Future Sex: Should You Sext?

We all know that youngsters these days are using their iPhones for things a lot more scintillating than Angry Birds, but still, the numbers are kind of shocking. Recently, a new study was released detailing high school students' sexting habits. The results, gleaned from data from over 1,000 high school students in Texas, showed that 28% of teens have sent fully nude photos of themselves over email or text.

The study found that white kids were far more likely to sext than other races, and that socio-economic background did not predict sexting behavior. Girls also tended to be more bothered (95% reported be at least "at little bothered" by sexting requests) than boys when asked to send a sext. Nearly half of the boys questioned didn't mind "at all" when asked to sext.

I went to high school before everyone possessed a 10 megapixel camera phone, so I was fortunately unable to make any public mistakes, but I do remember that a girl who lived down the street from me did the 2003 equivalent of sexting. She and her friend took photos on their webcam, topless, inexplicably wearing sombrero hats, and sent them to some dude. He sent them to some other assholes and they all printed them and threw them around school. I can only imagine the current state of high school, a chaotic sea of hormonal assholes shaming everyone with nipple and penis pictures.

But, ill advised or not, sexting is here to stay. If almost 30% of teens have done it, how many adults are sexting? And if these children are growing up in a culture soup where sexting is super-normal, what lengths will they go to as adults to seek sexual scintillation? I'm scared of this future. Celebs and sports heroes and socialites and your friends, they're all sexting. I'll include a link to Brett Favre's sext-scandal-weird-penis here, so you don't have to Google it out of morbid curiosity like I did.

We're all adults here, so we're legally allowed to send all the naked pictures or sexually-charged material to one another that we want, unlike teenage sexters who are being charged under laws that don't distinguish between adult and teenage production and dissemination of underage pornographic images. So, should we sext? Should you? And, if you want to, how do I think you should do it?

Yes, I think you should sext if you want to. If you're in a committed relationship, then it can spice things up so they don't get boring. If you're in a non-committed relationship then you're like everyone else in New York, and it's still fun. But! Maybe you should try using words instead of images. No one said that the only way to inspire lust is through maneuvering your penis into the weirdest position in which you think it looks large and then immortalizing that optical illusion using an iPhone.

I'm likely biased because I'm a writer, but I think people should get more creative with their sexts. Say, "You looked really hot/sexy tonight." or "I want to ……. to your ……. so bad." or something. Unless you're a mega-celeb, no one will care if they stumble upon these written sexts. You can just be like, "Yeah, I said that. I was horny. Whatever." Pretty low-stakes sexting.

If you want to up the ante and sext some pictures then I have some more advice. First, don't use fluorescent lighting or whatever weird lighting you have in your bathroom. Check the background of your picture before you send it. Having a toilet looming in the distance is weird and gross, yet so many people do this. If I can give you one piece of advice that you'll internalize and remember forever it's this: don't include your face.

A couple months ago an acquaintance of mine misunderstood how Instagram works. Instead of realizing that it's a social networking application, she must have thought it was just a series of filters to make you look more attractive, because she posted a bunch of X-rated images on her Instagram and a lot of people saw them. She was obviously taking them for her boyfriend, and if her face hadn't been in the pictures then we probably would have just been like, "Hey nice boobs." and it wouldn't have mattered as much.

I don't care if you don't think it's as sexy to send bizarrely beheaded naked pictures of yourself, you should do it anyway. Even if the people you send sexts to are trustworthy, their phones still get stolen, their Gmails get hacked, their computers get stolen, their friends are nosy assholes, and people get drunk and do dumb things. Unless you want your face maybe gracing one of those weird ads that pop up on the side of porntube sites, don't include it.

So sext all you want, but remember that everytime you put a naked picture of yourself out there, you are trusting that all the online servers and error-prone people throughout time will guard your privacy. And I'm going to say the odds are against you.

Follow Kelly Bourdet on Twitter: @kellybourdet.