kate r. warren

Pardon me while I step on my soapbox for a few paragraphs.. 

I know it’s hard to date, believe me, I’ve been there, hell I am there. And I know it can get lonely, I know what it is like to go out with your friends and have one of several things happen. 1) You go out with your friend(s) and they talk non stop about their crush, this guy they’re “talking” to, or their boyfriend 2) You go out with your friend(s) and their boyfriend(s) and because the world loves to make you feel less than, this always happen when you do not have a boyfriend… So I understand the notion of really wanting a relationship to work out, because you might really like him ( or her, I make no promises of being politically correct here), or you might be really lonely. I get all of this, trust me I understand. 

So, let’s talk about something I don’t understand, let’s talk about why 1 in 10 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 24 has sent or received  nude images. 

Let’s talk about sex…ting. Sexting.

Sexting, as established by United States v. Broxmeyer (2010), is the act of sending sexually explicit materials through a cell phone. This includes both text messages and images.

Here is my first concern - if you’re under the age of 18 and get caught taking part in pretty much any act of sexting, doing the sending, the receiving, the sharing, the having been shared to, you could face legal charges against you. In several cases local law enforcement have filed charges against not only the person who received the images, but also the person who did the sending, and most likely the taking (this is usually the person who gets naked).

My second concern is that despite how much you trust your partner, there is absolutely no way to ensure that the image or images would stay with that one person. Once a digital file has been created there is no way to delete it forever. I’ll give you a kind of example. I bought my first smart phone a few years ago, a Blackberry, off Craigslist. Did all the usual things I should have, made sure the phones info was correct and could still have service put in it, and had my mom go get it. (Cause you know, it’s from Craigslist, and, well, yeah) He told my mom that he had done a factory reset on the phone and all his info should be gone and it restored to like new settings. However when I got it home, put my service in it and started playing, I found a small number of nude pictures of some woman. This, hopefully, illustrates two points. That 1) even after he did a factory reset, his porn was still on my Blackberry, and 2) had I been some horrible, perverted person I could have spread those images around. So again, despite how much you trust your partner, you never know who he is selling his phone to, or even just letting it be left around. 

Now let’s really get to the heart of the issue, at least for me. Which is simply put: Why the fuck does sexting even exist? 

What has come to our world if teenagers are asking their boyfriends and girlfriends for nude pictures? Are we such a porn obsessed culture that this is the result? 

So let me be maybe the first but hopefully not the last person to tell you this: I don’t care where you are in your relationship, I don’t care if you’re 14 and in your first relationship ever, or if you’re 25 and have been dating the same person for two years, or if you’re 45 and in a committed long term marriage. You do not have the right to demand access to your partners body 24/7. 

I honestly have never heard of a “healthy” example of sexting, of full-fledged nude pictures. I understand that in relationships, especially new relationships involving young people, it’s hard to understand each other in a sexual way for a lot of different reasons. And I understand that the allure of having a comfortable way to develop a sexual relationships. It is much easier to ask all those necessary questions in a relationship via text.. things like have you had sex, if so with how many partners, what kind of things do you like, what kind of things have you tried, what kind of things do you want to try, etc.. It is so much easier to be honest when they can’t see you blushing. And I also understand that it seems so much easier to show a partner your body via some removed form like a picture you took with your iPhone. It seems so much easier, but the consequences can be so harsh. 

Healthy option: if your partner and you, both willingly, want to experiment with sexting, consider taking a photo of your shoulder, or your neck, at unique or interesting angels, or play guess where this freckle is, anything but full-fledge nudity. Neither of you should have to have such a picture to maintain a healthy relationship. 

The pressure. Stop it. Now. You do not have to have a picture of your girlfriend (again with the not being politically correct, I know this can go both ways) to get through the day. It isn’t about trust (If you trust me, you’d send them to me. PLEASE). Asking over and over again for a naked picture of your girlfriend is not healthy, it’s ABUSIVE. Especially if she express concern or being uncomfortable. In a healthy relationship we respect our partners boundaries. So if your boyfriend (okay, okay, or girlfriend) says that if you don’t send them naked pictures they’ll find someone else who will, walk away. Right now! Because you deserve so much better. 

