A Philosophy on Sexting
During the deep pandemic, I matched on Hinge with someone I’ll call Ford. He was cute and our conversation was good, but there were barriers to us meeting. He lived about an hour away from me and we were hesitant to meet anyone because of Covid. Over the course of us talking our conversation eventually wandered into sexual territory and because I couldn’t see him in person I started sending him nudes. His response was so positive I started sending him videos, too. At first, nothing too intimate—a shot of my torso before a shower, me in my underwear in my bed. Eventually, it became more explicit.
If selfies are all about the angles and the lighting, sexually explicit videos are about a myriad of ever-changing and deeply personal criteria that directly reflect your beliefs about desire. The act of finding the perfect angle and place to set one’s cell phone, or the careful dance of holding the phone to catch the most appealing angle, is both for the creator and the receiver.
Mostly I want people to be able to see the real me, even if I’m kinda faking it. Nudes and sexting are one way to tap into that as much as possible, to try and seek out that intimacy even when I’m on the go, or away from me the physical presence of another person. I want to strip down the barriers that we so often put up when we’re intimate with each other—I don’t want to know what you do in your free time or your college major, as if those tell me anything about you.
Whether my videos were for me or for him, the way you perceive yourself through the camera lens is a kind of reflection of gender politics. Roland Barthes wrote in his book, Camera Lucida, of the concept of punctum. Photographs are often considered an objective documentation of reality. Punctum is this idea that there is a moment in the picture that punctures that objectivity, that makes you second-guess its authenticity. There is an implied honesty–which Barthes calls studium–of a cell phone video that you take yourself. The punctum of the sexually explicit media, whatever it is, punctures the surface of the video and spills over, implies that the video has been manipulated.
___STEADY_PAYWALL___
Several dozen videos of me and my dildo later, I decided to meet up with Ford. It was over before we even spoke—he picked me up in a lifted truck (“I have to have it for work”). He didn’t look like his pictures and the conversation was boring—even though he’d literally seen me fucking myself with a sex toy, there was no intimacy there. We barely had anything in common.
One of my favorite poses when I send nudes is on-all-fours, my back super arched. Usually my tits look great in this position and the parts of my body I’m more insecure about are hidden. This position is not naturally erotic to me. Honestly, sometimes when I cum it’s with my pants unzipped half-watching a Netflix show, a spoon of melting ice cream next to me. But I would never send that scene to Ford, or any other sex partner. Maybe the punctum in the videos I sent to Ford is the fact that he never became my sex partner. Instead he was a sounding board for my own sexual identity, or what I wished my virtual sexual identity to be. I wanted at that moment to be reduced to an image on a screen, because a video can be replayed or reused without fatigue or even communication.
“I feel like they have seen the part of me that I attribute the most value. I crave that intimate feeling all the time, even when my partner is away, and so I take to my cell phone to keep seeking it out.”
When you perform your online sexual identity, there’s a voyeuristic effect. If having sex with a partner in person is a little bit like performing on a stage, sending a sexually explicit video is like giving someone a peek to the backstage of your life. The sexiness of the video is in part due to the privacy of it: attempting to pull the curtain aside to show your partner what you might do in your spare time. Backstage. It’s rarely true, though, that the video is an authentic or objective moment for anyone. Knowing that you’re filming yourself changes the erotic behavior completely so that it becomes an articulated performance. Onstage. But, the fact that you’re sending the video at all is still an expression of privacy. I probably would not send these videos to just anyone—it still lives in a private sphere, even though it features an act of public performance. Backstage. The layers collapse upon themselves and become enmeshed.
This strange confluence of performativity is further complicated when the sender’s intentions begin to come into play. When I was sending videos to Ford, I was performing a particular version of myself, or a version of a self I wanted him to believe that I embodied. I wanted Ford to think that I was sexy, thin and able-bodied, that I enjoyed penetration with a sex toy, that I wished the sex toy was him, that I was pleasing myself and receiving pleasure, and that my body was for his consumption. Some of this performance was true and some was not. Because I’m a lazy bitch, I saved a couple of these videos to send to other lovers, each person probably thinking no one else had ever seen them.
I wonder, now, about authenticity’s role in the backstage-onstage-backstage confluence. Part of the reason I was sending Ford these videos, and the reason I send explicit media in general, is because I want to bring the receiver into the backstage of my life. I want them to feel as though they are seeing something that is private, and that this indicates that they are close to me and get to participate in a part of myself not many others come into contact with. I admit here this thing that betrays my age, or that I consumed too much angsty art as a teenager, or the inevitable conclusion of a global isolating pandemic: I crave intimacy. I want the receiver to see this part of me that no one else, even other sex partners, gets to see.
Analyzing this desire for intimacy, I can see there are several layers here which are probably best discussed with a therapist but that I nevertheless find relevant. I wrote this essay because I send a lot of nudes. And I do this because I value the sexualized side of myself maybe more than any other part. When I share that side intimately with a partner, I feel like they have seen the part of me that I attribute the most value. I crave that intimate feeling all the time, even when my partner is away, and so I take to my cell phone to keep seeking it out. I ache for the feeling I get when the heart-eyes emoji pops up on my screen, partly because of the validation but mostly because my partner has seen me in my most valued state. They have connected with a deeply intimate part of me, they have seen me, even if it’s not the most authentic me.
Words: Elissa Fertig
