practicing caution and confidence in online sexuality.
Tips for navigating online sexuality are most often directed at minors, who face the unique challenge of exploring their budding sexuality using the internet platforms their whole social lives orbit around. These tips usually follow a common theme: a person should avoid being sexy on the internet until they’ve reached the age of consent.
For modern day adults, however, being sexual online is par for the course. What was once considered sexually “explorative”--like posting seductive images or using dating apps--has become a somewhat regular part of 21st century courting. Mainstream internet is now our Craiglist personal ad... and should be treated as such.
Although the stigma around dating apps has lifted, and with it some of the shame around being sexually explicit on the internet, this new sexual revolution comes with its own risks; AI can draft a fairly convincing, slightly bashfall, highly intelligent invitation to have cocktails at a penthouse apartment nearby--that information alone should be enough to spook us. But it doesn’t, because human beings have an impressive drive towards sex and love and are largely willing to take the risk, and because there are somewhat helpful security measures advertised for most apps and websites.
And there are certainly ways we, as users, can further mitigate this risk. These ways are fairly obvious--don’t share any major identifiers in your profile or direct messages, meet at neutral locations, let someone know where you’re going on the date, don’t post anything on the internet you wouldn’t mind being broadcasted in Times Square, and so on.
But perhaps the most important tip is to avoid getting carried away by our assumptions of another person. People often make this mistake when engaging with celebrities or influencers online--we identify and relate to certain qualities of a persona, maybe more than we relate to people in our day to day lives, and so these public figures are easily trusted and admired.
On dating apps, the matchmaking algorithm often brings us to people we are likely to be drawn to based on who else--or what else--we interact with online, highlighting profiles that are entirely stripped of their context, save for a few coded identifiers. The app says “trust us,” and we do, because so many people are.
Unfortunately, to remove context is to deprive the user of their intuition around an interaction, and so they cannot properly assess comfort, safety, or true attraction. Without our intuition, we might have a major lapse in judgment.
Of course comfort and safety should be taken most seriously, but the threat to chemistry is one which might make for the most convincing argument in a moment of profound hornyness. This gorgeous person with your same hobbies and a trending haircut, asking you to come directly to their apartment, just might smell a bit strange.
