A tech-savvy Christian sexual ethic

If most young Americans receive any sex education at all, they hear flat messages to “just say no” or to wait until marriage. Few learn how to access birth control and fewer still how to properly use it. Many hear not a word about LGBTQ sexualities. Almost none are given resources to navigate the emerging realities of sex online. Yet we live in a thoroughly digital world, where sexting, digital pornography, online sexual abuse, and sex-focused AI have made unprecedented forms of sexual encounters and behaviors not only possible but common.

Despite admonitions to postpone sex until marriage, teens make extensive use of these sex technologies. Often in secret, without guidance or skills for self-protection, young people enter the land of digital sex as if entering a void. No wonder, then, that one in four young adults in the United States experience online sexual harassment or abuse by the time they are 18. Tragically, they are left to tread these waters alone.

Kate Ott, who teaches Christian social ethics at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, offers patient and nonjudgmental counsel through this perilous and taboo terrain. Whether considering online dating platforms, cyberstalking, sexting, digital pornography, sex between online avatars, or sex robots, Ott’s discussion of each technology is precise and nuanced. Throughout the book’s main chapters, as well as in a very thoughtfully prepared youth study guide (complete with accompanying scripture texts, discussion questions, and group exercises), she sensitively helps readers build an ethical framework for considering whether and how these digital sex technologies might fit—or fail to fit—with the love commandment.