Sexting among British adults: a qualitative analysis of sexting as emotion work governed by 'feeling rules'

Sexting has generated considerable public and professional interest with concerns centring on young people, and potential harms to mental and sexual health. Little research thus far has explored the practice among adults and none has focused on the cultural norms relating to the emotional experience of sexting across different ages and genders. We conducted 40 semi-structured interviews with a diverse sample of adults aged 18-59 years in Britain on the role of digital technologies in participants' sexual lives. In this paper, we draw on the accounts of 34 people with experience of sexting. We identified three main themes in participants' accounts related to the emotional aspects of sexting: (1) trust, (2) desire/intimacy and (3) shame. Under each theme, we identified motivations, 'feeling rules', and examples of 'emotion work' relating to the self, the other and the dyad. We conclude that there are shared cultural norms that constitute what appropriate sexting should feel like. Interventions aiming to minimise harms arising from sexting need to build on commonly held cultural conventions regarding the 'rules of the game' concerning feelings as well as behaviours.

Online Sexual Partner Seeking as a Social Practice: Qualitative Evidence from the 4th British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal-4)

Once perceived as a means for those unsuccessful at traditional dating, online dating has become normalized as a way to seek sexual or romantic partners. In 2019, we interviewed 40 British adults on the role of digital technologies in their sexual lives; this paper draws on the accounts of 22 who had used such technologies for seeking partners. We analyzed qualitative accounts of online partner seeking as a social practice, drawing on a sample diverse in age, gender and sexual orientation, and informed by sexual script and social practice theory. Our theoretically informed analysis emphasized the multiple meanings and goals involved, the affordances of the technology and individuals' skills. Our study provided several novel contributions. Young heterosexual people commonly used general social media, rather than dating apps, to meet partners; meeting partners often involved complex interplays between online and offline networks and encounters. Risks were defined not merely in relation to "risky others" but in terms of one's own actions or attitudes. Participants deployed various skills in minimizing harms such as non-consensual sharing of intimate images, and used self-care skills such as setting limits to engagement.

Weird Lullaby: Jane Campion's The Piano

This article examines the construction of woman's voice, gaze and desire in Jane Campion's Oscar-winning film The Piano, 1993, with particular reference to the film's central character, Ada, and to the traditional female figures which her character suggests – siren, mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard's wife. It investigates the ways in which The Piano interrogates and disturbs traditional patriarchal narratives, ways of speaking and seeing, and patriarchal constructions of bodily pleasure and desire; revealing these as partial, hard of hearing, short sighted and incapable of pleasure. It argues that while the film succeeds in this interrogation, it goes further in its attempt to envisage forms of speech, sight and pleasure which do not conform to traditional models based on the notion of rigid oppositions between self and other, masculine and feminine, active and passive. Instead, by focusing on mutual pleasure, sensuality, communication and the ability to be moved, it sets in motion ‘other’ ways of experiencing and understanding women's voices, looks, desires.

It concludes that The Piano articulates a demand for an encounter with men, in which women are neither marginalized as ‘the feminine’ nor re-incorporated into a patriarchal order; and imagines the possibility of both autonomy and connection, power and pleasure.