This Post Is Not About Anthony Weiner

Sexting (awful word) has been in the news a lot lately. Apparently now there’s a move afoot to not equate the consentual exchanging of explicit photographs between teenagers as legally tantamount to the distribution of child pornography, and I think that’s good thing. Such exchanges, while fraught with all sorts of proximate and distant hazards are, in a day and age when nearly everything is a camera, all but inevitable. There is an human desire to flirt, and to memorialize, and moving out of adolescence does not make one immune.

I was an “early adopter” (another awful phrase) of the internet. I pretty much learned to talk to women on the Internet (how much easier to construct a witty and solicitous response when communication isn’t quite synchronous), I met my wife on the Internet, and have set and received messages that (apparently) mark the sender or receiver or both as adolescent or foolhardy or just plain stupid. (Also, apparently it is still horrifying to contemplate that a woman might very much enjoy being on the receiving end of such missives, and the proper public stance is disgust and/or derision.)

I have also learned this.

It is possible to have remarkably mutually satisfying sexual encounters by text or photo or video or phone or even all of the above if your modern multi-tasking mind is up to the task.

It is completely impossible to get your ear scratched, or your hair stroke, or to have a zit popped on your back.

This, I think, sheds some light on the nature of sexual pleasure and intimacy both; and perhaps on the nature of of the relationship between the two of them.