Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

We’ve had enough carrots to last a lifetime. break out the sticks.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

Their freedom requires your slavery.

Americans barely caring about Afghanistan is so last month.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

JFC, are there no editors left at that goddamn rag?

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

When someone says they “love freedom”, rest assured they don’t mean yours.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Schmidt just says fuck it, opens a tea shop.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

We are aware of all internet traditions.

Eh, that’s media spin. biden’s health is fine and he’s doing a good job.

Consistently wrong since 2002

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Late Night Open Thread: One More Reason to Be Glad I’m An Old

Late Night Open Thread: One More Reason to Be Glad I’m An Old

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It is improbable in the extreme that I will ever feel required to sext as a social obligation, unlike today’s youth, per NYMag:

… Sexting must have arrived simultaneously with texting—it’s a safe bet that any new media not invented by lust makes room for it immediately. But we first heard about sexts, close to a decade ago, only in the context of misbehaving teens. Who else could be desperately horny enough to channel sexual energy into a medium so glib, a sexual behavior so pathetically chaste as to fall in the hierarchy of sex acts somewhere below dry humping? Most of us, it turns out: In a study from McAfee, more than half of those surveyed—and 70 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds—have received sexually explicit texts, videos, or pictures. But even as sexting colonizes our phones, the activity hasn’t exactly taken over our libidos: A study of American college students recently found that 55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in “consensual but unwanted sexting,” i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it. That sounds pretty bleak: Why contort yourself posing butt selfies in the bathroom if it doesn’t turn you on?…

My first thought was, okay: McAfee, they want to sell their ‘privacy protection’ products to people who just realized they aren’t the first individuals in the world to invent the pr0n selfie. But that doesn’t explain the college-student study (or the expressed experience of the NYMag writer, for that matter). I mean, yes, Rule 34 and the limitless human imagination, but… faking non-contact sexual activity as a social obligation?!? Wouldn’t that give anyone a headache?

Reader Interactions

25Comments

  2. 2.

    Little Boots

    seriously, anne, one good discussion on this or any site is worth about ten orgasms, at this age. I honestly can’t imagine anything more boring than sexting. but that is probably just age.

  8. 8.

    NotMax

    Hmm.

    I still bring a bottle of wine as a “social obligation.” Or a cake.

    Gotta don’t wanna catch up with the times.

  12. 12.

    Starfish

    Sexting did not arrive at the same time as texting. It arrived when we were able to send messages that included photos and videos.

  13. 13.

    Starfish

    Sexting did not arrive at the same time as texting. It arrived when we were able to send messages that included photos and videos.

  14. 14.

    Starfish

    Sexting did not arrive at the same time as texting. It arrived when we were able to send messages that included photos and videos.

  16. 16.

    MikeJ

    @Starfish: People sent sexually explicit texts long before we had photo and video. SMS was a big deal in Europe long before it was even available in the US.

  18. 18.

    The Raven on the Hill

    Meantime, Russia’s gone and taken over Crimea. If I were Turkey, I’d be scared. Come to that, if I were Ukrainian I’d be absolutely terrified. So far as I can see Russia wants two things: control of the Black Sea and its warm-water port and control of the nexus of natural gas lines located in Ukraine and there isn’t going to be much left of Ukraine if Russia gets them.

    There’s dispute over whether Russia or Ukraine is fascist, but I’d say probably Russia; it’s Russia that’s killing gays and using the Olympics to whitewash tyrannical behavior. The Russian disinformation campaign is pretty effective, however: Putin was after all 16 years with the KGB.

    Links:

    DaBlogFodder, Canadian blogger in Ukraine:
    http://dablogfodder.blogspot.com/

    Gas pipelines in and through Ukraine:
    http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2005/12/30/173336/17

  19. 19.

    oldster

    By a strange coincidence, today’s entry from the blog “WW2 today” covers an earlier era’s version of sexting: sending naked pics off with the boys to war.

    A U.S. intelligence officer at Anzio Beach describes going through the documents captured from German POWs or found on the bodies of German dead. Mostly they want actionable intelligence, but they find other things as well:

    “Some carried nude pictures of their wives or sweethearts, stimulating reminders of the joys awaiting their return. One PW had half a dozen seductively posed shots that, according to the letter found with them, had been taken by the woman’s father. Such photos, triggering salivating appraisals, lightened the day’s chores and were gleefully passed around, getting as much critical inspection as a captured map.”

    http://ww2today.com/27-february-1944-anzio-searching-through-the-pockets-of-the-dead

  20. 20.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Lust is an intoxicant, and it makes people do stupid things. It always has. More experience better arms you to resist doing stupid things – usually. Using text messages to do something stupid and lust-based happens so fast it’s particularly hard to resist, but really doing stupid things because of lust is a time-honored human tradition.

  21. 21.

    Omnes Omnibus

    A study of American college students recently found that 55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in “consensual but unwanted sexting,” i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it. That sounds pretty bleak: Why contort yourself posing butt selfies in the bathroom if it doesn’t turn you on?…

    Consensual but unwanted? I went to see “Beyond Borders” in exactly that frame of mind. I assume the thought process is basically the same here.

    Also, I wonder if the study actually shows that these people don’t ever like it or if it shows that they have done it on occasion when they themselves were not really in the mood but also when they were.

  22. 22.

    ThresherK

    I am also in that age quadrant where I imagine networks asking me not to destroy the demographics on their young, hip shows.

    As the default tech geek in my household, if I were to send a racy pic to my spouse I’d likely be asked to help spouse sign in to the account, open up, and view the file.

  24. 24.

    The Raven on the Hill

    This one is on-topic for an off-topic thread: Charlie Stross weighs in with Rule 34, meet Kafka. It seems that perhaps 8% of the Yahoo video traffic that the British spooks have been intercepting is…porn, porn, porn. He writes:

    I am still trying to get my head around the implications that the British government’s equivalent of the NSA probably holds the world’s largest collection of pornographic videos, that the stash is probably contaminated with seriously illegal material, and their own personnel can in principle be charged and convicted of a strict liability offence if they try to do their job.

  25. 25.

    ThresherK

    @JustRuss: Well, I know who I’m dealing with, so the modern digital version of that gambit is not used. But the I will say that the analog version of that process is still surprisingly effective.

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