, it would be ludicrous to construct a public and educational campaign aimed at warning women of the dangers of wearing mini-skirts and revealing tops and advising them never to do so. The suggestion in any Anglophone country today that wearing mini-skirts and revealing tops leads to rape – irrespective of whether the victim had illegally entered an adult bar or not – is anathema. This is to displace and distort the causal dynamics and levels of responsibility. Just like this rape example, then, campaigns that attribute the risk of social humiliation and psychic trauma to consensual, private sexting shift the focus from component to cause. Although well intentioned, current campaigns framed by warnings of the dangers of sexting contribute to the deflection of attention away from a more direct interrogation and exposure of the problems with unauthorized dissemination of sexts and the attendant invasion of privacy, defamation, bullying, and harassment.

Evidence of this misplaced focus can be found in educational materials designed for teens and parents. Take the NSW government information sheet for parents in Figure 1. Below the heading (‘Safe Sexting: No such thing’) and the pictorial image of teens using mobile phones is the lead introductory line highlighted in pink: ‘Parents are urged to warn children about the dangers of “sexting”: the growing trend for young people to send provocative images of themselves to their friends via mobile phones’ (emphasis added). Teens are also warned not to forward pictures of others, but the privileged subject of address is the teen (often a girl) that may be at risk of sending sexually explicit pictures of herself to friends. What is being problematized, in other words, is less the unauthorized dissemination of images of another person than the consensual practice of sexting self-images. Problematization also often slides into pathologization. The Australian educational film resource, Megan’s Story, provides an example of this. Designed for secondary school teachers and students, it depicts a story of a girl’s private sext gone viral in the classroom. The boyfriend forwards the photo, which is then circulated widely to students in the class. One boy responds with salacious flirtation, a girl looks at her with revulsion, and we are invited to think about Megan being subject to peer judgement and ridicule (Figure 3). Even the teacher is sent a copy of the image and looks concerned. However, the framing of the video itself and the narrative structure of the lesson plan first and foremost problematize and pathologize Megan’s action. The promotional summary of the video describes ‘a teenage girl’s experience of taking an inappropriate image of herself and ‘sexting’ it to a boy in her class and the unintended consequences [emphasis added].’ ¹⁰ Although, importantly, teachers are encouraged to have students think about the actions of the boy and other classmates in forwarding the image, judging her, and not respecting her, nevertheless Megan’s actions frame the video and lesson plans and are the first to be scrutinized: ‘1. Why do you think Megan took that photo and sent it on her mobile?’ Megan’s actions are situated as the source of the ‘problem’: ‘3. How did Megan’s classmates contribute to the problem?’ (emphasis added). Students are encouraged to see Megan’s classmates only as contributing to the ‘problem’, as secondary to the ‘problem’, whereas Megan is presumed to have caused it. When the students are asked to consider the inverse gendered scenario (‘Would things have been different if a boy had sent an image of himself?’), the first sample answer is: ‘It shouldn’t be different but it may have been; he’s still done the wrong thing?’ (emphasis added). ¹¹ That is, Megan has done the wrong thing. The video is not presented as a story problematizing a young boy’s foolish action of forwarding a private sext to classmates and the intended consequence of an invasion of Megan’s privacy. Instead, the victim is blamed. Megan is cast as agent of principal responsibility and represented as having sexually expressed herself inappropriately and wrongly. A form of misplaced sexism inflects this narrative, as a number of feminist scholars have highlighted (Tyson et al., 2012). I am not suggesting that young people ought not be made aware of some unwise decisions made, given the reality of unscrupulous practices of some individuals in disseminating unauthorized sexts. However, this could be done without making unnecessary and tendentious judgements and implicitly and explicitly casting the consensual sexter as the bad object. OPEN IN VIEWER

