A joke in The Onion is the lamentations of young men in college who failed to lure actual naked women with posters of naked women. Their inference that led to the experiment was actually sound, but real-life does not always follow reason.

And while sexual behavior of any kind, including "sexting" (texts about sex) - if you are not sure if sexting is sexual behavior, ask your spouse - is going to warrant concern from parents when it comes to kids, the perils of real or unprotected sex caused by sexting are not evident. Sexting is not a gateway to real sex. So far.

For a recent analysis, the authors found 234 journal articles that looked at sexting, but then removed studies that didn’t look at the relationship between sexting and behavior, as well as any studies that didn’t include clearly defined quantitative measures of sexting or sexual behavior. Ultimately, this process winnowed it down to 15 studies that looked at whether there was any link between sexting and: sexual activity; unprotected sex; and/or the number of sex partners one has. They found that there was a weak statistical relationship between sexting and all of those categories – and that was when looking solely at correlation. Evidence didn't show sexting actually influenced behavior at all.

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The problem? Just like noted above, there is no agreed-upon definition for sexting. Does sexting consist only of sexually-oriented text messages? Does it include photos? Video? Definitions varied widely from paper to paper.

“There are two take-home messages here,” says Andrew Binder, co-author of the review and an associate professor of communication at NC State. “First is that sexting does not appear to pose a public health threat to America’s youth – so don’t panic. Second, if this is something we want to study, we need to design better studies. For example, the field needs a common, clear definition of what we mean by sexting, as well as more robust survey questions and methods.”

Citation: Kami Kosenko, Geoffrey Luurs, Andrew Binder, “Sexting and Sexual Behavior, 2011-2015: A Critical Review and Meta-Analysis of a Growing Literature”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication May 15, 2017 DOI: 10.1111/jcc4.12187