Taking and sending nudes should feel sexy, empowering, and most importantly, worry-free. Sadly, sharing a nude means risking the recipient showing your private pics to others without your consent, or even worse, posting them online. But just because sexting is risky doesn’t mean people will stop doing it, or that they should. One study found that over 80% of young American adults have sent or received an explicit message or photo.
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Non-consensual nude-sharing is often called “revenge porn.” However, this term is a bit misleading. Nudes are not always shared to get back at the person who took them, and porn is, by definition, consensual. Nevertheless, about 1 in every 25 Americans has either been threatened with or been a victim of non-consensual nude sharing. The all-too-common narrative that people whose nudes are shared publicly are the ones to blame follows the same logic of slut-shaming and victim-blaming. To be clear, there is NOTHING wrong with sending or receiving consensual nudes. 
And the reality is that most people are going to keep sending nudes. Criticism that you shouldn’t send them in the first place isn’t very helpful or realistic. Discouraging people from expressing themselves sexually for fear that it will be used against them is actually incredibly backwards — it ends up demonizing the people taking nudes, and not the scumbags sharing them without consent. And just as abstinence-only education doesn’t stop people from having sex (or protect them from STIs and unwanted pregnancies), preaching against sending nudes doesn’t help anyone learn safer practices. 

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