One of the more insidious displacements in the teen sexting panic and educational literature occurs around the issue of child pornography. Not only are teen sexters often criticized for the unauthorized dissemination of private, consensual sexts, but they are also in part scapegoated for contributing to the problem of child pornography. Pedagogical texts almost uniformly warn young people that, in sending sexually provocative images of themselves, they could be held to be producing and distributing child pornography. It is a cruel irony, and one widely noted by critics of the criminalization of consensual sexting, that the very child pornography laws designed to protect young people from abuse are in some jurisdictions being used to charge teens with sending private images of themselves. In jurisdictions, such as the state of Victoria in which I live, where the age of consent is lower (16) than the definition of ‘child’ within child pornography statutes (under 18), this is especially disturbing. Wielding warnings of child pornography convictions – not to mention actually charging teens under those statutes – is an objectionable distortion of the spirit of these statutes and another means of displacing criminal responsibility. Returning to the resource guide to Megan’s Story, teachers and students are encouraged to understand how ‘her image may contribute to the problem of child pornography’. Echoes of blaming rape victims for wearing short skirts are hard not to hear. The information brochures cited earlier – like most factsheets I have come across – similarly trade in the threat of child pornography. ‘Tell children that sending or possessing child pornography is illegal’, pleads the NSW government (Figure 1). ‘Sexting is a felony and can have serious legal consequences. You could be charged with a crime’, warns the NCPC factsheet for teens (Figure 2). Whilst child pornography is not explicitly mentioned in the latter factsheet, the intertextual connection to it is obvious and child pornography is mentioned on the accompanying factsheet for parents. Moreover, the threat of serious crime is in fact accentuated in the factsheet for teens, on the one hand by not naming it explicitly and leaving open the possibility of legal infractions in addition to child pornography, and on the other by suggesting that teens might be at one with paedophiles: ‘If convicted you could be labeled as a sex offender for the rest of your life’ (Figure 2). The paradigm of adult sexual offences for behaviours of an altogether different order (i.e. intergenerational sex crimes) is hereby displaced onto teens and used as a framework to interpret their very different and consensual interpersonal interactions.

Stanley Cohen famously refers to the branding of folk devils onto which social anxieties can be projected as an emblematic feature of moral panics. Sex offenders and cyberbullies are, to be sure, routinely enlisted as kinds of secondary folk devils in the depiction of sexting’s dangers. But what is particularly interesting is that unsuspecting and non-malicious teens are the principal targets of sexting campaigns. They are targeted simultaneously as folk devils, or perpetrators, and as their victims. Indeed, as the judgment in a recent Florida court case ruled, this includes minors being victims of themselves. In 2005, a 16-year-old Florida teenage girl (AH) and her 17-year-old boyfriend (JGW) were charged as juveniles under child pornography laws after taking digital photos of themselves naked and engaged in sex, and then emailing the photos to the boy’s personal account (AH v. State, 2007). ¹² A local court upheld the charges and the two were adjudicated as delinquents. AH challenged the ruling on the basis that because she did not email the photos to a third party, the charges were a violation of her privacy rights and thus unconstitutional. There is indeed precedent in Florida for the recognition of privacy rights for consensual sexual activity among teenagers (two 16-year-olds, BB v. State). And, in fact, whilst the age of consent in Florida is 18, there is a close-in-age exemption, which allows for 16- or 17-year-old minors to have sex with someone between the ages of 16 and 23. However, the court ruled that privacy rights do not extend to circumstances in which the ‘minor memorializes the act through picture or video’ (AH v. State, 2007). Strikingly, the reason given for this is that neither of the two minors had a reasonable expectation that ‘the other would not show the photos to a third party’ or that the photos will not be disseminated unintentionally. That is, they have, to quote the court transcripts, ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’. The defendants also, the court concluded, ‘have no reasonable expectation that their relationship will continue’, apparently ‘unlike adults who may be involved in a mature committed relationship’. Underpinning all of these arguments was one of the foundational principles that the State has a compelling interest in ensuring that any ‘videotape or picture including “sexual conduct by a child of less than 18 years of age” is never produced.’ (Paradoxically, of course, this means that the consensual sex lives of teens as they are forcibly pulled within the orbit of the law in such cases are matters for public display – itself contrary to the State’s compelling interest.) AH also challenged this ruling with the claim that criminal prosecution is not the least intrusive means of furthering the State’s compelling interest (AH v. State, 2007). The District Court of Appeal also rejected this argument, reiterating the child pornography statutes that ‘the State had a compelling interest “to protect minors from exploitation by anyone who induces them to appear in a sexual performance and shows that performance to other people”’ (Florida Statutes (2012) § 827.071 (3)) – anyone including themselves.

