Recently, national and local media across North America have warned against the risks of ‘sexting’ – the practice of sending, posting or possessing sexually suggestive text messages and images via cell phones or the Internet. In response to this phenomenon, Pennsylvania District Attorney Skumanick threatened to bring child pornography charges against teenagers who had been caught sexting and who refused to attend a gender-based ‘re-education’ program designed to teach them about its dangers. Three girls refused the ultimatum, resulting in Miller v. Mitchell [2010], the first case to challenge the constitutionality of prosecuting teens for their digital sexual expression. This article critically considers dominant and intersecting cultural and legal narratives about sexting and troubles the predominant construction of teenage female sexters as dupes of the ‘pornification’ of a generation and as ‘self-sexually exploiting.’ The cultural and legal disavowal of girls’ narratives about digital sexual expression is considered through Judith Butler’s poststructural analysis of sexuality, speech and censorship. Drawing on two online studies of sexting, contributions to an online forum on the topic, and third-wave feminist writings on a generational re-envisioning of risk, respectability and privacy, I argue that that the foreclosure of the ‘domain of the sayable’ within which girls seek to speak works paradoxically to further render them fetishized sexual objects, thus engendering the very harm that criminal law seeks to remedy.
ABC 7 News (2008) Sexting: New, dangerous teen trend – a new, dangerous trend is growing among teenagers. ABC 7 News. May15. Available at: www.wjla.com/news/stories/0508/520195.html (accessed October 12, 2009).
2.
AdlerA. (2001) The perverse law of child pornography. Columbia Law Review101: 209–273.
3.
AlburyK.LumbyC. (2010) Introduction: Children, young people, sexuality and the media. Media International Australia (135): 56–59.
4.
ArcabascioC. (2010) Sexting and teenagers: OMG R U going 2 jail???Richmond Journal of Law and TechnologyXVI(3): 1–42.
5.
BarbieriA. (2009) You don’t know what sexting is? Texting explicit photographs has become a common part of courtship among teenagers. But the consequences can be tragic. The Guardian, August7. Available at: www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/aug/07/sexting-teenagers-mobile-phones (accessed October 12, 2009).
6.
BauerleinM. (2008) The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
BodeyK.R.WoodJ.T. (2009) Grrrlpower: What counts as voice and who does the counting?Southern Communication Journal74(3): 325–337.
9.
ButlerJ. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York. Routledge.
10.
ButlerJ. (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.
11.
ButlerJ. (1998) Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge.
12.
ButlerJ. (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
13.
CalvertC. (2009) Sex, cell phones, privacy and the First Amendment: When children become child pornographers and the Lolita Effect undermines the law. Catholic University of America CommLaw Conspectus18: 1–72.
Child Protection Act of 1984. Pub. L. No. 98–292, 98 Stat. 204.
17.
Child Pornography Prevention Act of 1996. Pub. L. No. 104–208, 110 Stat. 3009-26.
18.
CummingsP. (2009) Children’s rights, children’s voices, children’s technology, children’s sexuality. Roundtable on Youth, Sexuality, Technology, Joint Session of Association for Research in Cultures of Young People (ARCYP) and Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English (ACCUTE), Congress2009, May 26. Carleton University, Ottawa. Available at: www.liveleak.com/view?i=4ac_1243736876 (accessed June 19, 2010).
19.
Dr. Phil Show (TV series) (2009) Crazy teen trends: Sexting. Available at: www.drphil.com/shows/show/1212/ (accessed December 11, 2010).
20.
Dr. Phil Show (TV series) (2009) Scary trends: Is your child at risk?–sexting. Available at: www.drphil.com/shows/show/1262/ (accessed December 11, 2010).
21.
DurhamM.G. (2008) The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and What We Can Do About It. New York: Penguin Group.
FillionK. (2010) Inside the dangerously empty lives of teenage girls: Impressing each other with sex, booze and Facebook. Maclean’s, May10, 19–21.
24.
FisherC. (2002) The sexual girl within: Breaking the feminist silence on desiring girlhood. In: JohnsonML (ed.) Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Female Desire. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, pp. 53–64.
25.
FlanaganC. (2010) Love, actually: How girls reluctantly endure the hookup culture. The Atlantic, June.
26.
FoucaultM. (1978/1990) History of Sexuality: Vol. 1. An Introduction. New York: Random House.
27.
