If appeals to reason and decency can’t convince teens to lay off the nudie pics, Mexico is betting an animated video of exposed and mortified sexters will. The Mexican government and a slew of children’s advocacy groups have started a new campaign advising adolescents to “Think Before You Sext” in a series of videos and graphics that offer 10 reasons why sexting is a bad idea.
Fusion reports that the campaign, helmed by Mexico’s National Institute for Transparency, Access to Information, and Protection of Personal Data (INAI), is the center of a nationwide debate over whether sending provocative photos by phone is a an immoral practice that puts kids at risk or a fine element of a healthy sex life.
The 10 reasons laid out by the campaign are pretty standard and basically true: People and relationships can change; sexting can lead to criminal charges (like possession of child pornography); your photos might end up on social media; blackmailers love to get their hands on nude photos; and you can’t control who gets your photos once they’re out there. See them all acted out by generously endowed cartoon ladies taking off their bras, exposing their cartoon cleavage, and covering their nipples to a whimsical soundtrack:
The best part of this video is its attempt at gender neutrality. The segment warning teens that even a photo of a disembodied sex organ can be traced back to an individual person shows a Grindr-like shot of a naked male chest with a nipple ring. (A nipple ring! Might as well be a fingerprint.) There are two separate instances of horndog ladies posting sexts from men on a Facebook. One is a photo of a guy reenacting “Dick in a Box” (“I’d give anything to see [his penis],” a girl comments); the other is a skinny nerd striking a heartthrob pose (“girls , we have a porn actor in class,” the shady caption reads).
In reality, men are rarely victimized by women sharing their sexts without consent. Fusion quotes the director of a children’s digital rights organization, who says among Mexican students, men and women text sexual photos at almost equivalent rates, but 49 out of 50 victims of privacy or consent violations in sexting are female.
The problem, then, isn’t sexting itself. It’s people using sexting as a means to harass, humiliate, and abuse women. Sexting can be a healthy way to explore attraction and sexuality without actually performing any sex acts, and as long as teens have phones, they’re going to use them to take photos of their respective junk. Even the INAI commissioner responsible for Mexico’s anti-sexting campaign admitted in a press conference that eliminating sexting is as futile a prospect as ending STIs. The best any government agency can hope for, he said, is managing the consequences of sexting through prevention education.
That’s not entirely true. Principles of harm reduction dictate that preventing the harmful effects of a behavior is just as important as educating people about those potential consequences so they can decide themselves whether or not to take the risk. When it comes to sexting, this would mean stricter laws against and better prosecution of revenge porn and sites that distribute it. It would mean teaching boys to challenge traditional tropes of masculinity and have respect for women and their bodies. It would mean educating people about better protecting their sensitive information from hackers. A warning about cyberbullying might prevent some cautious teens from texting a topless shot, but without addressing the real danger—the cyberbullies and sextortionists—it won’t do much good for the rest.