Increased surveillance by law enforcement agencies is a common response to the identification of folk devils and suspects, observe Erich Goode and Nachman Ben-Yehuda of moral panics (Goode and Ben-Yehuda, 2012: 47). The constant rhetorical threat, and actuality, of criminal charges and prosecutions arguably are signs of this. Broader forms of surveillance are also operative in the sexting panic, with parents routinely recommended to scrutinize their children’s mobile phone and internet usage. ‘It’s important for you to monitor your child’s online activities’, implores the NSW Government’s tip sheet for parents, ‘Sexting and Cyber-safety: protecting your child online’, including websites they visit, ‘who they are communicating with, their online “friends” and the information they are publishing’ (Family and Community Services, 2011). Ever increasing efforts to survey teens in order to ascertain sexting prevalence rates also perhaps form part of this web of surveillance. The ruling against AH provides a striking manifestation and literalization in law of the imperative of surveillance, as do all convictions for non-aggravated sexting. Teens such as AH are deemed to have ‘no reasonable expectation of privacy’ with regard to their private, consensual online activities. ¹³ In such cases, where the rationale for criminal sanctions is the protection of children from harm, prosecution and punishment are judged to be in the best interests of young people and society.

Agency and the performativity of affect

Janice Irvine importantly cautions against taking the rhetoric of fear in sex and moral panics at face value, as though it is evidence of genuine emotion. That some individuals and groups might experience fear in the face of their children sexting is certainly possible it seems to me. Equally possible for others, however, is the scenario in which expressions of fear are mere rhetorical and tactical flourishes. Setting aside the question of the truth or falsity of affect, what Irvine calls for, drawing on theories of performativity and social theories of emotion, is attention to the ‘role of emotions in politics’ (Irvine, 2008: 5). Accounts of moral and sex panics are enhanced, she argues, when they attend to the ‘emotional dimensions’ (2008: 2) and the ways in which ‘[c]ollective emotion, evoked discursively, can bring publics into being, organize diffuse, sometimes inchoate beliefs and moralities into political action’ (2008: 11). Emotions are performative in other words. They often do not, or do not only, reflect actual embodied affect, but perform particular social meanings, customs, and strategies. If someone expresses anger at another’s belief that Muslim women ought to wear the hijab, that emotional expression is likely conveying alternative beliefs and expectations. Not unmediated embodied reactions, emotions are indissociable from social scripts, rules, beliefs, values, practices, and behavioural norms. The same is true, and often more palpably so, when it comes to carefully scripted media reports and pedagogical texts. Such texts highlight the performativity of emotion, and the way particular affects and emotions are deployed for a range of political purposes. As Irvine demonstrates, emotional language is used in sex panics to generate emotion in the reader or viewer, to mobilize a collective and gain support, and to advance certain political strategies, ideas, and practices. This is perhaps because, as psychologist and affect theorist Silvan Tomkins observes, ‘[r]eason without affect would be impotent, [and] affect without reason would be blind’ (Tomkins, 2008: 63). Tomkins is here discussing the distinct combination of affect and analytical capacity that gives human beings freedom from deterministic instinct. However, a broader and perhaps simpler point is also being made, and it is one that resonates with performativity theories and social theories of emotion. Because the affect system is, for Tomkins, the primary motivational system for human behaviour, affects give discursive meanings their impetus, depth, social influence, and urgency. Affects and emotions enable thoughts and ideas to be communicated, to be felt, to matter and to be acted upon.

Following Irvine, I view the sexting panic not as the simple reflection of social fears and anxiety – although these emotions might well be felt by some people – but as the performative and ‘dramaturgical’ production of fear and other negative affects for various social and political ends. ¹⁴ Affective hues or hints often reveal as much, and sometimes more, about social scripts, rules, beliefs, values, practices, and behavioural norms as the textual or verbal messages explicitly accompanying them. And they bolster textual and verbal messages. Scripts, rules, beliefs, values, practices, and norms are among the sub- or para-textual performative strategies advanced in responses to sexting. Emotional postures and tones clearly imbue the rhetorical tactics in the sexting panic, as we have seen so far. Fear and shame – and, indeed, the fear of shame – are the main affective tropes framing public responses to teen sexting. ¹⁵ Fear is conveyed (communicated and transported) repeatedly through ideas about the danger to befall teens from sexting gone wrong. It is the framework of virtually all media and educational texts. It is mobilized in something of a Freudian sense, as a warning signal of impending danger. Shame is another affect shaping media and pedagogical texts, which is not surprising given that criminal charges and psychically damaging peer harassment and invasion of privacy are proffered as the main serious consequences. Fear and shame are marshalled largely as a way of purportedly reflecting or describing existing and possible consequences for sexters, families and communities. Operating not just as a passive representation of reality, these warnings are also performatives, in that they are active attempts at enacting certain realities, such as regulating teenage behaviour, reinstating the division between adolescents and adults, and reinscribing public/private boundaries. However, when we take a closer look at the affective dimensions of responses to sexting in some of the texts considered so far, it is not difficult to see another far less explicit performative strategy that arguably underpins all of these but that is rarely remarked, if not, foreclosed upon. It is the enactment of a particularly one-dimensional, unified and exclusionary model of teenage agency.

