While she was attending Lamar University in Texas, Meeghan Falls sent countless nude photographs to her boyfriend. Two months after their two-year relationship ended, Falls found out that her ex-boyfriend had posted many of the images, along with identifying information, on the Internet. "My stomach dropped," Falls said. "I started shaking. I started crying immediately. I felt like the whole world had seen me naked."
Falls was the target of "revenge porn" — the distribution of naked or sexual images of other people online without their consent, generally by ex-romantic partners. Revenge porn can be emotionally devastating to the victims, as Falls' story shows. It can have serious other consequences as well. Teachers who have had nude pictures posted online have lost their jobs. Revenge porn can affect custody disputes. In some cases it can damage relationships with families or spouses. Kayla Laws, for example, sent a topless image to a friend considering plastic surgery. When her email was hacked, the picture was stolen and placed on a revenge porn site. Soon after receiving harassing emails at work, someone sent the photo to her sister. She was afraid she would be fired from her job as a real estate agent.
Revenge porn is obviously cruel and unethical, whether the images in question are actually stolen or posted by an ex in a betrayal of trust. But addressing it legally is difficult. The main barrier is the First Amendment, which protects free speech even in extreme cases. In addition, in 1996 Congress passed the Federal Communications Decency Act, which protected websites from prosecution for user-submitted content. This means that YouTube or Facebook can't be prosecuted if someone posts pornography to those sights. But it also means revenge porn sites aren't responsible when a guy posts a nude image of his ex.
There are some legal remedies. Victims of revenge porn can bring lawsuits, forcing websites to disclose the users who posted the images, and then sue those users. Such lawsuits can be difficult, since those who bring suit may have to make their names public, possibly resulting in further harassment and embarrassment. Nonetheless, some victimshave publicly sued revenge porn site Texxxan.com and its host GoDaddy for violation of privacy, though it's unclear whether they can win.
More hopefully, California recently became the first state to pass a law specifically targeting revenge porn by making it a misdemeanor for an individual to take and circulate sexual images online with the intent to harass or annoy. Even this law, however, has serious limitations. Since it only outlaws images taken by others, it does not address "selfies," images snapped by an individual her or himself and sent to a significant other. It also doesn't address images placed on revenge porn sites for money or gain, rather than with an intention to harass.
Because revenge porn has so far proven difficult to regulate legally, it is important to think about non-legislative ways to address the problem. Educating people about the dangers of sending nude photos is a logical step. But how much effect such education will have is uncertain. A study at the University of Rhode Island found that 56 percent of college students have received sexually suggestive images, and more than two-thirds have sent sexually suggestive messages. In short, sexting and sending sexual selfies have become an established part of college life for many. Perhaps education could encourage people to be more careful when engaging in such practices, but eliminating the sharing of compromising pictures seems unlikely.
Conor Friedersdorf at The Atlantic approaches the issue from another perspective. Friedersdorf doesn't address revenge porn sites in particular, but he talks about a number of related phenomena. Specifically, he points to an incident in Tennessee in which several high school boys pretended to be romantically interested in female classmates and convinced them to send naked pictures of themselves. The boys then threatened to distribute the photographs to parents and friends if the girls did not continue to send nude pictures.
Friedersdorf argues that this kind of blackmail could be substantially reduced if we did not have such a stigma against nudity. That stigma, he argues, is both pervasive and nonsensical. "In so many instances of nude photo blackmail, there's no sex, just a grainy nude image. And nudity alone, without even a provocative pose, is enough for stigma and blackmail." If nudity were as acceptable as it is in Continental Europe, Friedersdorf suggests, it would be much more difficult to shame and harass people simply by putting a nude picture online.
There's obviously something to this. If people saw nude images as moderately embarrassing rather than catastrophically evil, revenge porn victims wouldn't have to worry about losing their jobs. They might feel less emotional distress as well. Perhaps, in some cases, this change is already underway. Writer Nikki Yeager, for example, wrote a cheerful post about how she really didn't care that her ex had placed a picture of her vagina on a revenge porn site. Admittedly, the image was not identifiable as hers — but, on the other hand, she did tell the whole Internet it was out there. Her blasé reaction, more amused than traumatized, seems like something we might hope for more of in Friedersdorf's imagined future of unstigmatized nudity.
Even in such a future, though, revenge porn would still be a problem. That's because revenge porn isn't really about nudity, or even necessarily about sex. Instead, as Jill Filopovic argues, "The purpose of revenge porn [is] to shame, humiliate and destroy the lives and reputations of young women." Men, as Filopovic's comment suggests, are rarely targeted. Filopovic describes her own experience in law school, when she was constantly harassed through a site called AutoAdmit. No one had naked pictures of Filopovic to post — so people just posted descriptions of her clothing or repeated what she said in class that day, juxtaposed with crude sexual commentary. According to Filopovic:
It's hard to explain the psychological impact these kind of anonymous posts have, when these people know your name, face and exactly where you are during the day. You can't walk down the hall at school without wondering if that guy who just made eye contact with you is going to go home and write something disgusting about you on the internet, or if anything you say in class is going to be quoted on a message board as evidence that you are a stupid cow, or if any one of these anonymous commenters is going to take their sexually violent urges offline and onto your body.
Along the same lines, Caitlin Seida recently wrote about how her picture was posted online without her consent. The image wasn't nude or sexual; it just showed Seida in a Laura Croft costume for Halloween. Hundreds of strangers then took the opportunity to comment on her weight (she has a thyroid condition) and abuse her for, basically, not looking sexy enough in their opinion.
Revenge porn, then, isn't an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it's part of a general Internet milieu in which women, especially, are viewed, targeted, policed and "punished" for breaking up with someone, or for being too naked, or too sexual, or too outspoken, or too heavy or really for just being women. The web has made it possible to crowdsource misogyny. Revenge porn in which women are identified has even made it possible to crowdsource stalking.
Since revenge porn is an outgrowth of misogyny, and since that misogyny takes a number of forms online, reducing the stigma of nudity seems unlikely to be helpful. For that matter, teaching women and girls not to send nude pictures of themselves to their boyfriends seems like it would have a limited effect. Again, Seida and Filopovic didn't take or send nude pictures of themselves, but they were still targets of humiliation and harassment.
Instead, if there needs to be education, it seems like it should be focused on guys. Obviously not all men harass women, online or off, but a certain number do, and they need to be told to stop. Schools and parents should teach boys (and girls too) that harassment like this is unacceptable. And society needs to tell people it's unacceptable too — which involves passing laws. The measure in California is a good start. Hopefully other states will pass more effective legislation soon.
Add new comment