Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Harriet Jacobs of Fugitivus writes very powerfully about extracting herself from a very deeply-ingrained local culture of abuse. Parental abuse. Sexual abuse. Partner abuse. Often intertwined with drug abuse and alcohol abuse. She now works in or around the field of social services related to family and child courts. (I’m trying to be even more vague about what she does than she tries to be.)

Wow. She’s some writer. With some past. And some really great insights about it. And she’s got what sounds like an awesomely insider job in an area of law and society that very much needs to be better understood. And she writes very well about that too.

While there’s an excellent chance I’m the only one who wasn’t already reading her a quick Google search doesn’t turn up that many references to her. Which is a shame. As I said she has sometimes chillingly important things to say. For those likely to be triggered by any manner of abuse at all her topics are all pretty much triggering.

An example of something triggering would be the following quote about the (internal) logic of abusive relationships in the context of perilous/subsistence social situations… made even more trigger-y by the circumstances her abusive relationship made it possible to avoid! (Emphasis hers.)

I’ve said this before, but I never really applied it to my own life. Sometimes, the reason women stay with abusive men is because they assume they will always be abused, and they’re choosing their abuser. I am certain, had I been single, Nero would’ve made a move on me. And without the omnipresent threat of stealing another man’s girl, he might’ve felt perfectly safe about raping me. I don’t have any doubt that the other boys would’ve told me it wasn’t rape, which would’ve been part of Nero’s sense of safety. Granted, the only reason I was in a social group like that was because of my association with Flint, but being surrounded by people of his choosing did exactly what he wanted it to: It made me choose him as the best alternative. For a few years, I was surrounded by completely amoral drug addicts and rapists/rape-apologists. And I assumed everybody was like that, once you got to know them enough; after all, I’d seen the boys act decent and human in front of new women. That’s a dangerous place to be, and since I wasn’t yet together enough to realize “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits,” the second best solution was to find some way to protect myself from all of them by choosing one of them. Letting Flint rape me was insurance against anybody else doing it.

She said it here.

That resonates very seriously for me, though obviously from a slightly different perspective. The kinds of people she describes hanging around with, and for that matter being, sound so similar to the people I hung around with during my transition from homelessness into mere desperately marginality. A life where “good guys” only sold or used pot, coke, alcohol and maybe occasionally non-meth speed while “bad guys” sold coke, pot, tranquilizers, and more-directly addictive “hard stuff.” A life where “up and out” meant “working my way up” into a “Clerks” like assistant manager position in an exurban fast-food joint with only the most peripheral contact with my former friends. And “friends.” And before moving away completely to the Northwest where I discovered college, real friends (including many of my old, true friends), work, life, health, and eventually love and family.

In other words, while my situation was nowhere near as dire as Jacobs I completely recognize the logic that comes from the realization that “I don’t have to hang out with these fuckwits.” Instead inside that culture being a “good guy” means hanging out with the good drug dealers and good crooked cops who don’t beat up their girlfriends and who think it’s “bad form” to have sex with women who’ve passed out. The way “those losers” do.

Sigh. There’s a lot more at her blog. Not just about the downsides but about how to deal with the downsides. But from within and, once out, from without.

Jacobs has just taken a new job, an important one, that requires a great deal more circumspection in her blogging, and which takes up more of her time and energy. So who knows if she’ll continue writing the way she has been. That said she’s got a couple of very powerful new pieces. For instance one about how society, personality, and personal circumstance conspires with the law to constrain reproductive choice for the very young and very vulnerable even more than you think it does. And another about how one very anonymous department of a very-deliberately not-identified administrative entity helps getting judicial waivers of parent-notification requirements merely difficult in a system that’s otherwise not really well-designed to give them at all.

At Sex 2.0 blogger Maria Diaz presented a session on “Revenge Porn.” Here are my rough, non-verbatim notes taken live during the session. Update Calico has posted video transcripts.

Workshop initially inspired by hassles faced by Gretchen Rossi of a TV show called “Real Housewives of Orange County”

• Ex boyfriend started to post photos to thedirty.com after the show aired

• She doesn’t talk about it but she’s attempted legal action against the website

So! What is revenge porn?

• Photos or images distributed by someone in an attempt to humiliate the subject; sometimes includes contact info
• First used on urbandictionary in 2007

• (Comment: For sex-industry people may not be photos but might be contact info)

Reason for the talk

• People are sharing more pictures and other personal information than ever.
• Not just for world but peer group

• Solution has to be more realistic than “never take naked photos or otherwise do anything else that could ever get online ever.”