I get all of this in a rational, I’m not dating anyone who would dare do this, kind of way. But I know it isn’t black and white, or easy. But I also know that no person, boy, girl, man, woman, need a naked picture of their partner. 

I was inspired to write today, which if you actually knew me, might surprise you. I’m visual; I love to read words, not write them. But, being a 22 year old college junior, not surprisingly, I’m kind of lost in life. Which if you know a college student my age, and they say they have everything figured out, bet them $100 bucks, and call bull shit. Because we just don’t. So being kind of lost in life, when something resonates with me, I tend to grab hold and not let go until I’ve over analyzed it enough to see if it can provide me any anchor. This leads to me what has put me in this unusual state for the night. One of my favorite fellow Tumblr’s - Ella - wrote an article (one of three!) for Thought Catalog and I had to pause the movie I was watching because the title of it caught me off guard. “I don’t want to go home.” (read it here). 

Just like most people Ella knows, I’m a transplant from somewhere else. There are a lot of differences between my transplant story and Ella’s. The one most obvious to me is the distance between our respective homes, and where we moved to. In my view of the world, or at least North America, she moved from one of the furthest places from home possible. This to me, is literally clear across the country. I can drive home in a day if I needed or wanted too. Just under 8 hours is my record. The second biggest difference to me, is that  when I moved to Austin, I moved with family. My Uncle has lived here all my life, and my Mom had moved back down here about a year before I did. She even made a 16 hour bus trip back to Kansas just to help me move. I didn’t have to worry about setting up and apartment or a job before I moved. I decided I wanted to move, decided when I would quit the job I had had since High School and decided what I’d do with my last two weeks with every thing and everyone I knew. I’m not sure if Ella’s story went down like that. 

What I’m mostly trying to say is that when considering the daunting task of moving away from home, from everything a person has ever known, I had it pretty easy. I moved away from home for a variety of some really complicated reasons and some really simple reasons. The timing will never be as perfect as it was, a smoother transition could have never have taken place. Still, moving away from home is a big deal. I’ve been gone for almost three years now. And I’ve been home exactly twice. And despite getting to go back to the familiar, and see old friends and family, they’ve been pretty disappointing vacations. So, to round some of this out, I don’t want to go home either. It doesn’t bother me that I don’t want to go home. And I’m tired of feeling bad about that. 

I grew up in what I can only describe has the biggest “city” Southeastern Kansas has. Sometimes obscurely referenced in movies, and most notably the home of a serial killer who went uncaught for decades. And I never fit in there. Not ever. I find that people there are so closed up, so content with doing just okay, just getting by. Cost of living is low, why rock the boat. This is the mentality of my family that is still there, that will always still be there. And it always bothered me. I had always had a big imagination, big dreams, big goals. And they never fit in Wichita. So I left. And it was the best decision I’ve ever made. 

I’ll try and come full circle, with this, and relate it back to Ella, I don’t want to go home, and randomly, to New York. Highlighted nicely in Ella’s article, she is surviving in New York City. And for all intensive purposes I’m surviving in Austin, admittedly these places are very different, but hear me out. When I was in middle school, after my Mom got out of Wichita, I started to dream out side of it’s boundaries, and found a love for New York. I remember doodling “New York City” and “NYC” into school notebooks like it was a boy I had a crush on. However when I went to share this dream with my Dad, he wasn’t supportive. In fact, in a move that could have only secured a good number of years in therapy, he tore it down. (To some of his own redemption, only two years later, he helped pay my way for my first trip to the big apple. I considered staying) But here is this point, even though I’m not in New York (Yet! Yet!) I am no longer in Kansas. And with how lost I get, I can hold on to that. 

I’ll leave you with a photo from my first, and so far only trip to NYC. Circa 2006.

(I also stipulate that, Ella, I believe is a writer by nature, and despite my attempt at going to college for Journalism, am not.)