The Craigs List Outing Scandal: A chance to over it

Here's a nice current-events tie-in to my previous post about talking about our sex lives, and a "quite a few others about the eventuality of being outed

So what happens if you're a Seattle Craig's List denizen and you answer an ad posted as a prank by someone named Jason Fortuny? You get everything you sent in reply, including names, addresses, phone numbers, audio, video, and any photos of your formerly-private parts posted to a Wiki that may or may not be able to handle all the hits it's getting. With all the sympathy in the world I'd like to suggest you get over it... and tell everyone who gives you shit to get over it too.

Here's the scoop:

Via Boing Boing I found a link to Violet Blue of Tiny Nibbles about the whole sorry episode.

Last Monday Seattle resident Jason Fortuny (and a friend) carried out a thought experiment into reality -- one I think anyone who has surfed Craigslist sex ads has entertained. He took a hardcore Women Seeking Men ad from another city and reposted it to see how many replies he could get in 24 hours (the ad's photo at right). Then he published every single response -- photos, emails, IM info, phone numbers, names, everything, to a public wiki (Encyclopedia Dramatica -- site is up and down, check back if down). Then they went public on Jason's LiveJournal page calling it The Craigslist Experiment, inviting readers to identify the CL ad's responders and add more info ("Your Goal: identify people you know IRL and point them out. We've already had great successes here.") It has turned into quite a meme, getting posted all over the place.

Read Violet Blue's article here.

Non-extenuating circumstances: The guy used an egregiously unsafe, attractive-to-predators ad he'd copied verbatim from another venue. He lied. He was outed himself. Lawsuits may be headed his way. And many of the respondents replied in a way that would make it difficult to sympathize with their situation. Many of the respondents evidently replied in a manner that women who post personals find all to familiar and all too unwelcome. As Blue puts it...

When researching my sex books, I've placed CL ads just to get a random sampling or to get ideas; I post as female. Every time, I've received an overwhelming amount of troll responses with unsolicited photos. I have always wanted to do something with those responses and photos, as they are often offensive and sometimes even kind of evil. But I never get past the thought process involved in the prank... I think about it, and joke about it with friends. Sometimes I'll even chat with other chick sex educators, laughing over beers and comparing the unsolicited photos we've gotten recently, just via our web presence. ("You got a *face* pic? You rate!")

I say those circumstances are non-extenuating, though, because had Fortuney chosen to pose as a more conventional woman or man and post a soft-focus, heartfelt-sounding ad seeking candle-lit evenings, glasses of wine, and gentle passion set to clarinet solos the results would have been the same: a number of individuals would have answered it, and Fortuney would have published whatever he received. Though he chose to advertise a fairly risky scenario (perhaps for comic or moral effect) instead of a more vanilla one is sort of irrelevant -- made more so to the extent that copycats are beginning to repeat the prank -- because to the extent privacy mattered to the respondents, their privacy would have been no less compromised. No matter the nature of the post they responded to they would have been no less outed, their jobs no less threatened, whatever partnerships no less shaken, their friends and families no less surprised to learn they had sex lives.

Wait a second, though... what was that last part? "Their friends and families no less surprised to learn they had sex lives?" Wait a second!

We've all got sex lives of one sort or another. Blue puts it nicely

Ultimately, this is going to piss off a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and a high percentage of these guys' lives are going to change in a major way. But I'll argue that The Craigslist Experiment is an inevitable form of online natural selection. If you have something to lose, don't do something that could make you lose it. And I also think that if our culture was made to feel less ashamed about sex, Jason's results would be quite different.

"...if our culture was made to feel less ashamed about sex, Jason's results would be quite different." Back when he was the editor of pre-internet The New Republic magazine, Michael Kinsley coined the political catch-phrase "The scandal isn't what's illegal, it's what's legal." When it comes to sex, the scandal isn't really what consenting adults do, the scandal is that we pretend we *don't* do it.

So let's look at what happened on Craig's List from the perspective of the respondents: a consenting adult asked "Who in the greater Seattle area would like to get together for a particular form of sex?" 178 (and counting?) consenting adults in the greater Seattle area said "I do." Although this particular invitation was delivered under false pretenses, recognizably similar interchanges between consenting adults evidently occur several hundred thousand times a day all across the country.

I'd say the scandal is not that it happens. It's that several hundred thousand people (plus even more hundreds of thousands, or millions, of somewhat more prudent people who don't participate even though they'd like to) aren't willing to talk about it.

To repeat what Violet Blue says "...if our culture was made to feel less ashamed about sex, Jason's results would be quite different."

Where's the real scandal? It's not that hundreds of thousands, or millions, or the majority of the adult population would like to enjoy sex. It's that the majority of the adult population is ashamed to admit it, to mention it, to process it. The real scandal is that everybody, including the victims of this prank, aren't saying "So?"

My take on the unfortunate men that Jason Fortuny chose to reduce to the status of objects in a sexual context, that he chose to use in a non-consensual sexual context? If you watch many wildlife films about the Antarctic you're bound to see a phenomenon where a bunch of penguins are standing on a chunk of ice staring down into the water where leopard seals are swimming around waiting to eat them. More and more penguins keep piling up behind the first until, eventually, the first ones to arrive at the edge get pushed in. And eaten. After which it's safe for all the other penguins to jump in. Which they do. By the thousands.

The 178 people who were unscrupulously outed may be screwed. So might the next several thousand who wind up, like first penguins everywhere, involuntarily plunged into the cold water of public recognition. But sooner or later, once the leopard-seal-like late-night snarkfests and pretend-shock and moralizing tut-tuts become passé, it's very likely that we'll eventually feel comfortable jumping. And with any luck the rest of us will eventually say "So what? Grow up! Almost everybody has sex and I'm no different. Get over it."

Which, if I were one of the unfortunate people who fell afoul of Fortuny's prank -- the unforgivably coerced-out people I have nothing but sympathy for, is what I'd say. So what? Almost everybody has sex, I'm no different. Grow up! Get over it.