Different flavors of revenge porn

• Celebrity sex tape
• Scorned ex who distributes tapes to world or to friends
• Faux revenge professional porn

• The Revenge Porn threat (blackmail) “Do what I want or I’ll release the photos

4 Cases

• Lena Chen (formerly of Sex and the Ivy blog)
• Outed in photos by disgruntled ex
• Kim Kardashian (Public celebrity)
• Carrie Prejean (Miss California)
• Carrie Prejean was outed as revenge for homophobia… but still was outed and it was still revenge
• Jason Fortuny (with a twist)
• Posted respondents to his “violent craigslist” prank

• Imagined he was in the clear but wound up losing court battle

Maria Diaz asked: Why do outed celebrities’ seem to suffer less career-wise (but not suffer less personally)

• Guess: Probably papparazi influence

Question: Why the market for humiliated/revenge-upon-ed wives, husbands?

• Opportunity to look down on someone
• “At least I don’t have naked photos of me…”
• Eroticizing shaming/prudery
• Justifying/viewing “object lesson” participation
• How people think about women (has to do with why it’s almost always women.)

• Not much stigma for men because (no-sex class moment here) it’s expected that men will “debase” themselves. It might happen that they’re outed but it’s not “news.”

Question: With everyone growing up with phonecams, etc do you think it’ll ever reach a point where someone won’t have to resign or won’t be hired if outed?

• Probably so. There’s often little lasting damage now

• There is a control issue. Sex bloggers (e.g. Lena Chen) who post their own photos still felt hurt and betrayed when an partner does it against their wishes

Maria: Problem with Jason Fortuny and other revenge/stalking cases is there were, or are, no real laws.

Point: Revenge porn ought to be treated as internet stalking
Downside: law enforcement may not be prepared/motivated to enforce stalking in the first place

Point: saturation of millions of “yeah I did that too” takes power away from straight-up revenge. Saturation doesn’t protect in Fortuny-type “craigslist respondent” outings

Point Saying “If you have to do it… lock it down, get “collateral,” is implicitly agreeing it’s wrong. Saying “it’s the worst thing” is only an issue if it’s really the worst thing!

Possible “fight fire with fire” Strategy:

• Cuts both ways
• Out people who post revenge porn.
• Saturation may protect victims (I mean, at some point it’s going to become “so what”) but it’s unlikely to protect perpetrators.
• At some point in the future we’ll be blazé about being naked on the internet…

• But! At no point are we ever likely to be unconcerned about assholes who out people.

Photo “Revenge is a dish best served cold” by Flickr user mollyjolly. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Ms Naughty of Porn for Women Blog answers an emailer’s question with the title of her post…

I was contacted the other day by a woman who asked me if I would consider publishing a male masturbation video featuring a guy who had not consented to the film’s distribution.

The rest of the post is great too. Read it here.

The title? “No, Stupid, Porn is Not For Revenge.”

Sounds about right. Nicely put, Ms. N.

Oh, and another excellent point by Andrea Zanin of Sex Geek — again specifically addressing ways for S&M community members to deal with abuse, but applicable way outside that single community.

2. Remember that submissives are not idiots. Anytime the idea of “protecting the poor helpless submissives / newbies” comes up, it makes my skin crawl. It is condescending and inaccurate to think that someone in the submissive or bottom role is any less likely to stand up for themselves than anyone else; any less likely to take proper precautions to protect themselves in the first place; and any less likely to know their limits, know how to defend themselves, and know how to make wise choices. They may be marginally more likely to find themselves in a vulnerable position within a scene, but this doesn’t make them airheads who can’t take a moment to think about relative risk and commonsense safety precautions.

She said it here.

What started out as just ferrying an out-of-town guest turned into an unexpected invitation to a dinner party the other night. One of the other guests was an MPA grad student who, among other things, spent a year as a caseworker working with traditionally underserved young, often undocumented women who were either pregnant or had very young children. She said the same thing I keep hearing over and over again from pretty much everybody who works with (instead of maybe tries to heroically “rescue”) new and prospective teen mothers.) Bottom line is same as Sexgeeks: they’re not idiots. In fact they’re often not just bright but very bright. To the extent there’s a problem it’s more often external to the young parents themselves.

Same with, oh, say, sex workers, undocumented immigrants, the impoverished, and other heavily “othered” demographics.

I might add that there are more than moral or ethical reasons for remembering that othered members of the “underclass” aren’t idiots, there are practical reasons as well. For instance they may not recognize themselves in our descriptions. They may resent our characterizations. And consequently they may not respond to our attempts at outreach… even, once burned, attempts that might actually be respectful and helpful.