My sexting advice for Tiger Woods

I wrote a piece about dos and don'ts of sexting for Tiger Woods (and you!) at The Daily Beast.

Here's a snippet:

Don’t:

1. Ask who else she’s seeing

“Do you have a boyfriend” and “who is your new boy toy,” Woods asked Grubbs. Not only is it not his business, it sours the mood he’s trying to create. Keep your texts about the relationship at hand, not possible outside entanglements.

Dos

1. Start slow

This doubles as good advice when it comes to putting the first move on someone. Don’t leap straight into explicit language until you know that’s what the other person’s into. Woods and Grubbs were already seeing each other once their risqué texts started flying. David Borgenicht, co-author of The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, Dating and Sex, agrees. “Know your audience” is his first rule (this, I’d say, also applies to dirty talk). “Don't be overly blunt or crude if your sexting target is shy. When it comes to intimacy use double entendres and suggestive language rather than blunt statements of desire or graphic descriptions of actions you'd like to take.”

Read the rest at The Daily Beast (and be sure to check out the lively comments section).

There was a piece in The New York Times last week, "Text Messages: Digital Lipstick on The Collar," by Laura M. Holson and I really liked this part:

Sherry Turkle, a professor and researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has studied interaction with technology for more than two decades. Unlike with computers, Professor Turkle said, consumers have a deeply personal connection to their cellphones, where they keep contact lists and family photos. “They carry them in their pockets,” she said, “next to their skin.”

One woman Professor Turkle spoke to for a study was so grief-stricken after she had misplaced her cellphone that she described the loss as a death. “People feel it is an extension of their body and mind,” the professor said, but, she added: “Like Peter Pan, we do not see our electronic shadow until it is pointed out to us. We assume it is not there.”

I really liked this image, and it made me think about how and why texts are more personal then emails, and how it's easier to overlook emails. Sure, maybe you're getting hundreds of texts a day, but probably not, and certainly on an iPhone, they show up differently than email does. Plus your phone is the only device that's going to receive that text message, whereas an email can be retrieved from multiple sources.