Safer Sexting

Sexting can be super fun and super hot, and it might be a huge and wonderful part of your sex life, or it might be a disaster! So don’t let it be a disaster!

What’s so risky about sexting?

Different kinds of risks

• Physical harm
• Emotional harm
• Financial harm
• Damage to devices

How could sexting actually hurt you physically?

If the person you’re sexting with — or someone who steals their device or account — can find out where you are in real life, they could come after you. On the plus side, if you stay anonymous, you can’t get pregnant or sexually assaulted or an STI (sexually transmitted infection) or any of the other physical dangers associated with sex IRL.

What kind of emotional harm are we talking about?

There’s a wide range of possibilities, from the other person saying something hurtful in the moment, all the way to major consent violations such as sharing your nudes with your friends on the internet. On the plus side, anonymous sexting can give you more protection from emotional manipulation than a real-life relationship, because if you’re texting with someone and you realize they are trying to hurt you, it’s very easy to block them and be done with it.

Financial harm from sexting? What’s that?

If you send anything that’s personally identifying — could be a face pic, an email address, a phone number — it could be used to blackmail you: “send me money or I’ll send your nudes to your public Twitter contacts” — these could include your family. Remember that normally everyone can see the list of your followers and who you follow on Twitter, and this is true of other social media as well, so by the time you get the blackmail threat, it may be too late to lock anything down or delete anything. Also think about the impact on your career and future earning potential if you are expecting to work in a field where adult content connected with your name could be a problem. On the plus side, you could get blackmailed for thousands of dollars and it will still be cheaper than real-world divorce.

And how could sexting hurt my phone?

Try not to get lube and cum on your phone if you can help it. If you don’t normally keep your phone in a full-coverage case, you might want to get one just to use with sexting.

It sounds like you’re saying sexting is too risky. But it’s so great!

Nothing in life is zero risk — it’s always a trade-off of risk and benefit — so safer sexting means getting the risk as low as possible and the benefit as great as possible. It’s not for everyone and that’s ok!

What’s all this about CAPS?

Four principles of safety:

1. CONSENT — Sext with people you know only if you trust them to respect your consent now and forever.
2. ANONYMOUS — Sext with people you don’t know only if you can do it anonymously.
3. PUBLIC — Never send anything to anyone, whether you know them or not, if you wouldn’t want it to show up on the public Internet in a place where your friends and family could see it.
4. SECURE — Do the internet security things.

How do I do this safely with my partner?

When sexting with people you know, make sure you trust them to respect your consent now and in the future.

• Respecting your consent means that you have a conversation before you start sexting in which you say what you expect them to do and not do with what you send, and then they follow your expectations. There can be room for mistakes here! If someone makes a mistake and violates your consent, you want to see them take initiative, own up to it right away, and make a meaningful apology.
• It also means checking in periodically and making sure they are still respecting your consent — better to find out after sending them a few pics than a few gigabytes
• Now and in the future means you not only trust them to respect your consent now while they’re motivated to do so by all your lewds that they’re getting off to, but also in the future when you aren’t sexting with them any more, and they might not have any motivation to respect your consent other than that they believe it’s the right thing to do.
• Keep in mind that even if you’re sending your texts to a person who you know and trust, you’re also sending them to a device which could be hacked and/or stolen, and you’re also sending them to an online account, which can also be hacked and/or stolen.

How about with a random stranger on the Internet?

Sexting with people you don’t know is riskiest, but you can manage those risks if you are careful.

• Keeping yourself anonymous on the Internet is not for everyone — you have to be able and willing to think like someone who wants to hurt you now or might want to hurt you in the future, you have to keep those threats in the back of your head all the time, and you have to feel confident in your own ability to trust that the measures you’re taking to stay anonymous are actually working.
• Even with someone you don’t know, there’s still a place for negotiation to prevent consent violations. You can’t trust them the way you can trust someone you do know, but you can still say what you do and don’t consent to, and what happens in that conversation might give you early indications about whether you want to sext with them.
• Bottom line: assume you can’t trust them, and limit what you do with them to things where trust isn’t required.
• In pictures, don’t include any personally identifying information such as a face or a tattoo, and watch out for other personally identifying information that might show up in a picture of a body part, like a birthmark or maybe some really distinctive makeup.
• In text, don’t include any personally identifying information about yourself, such as physical addresses, names of people you know, account numbers, nearby landmarks, nearby cities and states, etc. This is hard! Assume that if you’re sexting with someone for an extended period of time, some details will get through anyway despite your best efforts, so consider that when choosing who to sext with.

How do I make sure what I send never gets traced back to me?

Don’t share anything that you wouldn’t want to show up on the Internet

• Imagine that what you sent has been posted in a place where your friends and family will see it — if they can tell it’s you even if your name is not posted, don’t send it
• A face pic is risky not only because it’s personally identifying but also because of how it could be used — for example it could be photoshopped onto a body and then shared
• Even if you’re using a texting app that doesn’t save text or pictures, that’s not much protection — they can still take a photo of their screen with another device

OK, but how do I actually manage to stay anonymous?

Do the Internet security things.

• Use a password manager. (This can be a little notebook or a piece of software. What you use matters less than that you do something that makes it easy for you to keep track of all your accounts and passwords.)
• Set a different high-complexity password on each online account you use, both the anonymous ones and the non-anonymous ones.
• When signing up for an anonymous account with which to text, don’t use your real phone number, your real email address, or an account name that identifies you in any way. Get yourself an anonymous email address and a burner phone number, and use a texting app that offers end-to-end encryption so you know that the app servers aren’t saving anything that could be stolen later if/when they have a security breach. I’m not going to recommend specific ways of doing this, do some research. Hint: don’t count on Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp, or Microsoft to care about your privacy. But if you have to pick one of them, pick Apple — they’re the only one on the list whose business model doesn’t actually rely (very much) on violating your privacy.
• It might be tempting to use your anonymous email address or burner phone number for things other than sexting. Don’t do it, because that will leave bread crumbs that could be used to figure out who you are IRL.