Women More Likely To Feel ‘Empowered’ By Nude Sexting, Study Says

Why do women (and men) send nude photos of themselves via text message?  An extensive new study conducted by University of Arizona doctoral candidate Morgan Johnstonbaugh found that the reasons why people engage in “sexting” are far more complex than is generally assumed, in particular for women. For women, Johnstonbaugh found paradoxically that the practice of sexting nude selfies can be both disempowering and empowering, according to a summary of the study by the science news site Eureka Alert.  For the study, Johnstonbaugh surveyed about 1,000 college-age individuals, whose average age was 20.  Women were four times more likely than men to say that they sent nude images in order to hold the interest of a romantic partner, or to discourage that partner from looking at nude pictures of other women—such as porn, presumably—indicating a disempowering, even desperate motivation for sending sexts. But the study also found women four times more likely to say that sending nude images gave them a sense of empowerment, and twice as likely as men to say that sending nude selfies boosted their own self-confidence. “Women might find sexting to be really empowering because you can create a space where you feel safe expressing your sexuality and exploring your body,” Johnstonbaugh said. “The fact that women are more likely to feel both empowered and disempowered—that they’re selecting both of these options when thinking about the same event—highlights the fact that women have more to gain from a potentially beneficial interaction, but they also have more to lose.” Either way, the fact that numerous women in the study gave both empowering and disempowering reasons for sexting showed that women’s motives for texting nude or sexually explicit images of themselves are more complex than might be stereotypically believed, the researcher said. While women often feel pressured to share sexually explicit images via text, the study found that young men also feel the same pressure. In the study, 40 percent of both men and women said that they had sent a nude picture in order to satisfy a request of the person receiving the image, according to a HuffPost report on the study. High percentages of men and women also said that their motivation for sexting was simply to sexually arouse the recipient—which was, in fact, perhaps not surprisingly, the most common reason given for sending a nude image. Nearly three of every four women (73 percent) listed "turning on the recipient" as their motivation for sexting, while two of every three men (67 percent) said the same thing. Photo By Pro Juventute / Wikimedia Commons