So, We All Have an Innate Need to Sext, Eh? Really.

OK…

I think I’ve shared before that I have no hopes of running for politics because (for one thing) there are some naked pictures of me, from college, floating around somewhere in this world. It was on a farm, one of my female friends was an aspiring photographer, we we bored. You know the say, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

So, that said, I can’t really get all uppity about sexting. Although I will say this: I’m not sure why people want to say (or send or show) things via electronic devices if they don’t want to incur the risk of getting caught. In other words, why do pictures and copy need to be emailed or sent through a phone rather than revealed *in person*? Could it be that a lot of us have a subconscious desire to either watch porn or *be the porn*?

It would seem that according to one article, “The Urge to Sext Naked Self-Portraits Is Primal“, that that is *exactly* the case. Kind of:

“The desire of the man is for the woman,” Madame de Stael famously penned, “The desire of the woman is for the desire of the man.” Being the center of sexual attention is a fundamental female turn-on dramatized in women’s fantasies, female-authored erotica, and in the cross-cultural gush of sultry self-portraits.

Studies have found that more than half of women’s sexual fantasies reflect the desire to be sexually irresistible. In one academic survey, 47 percent of women reported the fantasy of seeing themselves as a striptease dancer, harem girl, or other performer. Fifty percent fantasized about delighting many men.

“Being desired is very arousing to women,” observes clinical psychologist Marta Meana, president of the Society for Sex Therapy and Research. “An increasing body of data is indicating that the way women feel about themselves may be very important to their experience of sexual desire and subjective arousal, possibly even outweighing the impact of their partners’ view of them.”…

Men do not share women’s desire to be desired. Instead, they emulate their bonobo brethren: The internet is saturated with penis self-portraits from every nation on Earth. At any given moment, one in four cameras on the webcam network ChatRoulette are aimed at a penis. On the adult networking site Fantasti.cc, 36 percent of men use an image of a penis as their avatar; only 5 percent of women use a vagina. On Reddit’s heterosexual Gone Wild forum in 2010, where users were free to post uncensored pictures of themselves, 35 percent of images self-posted by men consisted of penises….

Though hordes of men pay to peruse amateur photography depicting the anatomy of ladies, not a single website collects cash from ladies interested in surveying amateur photography of phalluses. It is this marked gender difference in interest that reveals the dichotomous evolutionary pressures shaping male and female exhibitionism: Women feel the conscious desire to catch the universally attentive male eye, but since women’s erotic attention is rarely ensnared by a penis, the male exhibitionist urge is comparatively vestigial.

Yeah. Lots of jargon, but it does remind me of something that I once heard: Both men and women find the woman’s body to be more attractive (which is why even a lot of heterosexual women find themselves aroused by lesbian pornography). Hence, men like to watch porn and a lot of women prefer to read about it (erotica *is* a form of porn).

But I guess my question to you guys in all of this is that it’s one thing to want to be found desirable by the person you’re in a relationship with. It’s another to want all of cyberspace to cosign. So, specifically as it relates to women, do you think sexting is about the need to feel wanted by the man they are in a relationship with OR the need to feel validated by any and every person who “happens upon” the text or pic? AND, do you think that people who send naked pictures of themselves even stop to consider that it’s basically like being a porn model for free?

Sound off…