This article explores gender inequities and sexual double standards in teens’ digital image exchange, drawing on a UK qualitative research project on youth ‘sexting’. We develop a critique of ‘postfeminist’ media cultures, suggesting teen ‘sexting’ presents specific age and gender related contradictions: teen girls are called upon to produce particular forms of ‘sexy’ self display, yet face legal repercussions, moral condemnation and ‘slut shaming’ when they do so. We examine the production/circulation of gendered value and sexual morality via teens’ discussions of activities on Facebook and Blackberry. For instance, some boys accumulated ‘ratings’ by possessing and exchanging images of girls’ breasts, which operated as a form of currency and value. Girls, in contrast, largely discussed the taking, sharing or posting of such images as risky, potentially inciting blame and shame around sexual reputation (e.g. being called ‘slut’, ‘slag’ or ‘sket’). The daily negotiations of these new digitally mediated, heterosexualised, classed and raced norms of performing teen feminine and masculine desirability are considered.

In this paper, we explore a contemporary panic around teen sexting considering why it focuses mostly on girls' bodies and 'breasts'. Drawing on empirical findings from research with 13-and 15-year olds in two London schools, we ask: How are girls' and boys' mediated bodies and body parts constructed, negotiated and made sense of in the teen peer group? How are images of girls' breasts surveilled and owned by others? In what ways can images of girls' bodies be used to sexually shame them? How do images of 'boobs' work differently than those of 'six-packs' and 'pecs'? When and how is digital proof of sexual activity shamed or rewarded? Our analysis explores the affective dimensions of digital affordances and how relative gendered value is generated through social media images and practices. We demonstrate how our qualitative research approach facilitates exploration of the online and offline relational, material embodied performance of negotiating gender and sexuality in teen's digitally mediated peer cultures.

No abstract

The bold argument of Mediated Intimacy is that media of various kinds play an increasingly important role in shaping people's knowledge, desires, practices and expectations about intimate relationships. While arguments rage about the nature and content of sex and relationship education in schools, it is becoming clear that more and more of usyoung and old look not to formal education, or even to our friends, for information about sex, but the media (Attwood et al., 2015; Albury, 2016). This is not simply a matter of media 'advice' in the form of self-help books, magazine problem pages, or online 'agony' columnsthough these are all proliferating and are discussed at length in the book. It is also about the wider cultural habitat of images, ideas and discourses about intimacy that circulate through and across media: the 'happy endings' of romantic comedies; the 'money shots' of pornography; the celebrity gossip about who is seeing whom, who is 'cheating', and who is looking 'hot'; the lifestyle TV about 'embarrassing bodies' or being 'undateable'; the newspaper features on how to have a 'good' divorce or 'ten things never to say on a first date'; or the new apps that incite us to quantify and rate our sex lives, etc. These constitute the 'taken for granted' of everyday understandings of intimacy, and they are at the heart of Mediated Intimacy. Here we present a brief summary of the book and its conclusions: Normativity and inclusivity Sex advice-and media more widely-is largely heteronormative: presenting 'normal' sex and relationships as primarily happening between one cisgender man and one cisgender woman. This is embedded within the representation of men and women as 'opposite' and 'complementary' exemplified in the bestselling Mars and Venus self-help books (Potts, 2002), men's and women's magazines, romantic comedies, and chick lit (Gill, 2007). Sex remains centred around men's pleasure with the omnipresent male sexual drive discourse (Hollway, 1984) and assumption that men are focused on sex and women on love. Recent shifts from objectification to subjectification mean there is now an onus on women to be 'up for' sex, to demonstrate enjoyment, and to find it empowering, whilst still navigating the sexual double standard to be sexual enough, but not too sexual. This plays out in many sex advice advice materials which-implicitly or explicitly-emphasise the vital importance of women providing regular sex to male partners so as not to lose the relationship. However, TV shows like Girls and Fleabag begin to open up the possibility of a more messy, complex female sexuality as their characters navigate this territory.

This article explores the use of private diaries in qualitative research about intimate everyday experiences. The article first reflects on existing diary-based research, then examines data from a small-scale UK study about the negotiation of condom use in heterosex to pose questions about the kinds of data made available when participants use private diaries as a prompt in qualitative interviews. The article discusses the use of private diaries as a way to explore ambivalent, everyday experiences and interrogates the role of diaries as a form of confessional or measurement of private life. It explores how combined researcher intimate diaries and field note journals can be used in reflexive qualitative sexualities research. The article finally examines the potential for diaries as a form of research intervention in participants' intimate lives.