From ‘Sext and the city’, 16 Oct 2011, article by Kimberly Spykerman, Sunday Times
They are called ‘sexts’ – sexually explicit text messages that may include naked photographs of the sender. And the increasing prevalence of ‘sexting’ among young Singaporeans is adding a dangerous dimension to the dating game.
Rachel (not her real name), a 25-year-old civil servant, told The Sunday Times that she was taken aback when she received such a message from someone she met on a dating forum. ‘He sent me an explicit picture first, and then asked me for a picture of my boobs.’
She said she somehow felt pressured to respond in kind. ‘I thought if I didn’t send a picture back, he would think I wasn’t fun,’ she said. Rachel even felt stressed over finding the most flattering angle to take a shot of her breasts so as to impress the guy. In the end, she regretted it.
…Assistant Professor J. Patrick Williams from the Nanyang Technological University’s sociology division tried to explain the phenomenon. He said that people have always shared sexual information, whether it’s in written form or a magazine picture. But now technology has made it easier to communicate and share this information. And what he termed the ‘Facebook mentality’ is one reason why sexting has become less of a taboo.
‘If young people inhabit social worlds which place value on being sexually active and sharing everything instantly with others, their media usage is going to align with those values,’ he said. ‘If you’re telling people where you checked in, what you’re wearing and how you’re feeling, this mentality is going to encapsulate sexuality at some point.’
Humans as sexual beings have been seeking vicarious pleasures of the flesh ever since the dawn of the most primitive forms of communication, whether it’s through cave-drawings, pottery, paintings, smutty letters, Morse code, naughty photos, chatlines, videos, cybersex, webcams, sms-ing or instant messaging. Before you know it, sex toys would come equipped with wireless remote action, and we would enter the epoch of not just virtual, but ‘almost-sex’. The access to transmission of obscene material, whether in the form of speech, writing or images, has always existed. The advent of the camera-phone and wireless technology just made it easier, faster and more frequent. Whether as a form of kinky couple-bonding or courtship ritual, people will still have sex eventually, with technology merely facilitating the transaction of bodily fluids. The availability of personal, discreet texting has already set the stage for moral decay, and it was only a matter of time before illicit conversations get spiced up with images of nether regions instead of a limp and unsexy ‘XXX’ or ‘Hugs and kisses’. Of course the risk we all take for sending dirty pictures to lovers behind our partners’ backs (which the survey results do hint at) is knowing how all these can be dug up eventually, and till this day, no one has figured out how to retract messages sent by mistake. Where’s the iTakeitback when you need one? Or did Steve Jobs bring the secret of this miracle app to his grave?
‘Sexting’ was a candidate for ‘Word of the Year’ in 2009, though in the early days of naval expedition, it could have also been used as a verb for the use of a SEXTANT in navigation, as in ‘Captain sir, I have sexted the horizon and we’re 30 knots away from port, sir!’. It’s an ugly, clumsy word to replace the now unused ‘cybersex’, and I would say even a misnomer if you’re talking about sending videos or photos. It only looks good in writing and is awkward in speech: ‘Can I sext you later tonight’, ‘Did you sext that woman behind my back?’, ‘Did you read that article about sexting in the Sunday Times?’ You get what I mean; the extra ‘t’ is like forcing a Singaporean to vocalise the ‘h’ in three, or a similar ‘t’ in truth. There should be a separate word for seducing someone with a picture or video of your naked self, and assuming that the majority of these are images of a man’s erect member or a woman’s cleavage, I would propose an alternative term: ‘SMF’ or ‘short message flashing’, or ‘see me flash’. The ‘F’ tag also adds some notoriety to the acronym. No longer will we have to deal with the troublesome ending ‘t’ or the categorical tussle over whether images are considered ‘text’, and since the use of ‘SMS’ is more popular than ‘text’ locally , I would imagine a slight but significant variation to be easier to catch on among horny Singaporeans.
I can't get no Sextifaction
What’s missing from the poll results is stratification, which would yield more interesting observations e.g how many 16 year olds are sexting, what’s the proportion of males doing it, which sex is sexting which body part, but more importantly, how many are sexting behind their partners’ backs and consider it to be ‘cheating’. What’s disturbing is that 38 people polled listed ‘Others’ as a reason for sexting. The only other reason than for the ‘thrill’, peer pressure or the lame ‘everybody’s doing it’ (They’re not) I could think of is this as a form of sexual/exhibitionist compulsive addiction for which they need treatment. It’s also troubling to note how getting naked is seen as form of ‘peer pressure’, like it were as simple as ear-piercing for girls, or supporting a football club for boys. ‘Coolness’ has nothing to do with sexting. It is a self-gratifying flirtation tool, a masturbatory fantasy and prelude to sex, nothing more. You do it if you want to get laid, not to be accepted into a certain community or be thought of as ‘fun-loving’ (There are so many other ways to be fun, unless of course you can perform can-opening tricks with certain erogenous muscles). In any case, people who exhibit themselves online do it at their own risk, and all it takes is just one unfortunate pervert to find a labelled gif of his member in the intray of his employer’s email to put a stop to this ridiculous practice once and for all.
Filed under: 2011, Nudity, Sex, Singaporean men, Singaporean women Tagged: | Matchmaking/Dating agencies, Nudity, Sex
