Sexting as Foreplay Technology and Briefly Ron Artest

Some thoughts on the erotic potential of sexting

Most aspects of our relationships have their digital counter. Rather than fear the digital, like many do, I argue that with enough creativity and ardor we can use these media to enhance our relationships.

It’s true that texting allows us to feign intimacy, typing depthless messages, keeping our distance, knowing accountability is nil. But that’s a personal choice or a result of passivity, rather than an ultimate result of form. If we privilege language’s ability to convey meaning, and affect someone on an intimate level, there’s no reason a well-crafted sentence exchanged between phones can’t resonate on an emotional or physical plane.

You lie alone in bed, missing your lover, craving his voice and touch. The shrill sound of your text tone startles you, makes you ill at ease. But opening the phone’s window, you see a clever text. You smile. The text is lifted from the screen, the words separate, dancing in the room’s deep blue. You croon as the text spreads, dissipates, conjoining with the night. The words no longer belong to the sender, nor the phone. They are yours to interpret critically or play with aimlessly. Maybe you respond. Or maybe you want to preserve the text, holding on tight as you fall asleep, eventually surrendering it to dreams, where it colors your unconscious life.

Texting excites the body, mind, and imagination over a distance. A sender constructs textual messages that’ll influence a receiver in ways he/she cannot do in person.

Go a step further with sexting: Must the suggestion of sex through digital media blunt the actual sexual experience? Definitely not. This is only true for the person who uses sexting as a cheap alternative, seeking instant gratification.

But consider sexting the latest in foreplay technology. Sexting should entice and tease a lover. When you think of your lover, your body reacts. The unexpected vibrations of your phone, the possibility of an erotic text, puts your body on edge. Viewing the message, you lose your breath. You put the phone away, take it out again, and each time the message excites in you a different type of joy, lust, or desire.

When you send a text, you wait, heart beating fast, in anticipation of your lover’s response. Have I said too much? Taken this too far? Perhaps he’ll take it further, words make me shake in bed.

The text doesn’t come. You’re anxious and confused and give up hope. But suddenly it arrives. Your body spasms, your hand shakes feverishly. You want to be forever suspended in the moment right after your phone vibrates and right before you view the message.

Of course the finale of a sexting session can only be an actual orgasm. But everything prior to your climax builds tension in a unique way, different than any physical interaction.

Ron Artest recently sexted an anonymous woman who leaked their conversation online. His sexts are failures because sexting as a complex erotic act escapes him. Not because there’s something fundamentally stupid about sexting.

His poorly written, “You like to 69?” and, “Have u ever swallowed during getting eaten out?” will excite no one, except gossip rags that sensationalize these banal types of stories. Rather than brush off sexting as something easy to tritely mock and criticize, we ought to think hard about what it can offer in the way of sexual appeal.

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