“Who Does Not Dare, Is a Pussy.” A Textual Analysis of Media Panics, Youth, and Sexting in Print Media

Abstract

The social media use of young people has become a site of increasing public interest. Young people experiencing with sexuality and intimacy in digital media spaces, has evoked public debates on youth, sexuality and social media. Sexting in particular, has often been covered in print media articles as a 'risky' youth phenomenon, leading to media panics about the alleged risks of social media. Although the social media use of young people has been studied in previous research, there remains a need to understand the broader cultural discourses on youth, sexuality and social media in print media. With this article, we examine the discourses in news stories covering sexting. The qualitative research design of this paper exists of a textual analysis of print media articles. Our findings show that public discourses in newspapers and magazines mainly articulate youth sexting as a deviant behavior. This deviance discourse is strongly linked to a gendered representation of youth who engage in sexting, resulting in a victimization of girls and criminalization of boys. The article concludes that the binary discourse in print media may not only reinforce sexual double standards, but also leaves little space for a more diverse and active comprehension of sexting.

Identities and Intimacies on Social Media

“…However, this discursive focus on risk, harm and vulnerability goes together with increased moral and media panics on youth, sexual intimacy and social media, in which discourses of youth sexualisation and victimisation are dominant in both the public and academic debate (Döring, 2014(Döring, , 2020Walrave et al, 2015;Korkmazer et al, 2020;Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Since these discussions mainly reflect adult anxieties rather than the lived experiences of young people, they often tend to use moralising and policing discourses Korkmazer et al, 2019;. These moralistic discourses are denying young people their sexual agency by representing limited roles for youth as sexual agents .…”

“…This gendered, radicalised, and classed discourse of sexualisation tends to neglect the differences (gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, bodily ability, etc.) between young people and obscure the given that different young people are sexualised in various manners that carry diverse meanings (Gill, 2012;Korkmazer et al, 2019Korkmazer et al, , 2020. However, sexuality is "a complex, multifaceted and multilayered notion that includes personalized sexual feelings and desires, social ideologies and practices of kinship, gender relations and reproduction, power relations, symbolic meanings of gender and moral discourses" (Spronk, 2012, p. 7, as cited in Naezer, 2018, p. 20).…”

Sexual Reputation, Intersectional Intimacies and Visual Social Media

“…However, this discursive focus on risk, harm and vulnerability goes together with increased moral and media panics on youth, sexual intimacy and social media, in which discourses of youth sexualisation and victimisation are dominant in both the public and academic debate (Döring, 2014(Döring, , 2020Walrave et al, 2015;Korkmazer et al, 2020;Livingstone & Blum-Ross, 2020). Since these discussions mainly reflect adult anxieties rather than the lived experiences of young people, they often tend to use moralising and policing discourses Korkmazer et al, 2019;. These moralistic discourses are denying young people their sexual agency by representing limited roles for youth as sexual agents (Dobson, 2015).…”

“…This gendered, radicalised, and classed discourse of sexualisation tends to neglect the differences (gender, age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, bodily ability, etc.) between young people and obscure the given that different young people are sexualised in various manners that carry diverse meanings (Gill, 2012;Korkmazer et al, 2019Korkmazer et al, , 2020. However, sexuality is "a complex, multifaceted and multilayered notion that includes personalized sexual feelings and desires, social ideologies and practices of kinship, gender relations and reproduction, power relations, symbolic meanings of gender and moral discourses" (Spronk, 2012, p. 7, as cited in Naezer, 2018.…”

Information sources about face-to-face meetings with people from the Internet: Gendered influence on adolescents’ risk perception and behavior

“…This seems to be part of more general rhetoric because female adolescents are more likely to be portrayed as powerless victims in other online scenarios (e.g. sexting; Korkmazer et al, 2019). It also ties in with the anxieties over adolescent sexuality, primarily focused on female adolescents (boyd, 2014; Chmielewski et al, 2017).…”