UrbanUpdate

There’s an unspoken contract surrounding the gifts you’re allowed to keep after your partner leaves. A really solid pair of joggers? Keep. An ergonomic computer mouse? Sure, probably. Those whisky stones you used twice? Judgment call.

But what about nude photos? When someone you’re dating sends you a saucy selfie, there’s context: Presumably, at time of receipt you shared emotional or at least sexual intimacy with the sender. Receiving a nude from the hot person you’re dating is a privilege, and when you no longer share that intimacy, you don’t get that privilege anymore. So yeah, you should delete your exes' nude photos.

Nathan is 28, and like most of the men I spoke to, his name has been changed here. Nathan said he automatically deletes nudes as “part of a larger project of desexualizing a person that I had been obviously sexual with since I've been dating them.” Deleting any photos is part of severing emotional ties with someone he's not dating anymore. Sometimes he doesn’t even wait till the split to clear the digital archives; he calls that “breakup prep.”

Most nudes don’t arrive in your iMessages or inbox with an explicit caveat about circumstantial consent. Yes, someone deliberately sent you a risqué photo or video of him- or herself because they wanted you to see it—in that exact moment and for the duration of your relationship/situationship. It’s more thoughtful and permanent than a Snapchat; a texted photo is designed to withstand anemic attention spans and perhaps provide whack-off inspo if you two are temporarily apart. There’s a lot of vulnerability in a texted nude: There were probably outtakes, and multiple efforts to find good light. It’s artwork that another person is sharing with just you.

But after you’re no longer romantically entangled with that person, the consent—the permission to peep, that is—expires. Barring something nefarious like revenge porn, the only obvious reason to keep an ex’s nudes is masturbation inspo, and that crosses a number of boundaries. Masturbating to someone's picture is creepy when things ended badly, and it's even creepier if you stayed friends. Especially when the Internet is full of pictures of naked people who never had a toothbrush at your apartment.

Once a breakup gels or the hookup dissipates, or when, at the very least, one of you enters a new monogamous relationship, the photos should go—right? But I conducted a very official Twitter poll, and 61 percent of the 46 men who voted said they never delete nudes. As a woman who dates men, in the wake of a breakup I am all too eager to gather boner shots and dismiss them into the void forever. Did we learn nothing from JLaw’s harmful hacking experience—the one she likened to feeling “gang-banged by the fucking planet”? It isn’t cool to keep nudes; the web is far from secure.

“I think I've done it”—kept nudes—“ever since I've had a computer with a hard drive,” said Gus, 31. “That is probably the same amount of time that I've been receiving them as well. I never really thought of why I would get rid of them.” A self-identified amateur photographer, Gus automatically uploads all his photos to iCloud—not just the dirty stuff. And that’s an important detail: Finding an ex’s underwear deep in the recesses of your closet eons after a breakup is one thing, and keeping the pair tucked away in a secret drawer is another.

Since Polaroids were popularized in the 1960s, it’s become a given that romantic and sexual partners swap pics. With Polaroids, suddenly you didn’t have to pull a favor with a photographer friend or risk a pimply teen printing an extra copy of your nude form at Wal-Mart’s photo center for his own secret drawer. Then the advent of camera phones helped make taking and sending nudes even easier. It wasn’t until June 2011, when Apple introduced the iCloud—easily the most passive way to hoard digital artifacts from your past—that this kind of stockpiling could happen on accident. A lot of these precious pixels probably live in the Cloud, undisturbed.

When I asked my pal Joey, 30, about the appeal of using raunchy visuals of your ex to masturbate, he pointed to the relentless popularity of “wrong” porn, such as the brother-and-stepsister trope. “Some people get off on the hotness of ‘wrong,’” he said. Sure, but there's one key morality difference: The performers involved in porn are paid actors. They help create content to get countless strangers off for an indefinite amount of time. Your exes—whether you had a three-week sex-only relationship or you co-habitated for three years—are people who shared these images with you in confidence. Even if you’re not showing those images to other people, to use them outside of their original intent is craven at best.

Joey recently moved in with a serious girlfriend and says he is about to erase all exes’ dirty photos and videos from his phone. This will mark the first time he’s wiped clean his archives, a decision he says was co-habitation-inspired.

Then there’s Ahmed, the 35-year-old father of a toddler who has been happily married for the past five years. His trophy case of past conquests from his party-boy days lives on digitally in a hidden computer folder, “for safekeeping.” He said he can’t remember the last time he opened said folder, but just the same, he’d be bummed to let go of it. “Those were days that were very different from the life I'm living right now,” he says. “I think saying it ‘keeps me young’ is such a cliché. It brings me back to those times that I don't necessarily have to relive—but I've been there.”

Ahmed’s wife is unaware of his treasure trove and should that change, he says, “it would be a terrible situation.” Ahmed said he’d feel rotten if the tables were turned and his wife kept a clandestine stash of pics.

Nathan pointed out that discovering a current partner’s ex–photo collection could serve as a litmus test for his own insecurity. “If this person has never given me any reason to doubt our relationship, an old picture of a dick that does not belong to me will not change that,” he says. Should it really bother him, Nathan said he’d ask his partner to delete it, but that he’d take his own discomfort as a reflection of a larger problem, either with the relationship or with his own trust issues.

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And what about the people in these photos—how would they feel if they knew their photos were still out there? “I’m not sure, I’m not sure,” Gus said. He pointed out that there doesn’t necessarily have to be an exposed boob or otherwise sexualized body part for a photo to be spank-bank material. Plus, how does one attempt to Eternal Sunshine away the memory of an especially spectacular anal adventure on a couples’ vacation in Aspen? If someone wants to jack off to someone else, they will.

It boils down to intent and purpose: Are you keeping these photos in secret on purpose? And for what? Truly there is no one-size-fits-all aftercare plan with past partners. Joey, for example, said he’d be flattered by casual exes using his nudes in a sexual context but said that if a significant ex was still vibing out to him, he may be concerned about their moving on. It’s worth a conversation while parting—what should I do with your nudes?—but if you don’t want to even approach the topic, mass deletion isn’t the worst rule of thumb.

Look at it as an opportunity: When you can't get rid of lingering feelings, getting rid of photos can be a catharsis.

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