We remain in the naturalization holding pattern so I thought I'd address to an entirely different topic. Sexting. It was recently brought to mind for me when I read an Atlantic article by Amanda Mull titled, Why Do Smart People
Send Nudes? It was fascinating, if
disappointingly not in the least titillating but as often happens when reading
articles containing links, three hours of my life quickly evaporated and by the
time I climbed out of this particular rabbit hole I’d flipped through almost
fifty academic articles dissecting the topic of sexting. Who would have thought that this is such a
dynamic and growing area of research? More
impressive than the body of work, however, were the results as one study summarized
a meta-analysis which showed that almost half of the adult respondents reported
sending nude photos. Somewhat comforting
was the finding that this figure dropped to 12% for minors, but still. Sadly, this area of research is almost
entirely devoted to adolescents and young adults so I couldn't help wondering
how the numbers look for my generation, the shady side of fifty. The
only study that ventured into this age group delivered a surprisingly high number
(40%) but the data was drawn from what I suspect, or hope, is a severely non-representative
population of respondents, namely members of Ashley-Madison, a website whose
motto is, “Life is short…Have an Affair”.
So, in response to the scant
attention we’ve received - Jeff Bezos is but a single data point - I resolved
to devote an hour to conducting a very scientific study which consisted of
asking some work colleagues a simple question.
Have you ever sent pictures of your genitals to someone else with your
smart phone? I live and work in Europe
so such a question, while not common, is less likely to be viewed as sexual
harassment in the workplace here. It’s
clearly not encouraged but if you’re careful you can get away with it and not
affect your work relationships too much.
In any event, it didn’t take long and by extrapolating my findings
across cultures I’m happy to say that except for billionaires, no one in my
generation has ever sexted a picture of their junk to someone else. I don’t think anyone has ever even taken a
picture of their junk but I didn’t ask that question specifically. I would publish this important finding but
after having scanned the articles noted above I can see that I’d have to first
do some really complicated statistical analysis that I’m not qualified to
do. I’d also probably need to speak with
more than ten people. But please feel
free to build upon this mound of data and let me know what you learn. If you’re a Millennial, you can start by
asking your parents, who will, I’m certain, be happy to discuss this topic with
you. At least now though, thanks to Mr.
Bezos and Mr. Pecker, they’ll as least know what sexting is. Also, in case you’re wondering how I’d have
answered the question myself, let’s just say that the closest I’ve ever come to
sexting, with or without photos, is a few kissy-kissy emojis and if I’m feeling
especially amorous, I’ll sometimes include a little heart or two.
