The latter. If you're approaching it as a way to avoid vulnerability instead of a way to manage the kinds of vulnerability you're showing, then I can't imagine you'd get a lot out of the experience.
The thing that strikes me most immediately about sexting is the opportunity to be very deliberate in the information you are giving to your partner. There are no tells that you are unaware of for them to read to understand what you might find appealing. If you want your partner to know what it is you might enjoy, you have to choose to let them know in some way, even if you script it in such a way as to be incidental within the conceit of the messages. Everything your partner knows, they know because you have made a choice to ensure that they know. And because they are choices, they're open to judgment in a way that unconscious tells would not be.
It's a different kind of vulnerability, but it is still very much vulnerability. It's communicating things about yourself, and trusting that you won't be judged. And without it, you would be unable to communicate anything that might allow your partner to respond to you, as a person. You would encounter the same problem that you foresee with anonymous sex - you as a person would not be involved, and so and your partner would essentially just be using each other as producers of amateur smut fiction.
no subject
The thing that strikes me most immediately about sexting is the opportunity to be very deliberate in the information you are giving to your partner. There are no tells that you are unaware of for them to read to understand what you might find appealing. If you want your partner to know what it is you might enjoy, you have to choose to let them know in some way, even if you script it in such a way as to be incidental within the conceit of the messages. Everything your partner knows, they know because you have made a choice to ensure that they know. And because they are choices, they're open to judgment in a way that unconscious tells would not be.
It's a different kind of vulnerability, but it is still very much vulnerability. It's communicating things about yourself, and trusting that you won't be judged. And without it, you would be unable to communicate anything that might allow your partner to respond to you, as a person. You would encounter the same problem that you foresee with anonymous sex - you as a person would not be involved, and so and your partner would essentially just be using each other as producers of amateur smut fiction.