The Joy of Sexting

Is in receiving an unexpected message from your partner, and opening it in the pub to find an image of them masturbating so lewdly pornographic it causes you to immediately kill your screen and stuff your phone back in your pocket (blushing slightly, afraid someone saw), and leaves you wanting to make some weak excuse to slip away to the smoking area and take a second look, confirm that momentary glimpse of skin and fingers and open mouth… but having to wait, just a minute or two, because of how obscenely hard that glimpse has made you.

It’s in spending an entire day interweaving a fantasy with other activities. Drafting replies as you cook your dinner. Pondering the next thing you’ll say while your mind should be on work. Ignoring the television in favour of the latest exchange of words; that incrementally slow ramping up, every message giving a little more than the one before, replies clustering closer and closer together until – come late evening – you find yourselves both in bed, miles apart, the day’s distractions all behind you, finally able to focus, to finish the story you’ve spent all day writing.

It’s in lying in bed masturbating, waiting for your phone to buzz – time that you are spending wanking, and they are spending writing, or vice versa. And being just about to come when they finally finish their latest reply, and stopping yourself right on the brink, holding back, delaying that little bit longer because, before you tip yourself over the edge, you need to know what they’ve just said.

It’s in scrolling back and finding in your message history periods of time when your messages cluster closer and closer together, become urgent, feather off in strings of I want that, don’t you want that, I want that too, hard, so bad, so badly, hardly, so hard right there, fill me up, please, fill me up. Intimate filth in the same long history as other more quotidian kinds of talking: do you have the tickets for this evening, do you mind if I’m early, oh my god you won’t believe this thing.