How to have great sext: consent advice in online sexting tips

Both mobile phone communication and the genre of sex advice writing are often criticized, the former as unkind and the latter as sexist. Yet some research indicates that digitally mediated communication may have some advantages, particularly when disinhibition might confer benefits such as personal expression or resisting coercion and sexual harassment. This paper investigates whether consent is discussed differently in popular online sexting tips articles as compared with a similar set of general sex advice articles. I find that while general sex tips infrequently address consent and offer communication as an optional practice, sexting tips stress the importance of consent more often and warn sexters about the potential harm an unwanted sext might cause to a recipient. I suggest that this may be due to the particular affordances of mobile phone communication, including lack of physical proximity, asynchronicity, and the reduction of unconscious nonverbal communication. Because this discourse about consent appears in a popular format, it may have the potential to serve as a model for a broader cultural shift towards the normalization of explicit communication about consent for all sexual acts.