Attempting to rein in and control teenage agency by diminishing the practice of sexting and regulating the online activity of teenagers are among the more obvious performative strategies underpinning the delivery of sexting warnings. By performative strategies, I am thinking here of the Foucauldian notion of strategies as those aspects of power relations that are ‘both intentional and non-subjective.’ ¹⁶ Power relations have aims and objectives, and in this way they are intentional; but these intentions are located in discourse and are not necessarily consciously present. But there are also less explicit strategies of power. I argue that fear and shame are marshalled as a way of enacting certain norms of adolescence. ‘A young teenage girl takes a naked photograph of herself and sends it to her boyfriend’, begins a front page Herald Sun report in the UK. Citing the threat of paedophiles and child pornography, fear of danger is the article’s unmistakable mise en scène. ‘When they break up, the image is circulated by phone, email and social-networking sites. Suddenly, what was intended to be a foolish flirtatious message has become social death and shame’ (Duffy, 2012, emphasis added). At first glance this is simply a description of the possible experience of shame that has certainly resulted after some young women’s acts of sexting. Yet a lot more is being advanced here with regard to constructions of agency and social values and norms. The boy’s actions that initiated the unauthorized social circulation of the images after the break-up are hidden within the passively phrased statement ‘the image is circulated’. Agency and causality, and thus responsibility and culpability, are not located directly with him, or at least they are backgrounded. The young girl’s decision, in stark contrast, is identified as the active causal agency, and it is an agency that is disparaged as ‘foolish’, and elsewhere in the report ‘inappropriate’. (Earlier in the discussion of Megan’s Story we saw how the video also framed her actions as ‘inappropriate’.) The girl’s agency is seen as a capacity so compromised as to not constitute competent agency at all. Secondly, shame is not merely something that might result from sexting, but is a performative social script, norm, or value projected onto the girl’s action via the terms ‘foolish’ and ‘inappropriate’. Effectively, the mobilization (and misplacement?) of shame displaces any substantive consideration of positive and competent forms of teenage sexual agency.

Fear and shame are also the primary affects framing Megan’s experience in the video, as evidenced in the still promotional image of Megan’s face in Figure 3. As this is a pedagogical text – though not only because it is – the representation of these negative affects performs a certain kind of work. Just as in the information brochures and media reports, the affective tropes also do more than function as constative, or descriptive statements. In part, they function as ‘feeling and expression norms’, to use Irvine’s terms. For Irvine, drawing on the sociology of emotion, feeling and expression norms denote social scripts for how individuals and groups are invited, and in some senses expected, to respond and make sense of the event. Viewers are summoned to identify with Megan’s fear and shame and fear of shame. Yet, the shame experienced by Megan then merges imperceptibly into an implicit social attribution of shamefulness. We are summoned to witness contempt and disgust as normative reactions of peers, as shown by some of Megan’s classmates. Although the lesson plans encourage students to think about how others in the class contributed to ‘the problem’ by judging and not supporting Megan, no attempts are made in the video to challenge the place of contempt and disgust in this scenario. Viewers are solicited to interpret Megan’s actions as inappropriate, foolish and shameful, and she is positioned as reaping what she sowed, even if inadvertently and naïvely.