FrankeK.M. (2001) Theorizing yes: An essay on feminism, law, and desire. Columbia Law Review101: 181–208.
28.
FriedmanJ.ValentiJ. (eds) (2008) Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape. New York: Seal Press.
GoldsteinL. (2009) Documentation and denial: Discourses of sexual self-exploitation. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Spring (no. 51). Available at: www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc51.2009/goldstein/index.html (accessed February 10, 2010).
31.
HaradA. (2003) Reviving Lolita; or, because junior high is still hell. In DickerRPiepmeierA (eds) Catching a Wave: Reclaiming Feminism for the 21st Century. Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, pp. 81–98.
32.
HasinoffA. (2010) Making sense of sexting: Adolescents as careless, irrational, and sex-crazed. Unpublished dissertation chapter, on file with author.
33.
HumbachJ.A. (2010) “Sexting” and the First Amendment. Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly37: 433–467. Also available at: http://digitalcommons.pace.edu/lawfaculty/596 (accessed February 20, 2010).
34.
JohnsonM.L. (2002) Jane Sexes It Up: True Confessions of Female Desire. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press.
35.
KaraianL.MitchellA. (2009) Third wave feminisms. In: MandellN (ed.) Feminist Issues: Race, Class and Sexuality, fifth edition. Toronto: Pearson Prentice Hall.
36.
KarpM.StollerD. (1999) The BUST Guide to the New Girl Order. New York: Penguin Books.
37.
KimmelM.S. (2005) The Gender of Desire: Essays on Male Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press.
38.
KimpelA.F. (2010) Using laws designed to protect as a weapon: Prosecuting minors under child pornography laws. New York University Review of Law and Social Change34: 299–338.
39.
KincaidJ.R. (1998) Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (TV series) (2009) ‘Crush’, Season 10, Episode 20, aired May 5.
43.
LearyM. (2008) Self produced child pornography: The appropriate societal response to juvenile self-sexual exploitation. Virginia Journal of Social Policy and the Law15(1). CUA Columbus School of Law Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2008-26.
44.
LevineD.E.KilbourneJ. (2009) So Sexy, So Soon: The New Sexualized Childhood and what Parents can do to Protect their Kids. New York: Random House.
NussbaumE. (2007) Say everything. In: FishmanSHomansJMossA (eds) New York Stories: Landmark Writing from Four Decades of New York Magazine. New York: Random House, pp. 400–415.
RubinG. (1998) Thinking sex: Notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality. In: VanceC (ed.) Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston, MA: Routledge, pp. 267–319.
56.
SchulmanM. (2009) Sexting a world-wide epidemic: Problem hits home with “close call” in Polk County. Herald Journal, August5, C1. Available at: www.blueridgenow.com/article/20090805/NEWS/908051013 (accessed October 25, 2009).
57.
ScottK.SarracinoC. (2008) The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn Culture, What It Means, and Where We Go from Here. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
StoneG. (2009) “Sexting” teens can go too far: Sending provocative images over cell phones is all the rage, but it can go all wrong. ABC News, March13. Available at: http://a.abcnews.com/Technology/WorldNews/story?id=6456834&page=1 (accessed October 24, 2009).
60.
SutherlandK. (2003) From jailbird to jailbait: Age of consent laws and the construction of teenage sexualities. William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law9(3): 313–349.
61.
National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy and Cosmo Girl (2008). Sex and Tech: Results From a Survey of Teens and Young Adults. Available at: www.thenationalcampaign.org/sextech/ (accessed July 21, 2010).
62.
Tyra Banks Show (TV series) (2009) ‘Teen sexting’, Season 4, Episode 116, aired April 20.
63.
United States v. Knox [1994] 32 F.3d 733, 747 (3d Cir. 1994).
64.
VanceC.S. (1984) Pleasure and danger: Towards a politics of sexuality. In: Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston, MA: Routledge, pp. 1–27.
65.
WalczakW.J.BurchV.A.KreimerS.F. (2009) United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania: Verified complaint. Miller, et al. v. Skumanick: Legal Documents.March25. Available at: www.aclupa.org/downloads/MillerComplaintfinal.pdf (accessed February 10, 2010).
66.
ZurbriggenE.L.CollinsR.L.LambS.. (2007) Report of the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Available at: www.apa.org/pi/wpo/sexualization.html (accessed July 21, 2010).
