The New York Times Promotes Sexting

To make its own special contribution to the #MeToo movement the New York Times has published an article encouraging women to text full frontal pictures of their genitalia. And to share them with others. You cannot make this stuff up.

We ought to be promoting modesty. We ought to be promoting respect for women’s achievements. We ought to respect women for their minds, not their external genitalia.

Not the New York Times. It has explained how and why a woman should overcome her sense of shame and send out pictures of her genitals to some loving boyfriend or husband.

The Time pretends that these pictures will only be enjoyed in the privacy of one’s boudoir. It does not understand that teenage girls are reading this stuff and that when they send similar pictures to some boy they want to seduce, they do not understand that the pictures will be distributed openly and freely in the locker room.

The Times is normalizing shamelessness. It is assaulting female modesty. It is declaring this activity to be just another loving gesture for a couple that wants to heat up its sex life. This is beyond appalling. If you want to know why girls sext, the answer is, the culture encourages it. If it does not encourage it, it condones it.

If you were wondering why a quarter of the teenage girls in America are cutting themselves or burning their bodies, perhaps it has something to do with the feeling of being overexposed, of having no privacy and no modesty and no intimacy. We have become a culture of voyeurs... and the victims are invariably women.

The Times presents it all as an everyday occurrence, though one that ought not to be exposed to the children:

It was Thanksgiving, and Matt Silver was sitting around a table with his family when his 24-year-old girlfriend texted. “It was the first time we’d been apart,” he said. A full-frontal bare vulva popped up on his screen; he fumbled and the phone landed faceup under his 10-year-old cousin’s chair. (He retrieved the phone with his foot.)

Apparently, this exercise is designed to enhance sexual desire. You have to wonder what people did to stoke the flames of lust before the iPhone:

The V-selfie, though very much here, is perhaps less insistent. Shared on dating apps or in texts, it has been sent to create longing and a sense of intimacy: a missive of lust and promise to lovers, or would-be lovers, who are separated.

And then, of course, the paper finds a pathetic fool who rationalizes the action, making it a sign of commitment. No one seems to understand that once your beloved possess this image, he can easily share it… in what might be called revenge porn. Even if he does not, a woman knows that he can do it, so the threat is implicit:

He describes her V-selfies as “bold, courageous, beautifying, radiant and captivating when there’s a story and based on a conversation that led up to it. It’s not just an image. It shows an element of trust.”

The new intimacy, like everything else, is virtual. Wooing, connecting, arousing and even cuckoldry is virtual.

You would think that these people might want to try in-person “wooing.” And besides, who uses the word “wooing” to describe exposing or gazing at pornographic images?

And then, there are the aesthetics:

From the awkward angle, purpled hue and identifying features, we realized Vivien had missed the advice on lighting and how to take the perfect anonymous shot (it’s all out there on Google) and included not only the beauty mark under her right breast but also a pierced heart necklace.

Author Laren Stover seems to think that it’s about:

the internet’s enabling of mass vagina gazing.

One understands that these pictures most often lack a face shot. Thus, the possessor of the genitalia in question are not recognizable. Still, doesn’t this suggest that the exercise represents a loss of face. And if this is supposed to promote pride, why don't women attach their faces to the images?

No story about such activities would be complete without referring to Courbet’s notorious painting, The Origin of the World. Thus allows the Times art critic to exclaim and explain that a woman who exposes her genitalia to public view is proud of her sexuality. Huh. How stupid do you have to be to confuse shamelessness with pride:

According to Roberta Smith, the co-chief art critic of The New York Times, Courbet’s painting “identifies woman as proud possessor, revealing the ultimate object of the male gaze with a forthrightness that can stop the gaze in its tracks.”

And, don’t try to encourage a liberated woman to keep her clothes on. She will happily flash the world and declare it to be art:

The vulva has been occasionally flashed in real life as performance art. The artist Deborah De Robertis exposed her genitals, glamorously framed by her shimmering gold sequined dress, in front of Courbet’s painting at the Musée d’Orsay in 2014 (the viewers applauded) and more recently bared her vulva in front of the Mona Lisa at the Louvre, accompanying the display with a chant.

Stover is slightly discommoded here, because the images shared over your iPhone lack a certain aesthetic appeal. Dare I mention, that a few paragraphs ago she was suggesting that it was a grand erotic gesture.

The smartphone has democratized and arguably cheapened, like so much else, this particular form of expression.

In case you didn’t get the message, this shameless exhibitionism is all about female genital pride:

Now singing the praises of female genital pride is Regena Thomashauer in her book “Pussy: A Reclamation.” 

Again, it’s about the aesthetics or, should I say, the cosmetics:

“We’re in a generation full of people that want cosmetic improvements so they can share images,” Dr. Frank said. “I think the feeling of one’s sexuality is very much a center point of one’s image of themselves.” Intimate pictures have become more common in courtship, he pointed out. “I think you and I are both a generation out of that, but it appears that it is a major form of communication.”

And naturally, it’s empowering. Because we know that when an empowered woman meets a man she wants him to start thinking about how she looks down there. She doesn't want him to stare longingly into her eyes. She wants to direct his gaze toward her crotch.

Therapists have weighed in on the problem, on the wrong side, of course.If a woman does not want to show off her genitals via text message, we can always find a therapist who will pronounce her to be neurotic:

Not all women feel empowered, and some are afraid to look at or experience their own intimate feminine beauty. Nick, a 31-year-old software salesman and former Marine who served two combat tours in Iraq and the Republic of Georgia, brought up his girlfriend’s sexual inhibition to his PTSD therapist, who prescribed they take V-selfies over a mirror.

“She was very unsure of herself, very unconfident,” Nick said. “We didn’t have sex very often. It wasn’t something she was super-comfortable with, but I was in love with her. I was like, ‘O.K., well I guess I’ll find a way to make this no longer an issue.’”

I would happily believe that this is a joke. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Whether its news fit to print, is another story.