It ‘is important to deliver a message to a generation raised on technology and surrounded by sexually charged media’, declared Florida’s St Petersburg Times, ‘that the most damning consequence of sexting is the permanent invasion of a youth’s privacy and the lasting embarrassment’ (Podlas, 2011: 8–9). Or as a US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) tip sheet for preventing sexting puts it, sexting may ‘profoundly affect the emotional and psychological development of a child … youth who engage in sexting risk reoccurring embarrassment and victimization’, which ‘can be psychologically devastating’ (NCMEC, 2009). These kinds of shame scripts are repetitively used in media and pedagogical texts as cautionary tales of the dangers of sexting. But when continually employed unaccompanied by any substantive effort to critique attributions of shamefulness, these scripts begin to perform more than their professed warning function. This is the dimension of performative affect. By uncritically trading in shame (and fear), media and pedagogical texts recruit affective tropes and performatively enact that which they are only purportedly describing. The shame experience borders on, if not becomes, the shameful act. Media reports often make this connection more explicit. In the Daily Mail’s report ‘Generation sexting: What teenage girls really get up to on the internet should chill every parent’, Penny Marshall describes the way ‘girls flaunt themselves shamelessly, apeing the adult behaviour they see around them on TV and in magazines’ (Marshall, 2009). Similarly, in the absence of a critique of the use of child pornography statutes against young people, the endless warnings to teenagers about possible criminal convictions veer dangerously close, if not already perform, threats of adult hostility and aggression. Child pornography charges, court cases, sex offender registrations, and even diversionary programmes for consensual, non-aggravated teen sexting are the dramatic literalization of this. ¹⁷ However, as Kath Albury and Kate Crawford (2012: 471) argue, educational and policy responses ‘should do more than threaten young people with legal penalties or sexual shame’. They should challenge sexual bullying, promote sexual ethics, acknowledge young people’s agency and provide them with ‘a sexual citizenship that includes mediated self-representation’.

Yet even media reports and pedagogical texts that refrain from explicit shaming language (‘inappropriate’, ‘foolish’), but that cite shame as a psychological consequence of sexting, nonetheless contribute to the shaming of unaggravated teenage sexting and the demonization of teenage sexual agency. This is because, in the broader social context of ubiquitous warnings about child pornography charges, the incessant trading in shame scripts is done without any corresponding critique of assumptions about shamefulness. So when issuing warnings about the potentially catastrophic consequences of the unauthorized dissemination of sexts, media and pedagogical texts rarely (if ever) reassure teenagers that there is nothing shameful per se about sending a private, consensual sext to a willing recipient. Moreover, contextually, metonymically, or explicitly connected to child pornography charges, uncritical representations of shame only enact and reinforce assumptions of shamefulness and ignorant agency. The South Eastern Centre Against Sexual Assault in Australia outlines the ‘consequences of “sexting”’ in its two-page brochure: ‘psychological impacts can lead to depression, isolation, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and suicide attempts’ (SECASA, 2011). These are then immediately followed by a long list of legal consequences. What ‘many teenagers and parents don’t know is that sexting is ILLEGAL!’

Australian Federal Law states that:

Anyone under 18 who is involved in sexting can be criminally charged under the same child pornography laws used to charge adults.

Sexts between teenagers are considered to be child pornography because:

The sexts involve minors – children under the age of 18.

Teenagers can be arrested, charged and convicted if:

They take/create a sexy image or clip = creation of child pornography even if they take a sexy photo of THEMSELVES and send it to someone whom they wanted to send it to.

The legal consequences for teenagers involved in sexting could include:

jail-time

Like shame, the stain of criminality, left unchallenged, operates in more than a descriptive sense. Not only does it reinforce notions of shamefulness, but it also functions as a punitive threat. Nowhere in brochures such as these is there any effort to acknowledge and educate young people about the ambiguities and contradictions in the law vis-à-vis teenagers, and the fact that in many jurisdictions (especially in Australia) the age of consent is lower than definitions of the child in child pornography statutes. Nor is their any effort to contextualize current legal debates about sexting. Numerous jurisdictions across the UK, Australia and North America for several years have been debating how best to approach consensual sexting, with many concluding that charging teenagers with child pornography statutes designed to protect children from adult offenders contradicts the spirit of such laws and is unnecessarily and harmfully punitive. Most of the educational brochures include sections on ‘What you can do to protect your children.’ The protection tips are about warning children about the legal and emotional consequences, monitoring their online activity, reminding them to think before they act, and so on. Given the highly contentious nature of criminal charges for consensual sexting, and the widely held view that prosecuting teens may be more harmful than beneficial, it is striking that there are no appeals to parents to lobby authorities and governments to challenge the judicialization of consensual teenage sexting. This only highlights the prevailing discursive investment in issuing threats and regulating teenagers.

