Teen girls, sexual double standards and ‘sexting’: Gendered value in digital image exchange
Jessica Ringrose, et al.
In this study Ringrose et al. start a debate regarding gender, age and sexting images (sending nudes
on mobile digital technology). Their research was carried out in two schools in UK during 2011 and
tried to get the perspective of young people. The authors apply an analysis through a feminist
approach to evaluate and understand how young people perceive, negotiate gendered discourses
about sexual and moral on the conversations and interactions they have using their mobile digital
technology when describing, depicting or even sharing images of themselves or others.
The participants were females aged 12 and 13 (year 8 UK) and 14 (year 10 UK), and their research
design consisted of various methods including focus groups discussion and individual interviews with
thirty-five participants. Furthermore, they also analysed the participants’ posts on Facebook and
Blackberry. Their main goal was to understand and create enough data by analysing how these
young people would portrait their sexuality on photos they post or in the interactions via messages
and this could be by posting nudes, requesting, or being requested to send nudes, partial nudes or
even by collecting images which suggest sexuality. Furthermore, they aim to trouble the simplistic
and sensationalist discourses of age-inappropriate sexting and the double standards of sexuality, the
gender inequity discourses and so on.
To contextualise the topic of Sexting”, they used a sample containing some cases McClelland and
Fine’s (2008) ‘intensity sampling’ Furthermore, they used as a parameter another study on moral
visual representation and their theories of how powerful affects and emotion circulate in the viewing
of Reality TV (Skeggs and Wood, 2012). This work assisted them to evaluate some important aspects
of moral and values when looking, judging, and evaluating the worth of subjects through various
codes, which are classed, raced, and gendered.
Another study also pointed out how low- class morality and values are coded upon women and
young girls and images like nudes will also arise some judgment either positive or not. The same
judgment will happen with the images shared online, some people will make a shame of it, some
others will attribute some value to it as it is pointed by (Ringrose and Coleman, 2013).
As the authors put it:” …digital networks are places where images are produced, looked upon,
judged and evaluated in a range of gender and age specific ways” ( ). They discuss how the
architecture of digital profiles and how they allow forms of rating and comparing images of body of
females and males. They pointed out that the teenagers evaluated prefer to interact via Blackberry
messenger. It is a compliment for girls when a boy request photos of them, but at the same time
they need to learn how to negotiate with them about sending these photos or not. This negotiation
encompass the new norms of digital flirtation and this norms can be coercive or not.
They analyse the double standards and the rating attribution when boys are valued for their ability
of convincing girls to send them nudes and so on, and on the other hand girls could be rated
negatively (slut-shame) and being called skets. They analyse how these ratings occur in this
environment and how those photos are valued as commodities.
They argue that we need to scrutinise what make some images valuable and who are those
attributing value to them, who are devaluating them. How are this process of valuing or devaluing
linked to gender and sexual morality. They conclude their work by emphasising the importance of
continuing to address the gender inequity issues involved in sexting and dare readers to imagine
how it would be if we lived in a word where those bias on judgment would not exist and girls could
express their sexuality without being shamed.
