Sexuality: Generation Z taxes ‘sexting’ in stride

I can remember being 17 and seeing my first “naughty” text message pop onto my phone screen. The bluntness of “Let me bone you” somehow seemed so much raunchier and sexier than someone’s voice on the other end of a telephone. Now five years later “sexting” has evolved into something else, much like its predecessors.

If you flip through the archives of Out Front, you’ll come across the 1-800 lines for leather daddies and bears looking for a good time. While these party lines are no longer plastered across every page of the magazine, you can still find the occasional one located in the back of the issue. But let’s face it, the sexual mechanisms of the ’80s and ’90s were quickly replaced by the technology of the new millennium.

Cyber sex swept not only the nation, but the rest of the world, as well. We can all remember logging into Yahoo! chat rooms and typing our ASL – age/sex/location – and more often than not lying about it. I don’t know how many times I was an 18-year-old blonde cheerleader from Miami.

Of course there are still chat rooms to “cyber” in. In fact, now they’re even tailor-made for specific sexual desires, like BDSMchat.net, Pinkcupid.com and bros4bros.com. But like everything, newer technology is always invented.

As Generation Z – people born in the late 1990s to 2010 – came into sexual maturity, chat rooms and sexting weren’t cutting it; reading words on a screen wasn’t enough, we needed to see the person on the other end of the technological line. And thus sites like Chat Roulette and Sex Roulette were born.

With a simple click of the mouse, users on both of these sites could instantly be connected in a video chat. The terms and conditions were quickly violated with Chat Roulette – technically, people are supposed to stay clothed – so Sex Roulette was created, where anything goes and there’s no censoring.

The timeline doesn’t stop there, though. Now that Generation Z-ers are continuing to mature – both sexually and mentally – we’re learning that while we want to be sexually exploitive to a certain extent, maybe sending naked pictures and narrating what we want to do to each other via text isn’t the smartest idea. So someone wised up and created Snapchat – an app that allows users to text time-sensitive photos to one another; Snapchatters set the amount of time that the other person can see the picture before it disappears.

This breakthrough application sees more than 30 million viewers per day with its certain degree of freedom.

“I Snapchat all the time because it means I’m not committing to the photo of myself being out there for the whole world to see,” said 21-year-old Regan McCauley.

Non-Generation Z-ers are less enthused about this evolved sex application.

“Like most people born before the 1990s, I’m not a Snapchat user,” said Farhan Majoo, a writer for Slate, in a recent column. “I’ve long assumed the worst about the app – that combining cameras, young people and secret, self-destructing messages could only mean trouble.”

So here we are, in 2013 and Generation Z is hornier than ever. And then you add in Generations X and Y and we have literally, a cluster fu*k. So where do we go from here?

The vices we have for our sexual appetite will suffice today, but tomorrow we’ll be hungry again.

“Skype sex and Snapchat are fun for now,” said Jeanne Vance, a sociology major. “But we’re humans, we love sex, and we love technology. We’ve already meshed the two, and we’ll just keep wanting more until we’re satisfied. But that time will probably never come.”