I hate the whole revenge porn thing. Not just that people do it, but I hate talking about it. Why? Because the whole subject just attracts bullshit like tourists with fanny packs attract gypsies.
One of the biggest sources of bullshit it attracts is the MacKinnonite-Dworkinite “legal scholars.(1) That’s the wing of feminist “thought” that sees everything in terms of “its the girls against the boys, and the boys suck.” They all banded together to make revenge porn a “civil rights” issue, and a gender issue, most inconveniently failing to investigate the facts.
They tend to see this as “a thing men do to women.” Guess what. It ain’t.
Here is how they look at it:
In 2009, Professor Danielle Keats Citron published “Cyber Civil Rights,” arguing, for the first time, that we ought to understand and address cyber harassment as civil rights violations. In that article, she called for a cyber civil rights legal agenda to prevent, punish, and remedy bigoted online abuse that make equality in our digital age “more of a slogan than a reality.” As she documented, the Internet has “all too often reflected and reinforced the offline world’s power imbalances.” Cyber harassers “raise the price” women, sexual minorities, and other members of historically subordinated groups “have to pay to engage with others on- and offline by forcing them to suffer a destructive combination of threats, reputation-harming defamation aimed to interfere with their employment opportunities, privacy invasions, and denial-of-service attacks because of their gender, race, or sexual preference,” she explained. (source)
That was stupid then, and it is stupid now — the notion that online harassment is in any way more focused on anyone by virtue of their race or genitalia. That might have been the case back when there were no women on the Internet. But, even then. Monica Lewinsky claims to be “patient zero” with this shit, and who was her key tormentor? Linda fucking Tripp. And case after case after case shows that harassers are often women, and frankly, more of the serious cases are involving women doing the harassing.
That is in no way intended to mean that I believe that it is 180 degrees from what the “Cyber Civil Rights” idiots think. They’re 90 degrees off, not 180. If we kicked all men off the Internet for a year, I would not imagine that things would improve, at all. Trying to make this a gender issue might serve a publication agenda — because academia loves that shit — but that’s the only thing it serves. It sure as hell does not serve any quest for truth.
So with that as a backdrop, we find this. At least one journalist seems surprised that the first conviction under Virginia’s revenge porn law is a woman. As she is someone whose exposure to revenge porn is probably limited to reading a few stupid blog posts and press releases, coupled with the male stereotypes that she probably carries (fairly, I suppose), her surprise is not all that surprising.
But, when we look at what happened here, is anyone really surprised? News reports about the conviction describe the perpetrator’s motives in pretty familiar terms.
“Waynesboro Police Sergeant Brian Edwards said, “What was the intent of Ms. Craig for posting this? She considered the victim a romantic rival for this one individual’s affections and she said that she did it out of anger.” (source). See also (source)
Yes, there are dickless creeps (I refuse to call them “men”) out there who are behind revenge porn sites, and who distribute the crap. In fact, I’m confident saying that more than half of the perpetrators are dickless creeps. But, a pretty good chunk of them are women — exhibiting some pretty negative feminine type behavior — the whole “woman scorned” thing is a rotten stinky thing. And, just like some people exhibit really shitty behaviors, which are more likely when you have XY chromosomes, there are other really shitty behaviors that come with the ol’ XX model.
So, to answer this bubble headed “journalist”, I will say “No, No I am not surprised.” What I am surprised at is that anyone still buys this bullshit simple narrative of its “boys against the girls.”
That isn’t helpful.
And, I won’t accept the opposite either. Any commenters who say “yeah, it’s all the bitches” can go fuck themselves in advance.
Curing ignorance. It is not really in vogue, but lets give it a whirl, if you’re not too busy.
Update: This sums it up perfectly.
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(1) For those of you who don’t know what that means, Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon are legal scholars (I use the term loosely) who are alternately credited with the idiotic statement that “all heterosexual sex is rape.” While we are trying to dispel bullshit here, lets do that in all directions. Neither Katherine MacKinnon nor Andrea Dworkin ever actually said those words. The Straight Dope has a good summary of it — here, with links.