The predominant legal, policy and pedagogical response to sexting functions as something of a displaced conversation about the complexity of teenage sexual agency. Agency certainly features prominently in sexting stories. Media reports are responding directly to claims of an outbreak of online teenage sexual agency. Pedagogical texts are also premised on the assumption of teenage agency and seek to shape its development and exercise. However, these representations typically present a singularly compromised and deficient notion of teenage agency. Megan and her fellow sexters are portrayed as having exercised a transgressive and immature agency, often seen to be the result of the childish mimicry of adult behaviour, coercion by peers, or stupidity. ‘They may be pressured by friends or trying to impress a crush’, says the NCMEC: ‘Some are responding to a sexual text message they’ve received and others willingly send nude photos of themselves to a boyfriend or girlfriend’ (NCMEC, 2009). Despite the concession to voluntary sexting, teenage willingness is problematized in the sentence immediately following: ‘Youth make these decisions without thinking about how their futures may be affected. It’s important for parents and guardians to understand that as technically savvy as their children are, they often don’t think about the implications of how quickly digital information can spread via cell phone and the Internet’ (NCMEC, 2009). Trading in popular, long-standing narratives of teenagers as foolish, rash, hormone-driven, and psychologically and emotionally immature, teenage sexters are represented as lacking the wherewithal both to engage in the practice maturely and to deal with any unforeseen consequences. ‘Remind children to think before they act’, is the standard exhortation (see Figures 1 and 2). Couched within a pedagogical literature uniformly and ominously warning teens never to sext, these kinds of texts only underline the fact that all sexting is deemed the expression of a defective, naïve, and undeveloped form of agency. As a USA Today report put it, for ‘a disturbingly large minority of teenagers, the combination of technology, hormones and stupidity has led to a practice called sexting’ (USA Today, 2009b: A10). ¹⁸ And so we return to the shaming of teenagers. Notably, this contrasts sharply with the world of adult sexting, which, according to Cosmopolitan magazine’s article ‘The sex toy hiding in your purse’, can spice up the sex and love lives of women (Cosmopolitan, 2013).

Narratives of immature, rash, and hormone-driven teenagers go essentially uncontested, in spite of the voluminous research that cogently challenges such universalizing notions. ¹⁹ Again, these are not merely descriptive, but productive of norms of adolescence, social policies, and laws. Returning to the criminal case of AH, the District Court of Appeal in Florida refused to grant the young teenage couple privacy protection precisely on the grounds of such narratives. Majority opinion declared that

a number of teenagers want to let their friends know of their sexual prowess … A reasonably prudent person would believe that if you put this type of material in a teenager’s hands that, at some point either for profit or bragging rights, the material will be disseminated to other members of the public. (AH v. State, 2007)

The point is not that sexting is never a risky and dangerous business. Criminal charges have been laid, some teenagers have been registered as sex offenders, and a number of young people have committed suicide in sexting-related incidents. Nor is my point that the excoriation and infantilization of teenage agency is disrespectful and discriminatory, although I certainly think they are. Rather, my aim has been to highlight that the affective politics of sexting (i.e. the sex panic) serves a number of functions beyond raising alarm bells and protecting children. The affective politics of sexting is also a battle over social norms. Not only does the mobilization of fear and shame work to bring communities to action to tackle the ‘problem’, to warn young people about damaging consequences of sexting and scare them off it, to educate parents and young people about the issue, and to regulate teenage behaviour. The mobilization of fear and shame also works performatively to displace consideration of forms of affirmative, positive, and competent teenage agency. When pedagogical texts declare that there is ‘no such thing as safe sexting’, what they are implicitly doing is directing attention away from, or silencing, what are strictly excluded from this categorical imperative: safe, neutral, and positive forms of sexting. To include these examples, these realities, however, would be to contradict the categorical imperative and weaken its rhetorical and affective force. It would open up the question of non-infantilized forms of teenage sexual agency and challenge the child/adult opposition.

Unfortunately, current responses to sexting framed by the imperative of ‘no such thing as safe sexting’ tend to work in concert with punitive and prohibitionist-like logics and simplistic notions of adolescence. What have we got to lose by acknowledging and examining the complexities and competencies of different forms of teenage agency, not to mention fostering these competencies? If we are so concerned about the protection of children, why are we not able even to consider protecting both victims of abuse and those young people with less developed capacities and teenagers exercising competent forms of agency? Why are we so quick to pigeon hole young people into some unified category of the ‘adolescent’ that erases the uniqueness and specificity of a dizzying diversity of actual teenagers? How does the judicialization and punishment of consensual sexting – a practice permissible the minute one hits the arbitrary age of 18 – advance principles of protection and minimization of harm? In my view there ought to be moral panics about the discriminatory and punitive treatment of adolescents, the non-recognition of multiple adolescences and agencies, and the damaging consequences often unnecessarily wrought by sex panics and fear-based pedagogies.