Maureen O’Connor is ambivalent about it:
Even as sexting colonizes our phones, the activity hasn’t exactly taken over our libidos: a study of American college students recently found that 55 percent of women and 48 percent of men have engaged in “consensual but unwanted sexting,” i.e., sexting when they’re not that into it. That sounds pretty bleak: Why contort yourself posing butt selfies in the bathroom if it doesn’t turn you on? …
Of course, sex has always been something of a performance. But as amateur porn floods into our lives – and our lives flood into amateur porn – the difference between earnest pleasure and enthusiastic fakery is increasingly difficult to discern. It’s tempting to think that in performing the “consensual but unwanted” things we believe to be sexy, we are preventing ourselves from engaging in the truly sexy – behaving like thwarted teenagers instead of adults who actually have sex.
But sexual diversions don’t need to be measured by how closely they approximate coitus; innuendo can be enjoyable on its own, the same way hot photos are fun to look at even when masturbation is, like, the furthest thing from our minds. If I hadn’t been sexting that night at my kitchen counter, I might have been watching TV or killing time on the Internet. That sexting session wasn’t an inferior version of sex; it was a superior version of Candy Crush.
The Dish 