I was biking to work one day and found a random cell phone in the road. I looked in it for a number to call to return it to it’s owner and it turns out it belonged to a teenage girl in the neighborhood. When scrolling through the menu options, I came across the last picture she had taken on it: herself in the bathroom topless in the mirror.
I think cell phones have made it “safe feeling” for girls to send sexy pictures of themselves to boyfriends that is discreet and private. They never seem to believe that their guy could possibly show it to anyone else.
The ability to take photos that don't require a third party to develop is undoubtedly the biggest factor driving this trend.
Digital cameras have been ubiquitous for almost a decade. Plenty of young people can probably barely remember what it was like to shoot film, take it to a photo shop and wait for the results. Doing this made us older folks a lot more cautious about what we took photos of.
It's called "sexting" and is probably a lot more common than people wish to contemplate. So common in fact that Vermont is rewriting their child pornography laws so as not to ensnare teenagers who take naked pictures of themselves. Undoubtedly other states will follow suit.