HNT Editorial: "Revenge Porn" Humiliates All of Us
Photo by Flickr user hbruinsma. Used under a Creative Commons license.
[This seemed relevant to HNT folks so I'm posting it today. --fl]
Lauren of Feministe takes an issue raised by Jessica at Jezebel...
One day, you’re exchanging promise rings, and the next thing you know, you’re prosecuting your ex-fiancé for putting photos of your boobs on MySpace. The perils of modern love! Richard Morgan delves deep into what he terms “Revenge Porn,” i.e., when men distribute pornographic images of their exes without consent, on Details.com, and it ain’t pretty. The most insidious form of revenge porn includes the woman’s name, phone number, and address along with the naughty video for ultimate public humiliation. The worst part of the whole thing? Revenge porn is notoriously hard to prosecute.
... details her own experience of "revenge porn" and then makes a couple of excellent and obvious points
I don’t want to get into another feminist porn war on the blog, yet I think it’s pretty safe to say that most will agree that this is Not Okay. That being said, there is a market for this, so much so that there are several free and for-pay sites that capitalize on the “revenge porn” market, wherein dudes can post pictures and movies of their ex-bitches along with “that’ll show her!” messages meant to punish the little amateur sluts. The article linked in the blockquote details some of the issues victims run into when they try to get the movies and pictures removed, and moreover, the inability to prosecute their exes.
I'm... pretty sure that anyone who thinks it's ok to upload intimate images without the subject's permission, with or without identifying text, needs to have their corneas flared. As a highly visual person myself that's about as harsh a fate as I'm likely to wish on anyone but... seriously!
I mean...
You know how I talk sometimes about how *both* sides of the feminist porn vs feminist anti-porn sides are *mostly* right? About how on the one hand "pro-sex" feminists are right that exercising agency and challenging centuries of pressure to appear, or even better to *be,* chaste and sexless empower women? And about how on the other that "anti-porn" feminist are right to point out that the *reception* of that exercise is often perceived by men not as power for women but privilege for men? Yeah, well revenge porn? That kind of puts the shoe squarely on the anti-porn foot.
It's *obviously* a pain (although in kind of an "I told you so" sort of way) for anti-porn activists. It's also pretty obviously a pain -- real, heartfelt *pain* pain -- for the victims. And it's a serious jab in the eye for pro-porn activists as well. (And perhaps paradoxically it's also a black eye and a setback for the dickwad choads who upload the stuff. I mean because, seriously, *people have sex!* And, with digital cameras being nearly universal they take pictures of each other too. The mere existence of such photos reveal nothing at all about the actual victims beyond their contemporary humanity. That their erstwhile partners upload such photos, meanwhile, demonstrate only the victims *incredibly bad taste* in partners. Also, whereas nobody really "deserves" to be humiliated, that someone's ex uploads such photos is reason enough to recognize they made a rational choice in dumping them. Therefore the uploader betrays and humiliates only himself. Something to consider next time one contemplates pressing "send," m'kay? But I digress....)
Anyway, because I'm very much in favor of voluntary sexual photography but bitterly opposed to coercion, exploitation, and denial of choice, and because there are plenty of people doing it willingly I'd like to point to an article by Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Professors that outlines how a) current copywrite law makes it very difficult for victims to limit such "revenge" uploads but b) how the law could easily be changed. I may be perpetually banned from commenting on Bartow's site because we don't always, um, agree, but this seems like a reasonable undertaking, especially since the goal is to put the decision to post photos in the hands of the actual subjects. (Such requirements already being routine and well-established in commercial porn.)
See also Whatsername the Jaded Hippy.
That being said, there is a market for this, so much so that there are several free and for-pay sites that capitalize on the “revenge porn” market, wherein dudes can post pictures and movies of their ex-bitches along with “that’ll show her!” messages meant to punish the little amateur sluts.
I think there's actually a few problems that contribute to this:
* "Amateur" erotica clearinghouses that simply don't care about consent, or have bizarre ideas about it (e.g., that the only thing that matters is that the recording is of consented-to acts, or that it's totally fine to share pictures of a *current* partner without their consent).
* Revenge as fetish. I'm not sure how common this is, because it's the most reliable way to turn me off of any kind of erotic material featuring "real people." I don't know if it's simply an advertising angle, or if people really do get something out of the "revenge" aspect of it.
* Victim blaming. Every single time this comes up, folks try to make the point that of course *they'd* never let anyone do that to them, and (by implication) anyone who has a camera in the same room with their naked self deserves what they get.
I'm not sure how you fix this. Model releases might work if there's a way to streamline them, but I can easily see this sort of thing being used as a means of censorship and/or to make it too cumbersome and costly for anyone but the large-scale commercial porn industry to participate. For instance, it'd almost certainly require HNT participants to either invest a lot more in the process or give up some degree of anonymity.
What's really needed is a cultural change, though, not a legal one; a social understanding that appropriating images of others without their consent is a non-trivial wrong, that the guy who uploads a pornographic picture of his ex-girlfriend without her consent is deserving of scorn, not thanks.
Is that likely to ever happen? I don't know. I'd like to think that the increasing prevalence of sex-positivity would get rid of a lot of the "revenge" motivation and bring the idea of consent to the forefront, but I suspect sex-positive messages in this regard are likely to get co-opted by the "pro-getting-laid" mindset, and turned into "it's not shameful so there's no actual harm in appropriating people's images." I'd also like to think that things like HNT, where consent is a norm because participation extends beyond the images themselves, would crowd out the more questionable material, but I suspect that's wishful thinking as well.
[Eh, I think it's sort of irrelevant whether *consumers* care that the uploads are "real" revenge or fake. They might care that actor X isn't really a pool boy and actress Y really isn't a bored heiress, but they masturbate to that kind of porn all the time. What *is* relevant is that there's some sort of gap in IP coverage such that a person appearing in such images, real or contrived, currently has no recourse. Maybe ten years ago I worked with someone on a website who's partner was, or recently had been, a long-time employee of a *huge* commercial images facility. Her job was tracking the model-release provenances of all images the company sold. They paid her to do it because they were constantly bombarded with complaints -- interestingly the main reason they needed to keep track wasn't because the actual models sued, it's because they'd get sued by people who *claimed* they were in photos and the model-release documentation was used to prove "no, that wasn't your great uncle Dan under all those bandages in that hospital-services ad it was someone else who's signature we have on file." Anyway, her actual paper is firewalled but the abstract says what Prof. Bartow proposes is extending the same burden of proof to sites that host these "revenge" uploads. If the laws for commercial porn weren't already so onerous such an extension to "amateur" uploads might be problematic, but under the circumstances this would just be leveling that playing field. Finally, I don't see something like that affecting actual self-publishers, anonymous or otherwise since sort of by definition they wouldn't complain about themselves, and even if they did their hosting sites could produce substantiating server logs. In other words I'm not discounting the issues you raise, JFP, I'm just saying I think enough could be addressed to have a "chilling effect" on the jackasses who use that avenue to harass former partners. Thanks! --fl]