Cyberpsychology as Everyday Digital Experience across the Lifespan by Dave Harley Julie Morgan & Hannah Frith

Author:Dave Harley, Julie Morgan & Hannah Frith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Similarly, scholars have noted how blogging and taking/sharing selfies can alter and shape sexuality in ways which expands an individual’s understanding of their sexual selves. Tiidenberg (2013) found that people who engaged in taking sexy selfies reported a widening repertoire of desires and an increase in their general open-mindedness about sex which she attributed to (a) constant exposure to sexual scripts different from one’s own, and (b) pleasurable interactions/sense of community that meant the new information was easily internalised. Moreover, talking and posting selfies often led practitioners to develop an expanded sense of themselves as a sexual being (Tiidenberg 2014). For example, the eroticisation of ‘hands’ by audience members lead one interviewee to develop an understanding of himself as someone who has sexy hands, while another developed a sense of herself as sexy in the face of conventional readings of her body as too old or too overweight to be sexually attractive. Tiidenberg concludes that taking and posting selfies can be a therapeutic practice of accepting one’s body and a way to create a safe place for exploring one’s embodied identity as a sexual being. By posting pictures of the ‘real’ body, in a way which is staged, managed and made meaningful in self-authored ways, individuals can exploit the possibilities of online spaces to create and explore their bodies and their sexuality. Alternatively, users can adopt a ‘stand-in’ body in the form of an avatar to create and experience new sexual experiences which are felt in the material body even as they are enacted by a virtual body. In the following example, a woman describes her experience of cybersex chat in which she makes no distinction between her physical body and her avatar body:I like the feel of your touch too … the smell of your hair, the warmth of your breath on my lips, the softness of your skin as I caress your shoulders and arms. (Bardzell et al. 2014, p. 3947)

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