NEW YORK's "Canceled at 17": Should Teen Girls Avoid Sexting?

In Elizabeth Weil's, seemingly viral, New York cover story "Canceled at 17: When kids make mistakes, and classmates never forgive", Weil profiled 17-year-old Diego whom was "cancelled" by a number of his "elite performing arts high school in San Francisco" schoolmates after he "showed a nude of [Fiona] his beautiful girlfriend to a few kids". 

To the dismay of some of the article's commenters, this is how Weil described Fiona:

Fiona was Diego’s first real girlfriend, and she was almost psychedelically beautiful: pale, celestial skin, a whole galaxy of freckles, a supernova of lush hair. 

It appears that the readers of the Weil's cover story are mostly divided between team Diego and team Fiona. Team Diego are of the opinion that Diego made a regrettable mistake by sharing Fiona's nude, and, at the risk of being blamed for "victim blaming", team Diego advised Fiona to avoid taking nudes in the future. 

Team Fiona are of the stance that Weil's article is too forgiving of Diego, Diego is an abuser, and, despite the fact that Fiona's teen nude was produced with her full consent, Fiona was victimized. 

However, per Diego, he had the following conversation with Fiona where she said that Diego was not an abuser:

Diego, "I don’t appreciate getting treated like an abuser."

Fiona "I don’t think you’re an abuser at all. I know that."

Weil: "But this had grown way beyond them."

Consequently, wanderfranco113513 commented: 

Even Fiona told him she knew he was not an abuser" Half the people commenting did not even read this. Or at least chose to ignore it. Probably the most important part of the article

Still, some commenters suggested that Diego committed a sexual offence and that he distributed child porn, but, unlike mrs.danvers, not a lot of commenters suggested that Fiona should be charged with producing child porn too - thereby, avoiding being accused of "victim blaming":

mrs.danvers: I fail to see why the police have any call to involve themselves, he didn't commit a crime. I've heard some in this thread suggest that the photos was "child porn" but that seems rather a stretch. Who would the cops arrest-- Diego, for possessing alleged child porn; or Fiona, for creating alleged child porn?

In agreement with most orthodox Jews and Muslims, crissiegirld suggested that teen girls should "forcefully resist" sexting, and mjg suggested "single sex schools":

crissiegirld: But altho the boys who share nude photos of girls are certainly jerks, they couldn’t do that if the girls hadn’t agreed to have the photos taken in the first place. Isn’t it a better idea for teens to forcefully resist the taking of intimate photos? 

mjg: But I would posit that sending kids to single sex schools and not getting them phones until they're much older would prevent many cases like this one. 

However, kundalina disagreed with crissiegirl and opined that teen girls should not be discouraged from sexting.  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

kundalina: Yes let’s keep insisting girls simply forcefully resist their own abuse in a culture that continues to excuse their assault, exploitation and oppression 

Interestingly, paisleypie commented: "Teen sexting. What else is new?" And if you read this blog and/or our books, you'll know that paisleypie's correct. For example, we wrote a post about Lily Puckett's Teen Vogue article "How to Sext: The Best Tips and Tricks" (APRIL 13, 2017)

Relatedly, Weil wrote that a group of students at Oakland School for the Arts had been swapping nudes of coeds, it was shared in the comments that castrozb28's "17 year old son gets unsolicited nude photos in his DM‘s several times a week", and rsladester caught her 7th grader attempting to take a "quasi-nood" for her BF. [Emphasis added]

oasisgirl girl even opined that Fiona will "likely send nudes to guys in the future":

oasisgirl: What’s interesting is that he [Diego] will never do what he did ever again because he’s been so traumatized. She however will more than likely send nudes to guys in the future and tell him “please don’t share these pics with anyone. Someone did that to me once and it really sucked” 

In the end, k2maj5 may have summed it up best: "Started with a nude photo. Don’t all these incidents go back to photos and social media. HELLO? Very long article just to warn my kids 'don’t take nude photos'"