Beware the sexy selfie
Less is most definitely more when it comes to displaying your personal bits online, writes Bianca Capazorio
YOU have just started chatting online to someone who seems like a very nice guy. Your phone buzzes with a message. And there, in full technicolour, nestled in the checked fabric of his boxer shorts, is his penis.
Sexy selfies, featuring people of all shapes and sizes in poses ranging from sexy to downright disturbing, are flooding social media and dating sites.
And whereas many are sending these self-portraits to tease and titillate their partner, others’ selfies are not quite so gratefully received.
One woman who had just started chatting to a man on dating cellphone app Tinder was shocked when, after just a few messages, he started sending her pictures of his penis.
“What did he think I was going to do? Swoon? I blocked him immediately.” She said the incident made her reconsider using the app altogether.
One user of a gay dating site said he regularly received penis pictures from complete strangers. “You’ll open a message and there is a picture of this guy with his junk in his hand.”
One man said he enjoyed exchanging naked pictures with his partners, although he had never sent any naked pictures to women he had not met.
“I love it when women send naked pictures of themselves. They are like works of art,” he said.
GoodHope FM DJ Nigel Pierce said he had received a few pictures, mostly of women “doing their thing and showing their thing”, forwarded to him by men after raising the issue on his show. “I was really quite surprised by it, because this is not the kind of thing I do and it’s not the kind of thing my friends do. In the world I live in, I wouldn’t take out my penis and say hey, do you want to go out for a drink?”
Search the phrase “naked selfie” on Instagram or Twitter and you will be met with a flood of images of exposed breasts, chests and other body parts.
An emerging naked selfie trend is that of the after-sex selfie, in which couples take pictures of themselves in all their dishevelled postcoital bliss.
A Cape Town-based sex columnist and blogger, who writes under the name Dorothy Black, said: “I love that we’re talking about sex in places other than the bedroom. But does your specific postcoital bliss brag have to be on the feeds? I don’t know.
“Honestly, I can’t see the point of it other than to play into the dissociative narcissm that social media platform performance can be.”
Plus, there were pitfalls, she said. “It might seem cute and bonding at the time, but in my opinion this very public display of affection holds more negatives than positives. What happens when you break up? Or a potential employer is googling you? Who owns the pic and who gets to say how long it stays up for? What about those selfies where people are looking less than happy? Or the other person doesn’t even seem to know they’re being photographed? How rude.”
Johannesburg-based social media lawyer Emma Sadleir warned: “I can’t say this enough: never film yourself having sex.” In fact, Never Film Yourself Having Sex is the working title of a book she is writing about the pitfalls of this kind of thing, due out later this year. Sadleir said she was seeing an increasing number of clients seeking help after naked pictures of themselves had surfaced on the internet.
And, she said, if teenagers took and shared naked selfies, they stood to be prosecuted for making and disseminating child pornography.
“They don’t even have to be naked. The law says pictures of a child that are designed to arouse can be classed as child pornography.
“Countries all over the world are starting to prosecute this,” she said, citing a case in Welkom in which a 17year-old girl and the 42-year-old man she was sending naked pictures to are both to be prosecuted this year. The girl was charged with making and disseminating pornography and the man with sexual grooming of a child. Her father laid the initial complaint after finding the images on her cellphone.
Further afield, US politician Anthony Weiner lived up to his name when he sent pictures of his penis with sexually suggestive messages to women in 2011, after which he resigned from Congress. However, not to be deterred, he was involved in a similar scandal last year.
And last year, Jonas White, the mayor of the Western Cape municipality of Cederberg, was suspended from the ANC for allegedly sending several pictures of his erect penis to a co-worker, including one in which it was covered in whipped cream and topped with a strawberry.
Sadleir said if sexy images were leaked online, either by a jealous ex or someone else, the damage to a person’s reputation could not be undone.
“If someone puts pictures of you online, there are legal routes you can take to have them taken down, but this often draws more attention to the problem because the case has to go through the courts and the pictures are in the court file as annexures.
“My advice, if you absolutely must send naked pictures, is make sure your face and your genitals are not in the same picture.”
This is advice Madonna could have taken before recently posting a selfie of herself in the bath, face turned away from the camera, and important bits covered by bubbles.
Hollywood heart-throb James Franco has also posted several pictures of himself in his underpants — one of which shows him with his hand down the front of his underpants. He recently appeared on the Jay Leno show and defended the pictures, saying: “It’s what the people want.”