Sexting & Intimate Relations Online: Identifying how People Construct Emotional Relationships Online and Intimacies Offline

Intimate relationships online have become stimulated through the convenient nature the digital world offers in terms of instant and mobile communication. This availability for "real time" conversations on social media platforms has become to accommodate an online space for sexting. Sexting here defined for the purpose of this paper, as: the ability to communicate intimately or explicitly through a form of digital communication. Mobile devices have changed the way we use technology, demanding a need for immediate response. Therefore, the ability to discuss sex digitally begins to complicate offline face-to-face interaction the movement between psychological intimacies and effects emotional boundaries, in traditional interactions. This research paper will highlight a variety of emotive hegemonic discourses, to which heterosexual men and women feel the need to conform to online, to avoid stigmatisation offline. I observe the understanding of the construction of these emotional boundaries. This ethnographic research considers a sense of "sex expectation" through a series of expert and non-expert interviews in order to deconstruct an understanding of how social media and mobile technology facilitates intimacy online. There is a tendency for users online to adopt an alternative identity (Hasinoff 2014), which they may not be willing to explore in the offline world for fear of stigmatisation or rejection. Resulting in the use of hosting explicit sexual images online, in a public domain once intended to be private. Multiple 'sex' sites already exist on Twitter, @sexselfies (2014) and @iTakeSexSelfies (2015). This research investigated these sites in order to further highlight the contrasting identities of gender discourses: the ideology that women who display an interest in sex become identified as "slut" (Ringrose & Harvey 2015). In contrast, societal discourses require men to express their interest in sex, overlooking their emotive feelings towards an intimate relationship, according to Shilling, (2003). Sexting provides one lens through which to examine what is deemed to be "acceptable" within contemporary society, through the very public digital documentation of intimacy and relationships online. This paper narrows down the larger picture of sexting to focus on one lens to which to examine what is deemed to be "acceptable" within contemporary society.