Sexting Panic

Rethinking Criminalization, Privacy, and Consent

by Amy Adele Hasinoff

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Pub Date Feb 15 2015 | Archive Date Nov 01 2016

Description

Sexting Panic illustrates that anxieties about technology and teen girls' sexuality distract from critical questions about how to adapt norms of privacy and consent for new media. Though mobile phones can be used to cause harm, Amy Adele Hasinoff notes that the criminalization and abstinence policies meant to curb sexting often fail to account for distinctions between consensual sharing and malicious distribution. Challenging the idea that sexting inevitably victimizes young women, Hasinoff argues for recognizing young people's capacity for choice and encourages rethinking the assumption that everything digital is public.

Timely and engaging, Sexting Panic analyzes the debates about sexting while recommending realistic and nuanced responses.

Amy Adele Hasinoff is an assistant professor of communication at the University of Colorado Denver.

Sexting Panic illustrates that anxieties about technology and teen girls' sexuality distract from critical questions about how to adapt norms of privacy and consent for new media. Though mobile...

Advance Praise

"Sexting has brought together two things that adults fear most--teens' sexuality and technology. Sexting Panic is a fantastic antidote to the media-driven moral panic. . . . Hasinoff's thoughtful book offers a framework for rethinking sexual media production and the politics of consent. This is a critical intervention to a fraught topic."--danah boyd, author of It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens

"The most comprehensive analysis of sexting so far. Amy Hasinoff gives us nuanced insights into young people's practices of sexting with a much-needed emphasis on consent and agency. This book challenges the orthodox anxieties about technology and female sexuality, while provoking us to rethink ideas of media production and information."--Kate Crawford, author of Adult Themes: Rewriting the Rules of Adulthood

"Talk about sexting has become a key site for making sense of young people's relationships with sex and technology, but it is often hampered by common-sense and frequently sexist views of girls. This book, which is clear, compassionate, and practical, argues that in order to move forward in our understanding of sexting we need to see it as an act of media production and to refocus adults' concerns about girls onto girls' rights to privacy and to a culture of consent. Amy Hasinoff's book is a major contribution to debates about sexting, sexualization, and contemporary sexual and media cultures."--Feona Attwood, editor of Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture

"Hasinoff has written a bold and provocative book that complicates prevailing assumptions that sexting is an inherently damaging practice for young women. Deftly integrating scholarship regarding adolescent female sexuality and digital media practices, Hasinoff challenges the reader to move beyond a simplistic understanding of female victimhood to embrace a more robust understanding of sexting as a potential expression of authentic desire and agency."--J. Shoshanna Ehrlich, author of Who Decides? The Abortion Rights of Teens

"Moving away from the dominance of media, legal, and educational focuses upon sexting, Hasinoff . . . covers a lot of necessary ground and brings a complex reading to sexting that the topic deserves."--Larissa Hjorth, author of Mobile Media in the Asia-Pacific: Gender and the Art of Being Mobile