Revenge Porn and The Women-Humiliation Industry

Jill Filipovic has a piece in The Guardian about Revenge Porn.  She has a very personal perspective on this because she herself was a victim of a bunch of malicious anonyous misogynists on a law student and lawyer forum.  It’s an important read, and nothing I have to say would add anything to it, at least within the bounds of the discussion as she frames it.  But I do think that I can add something by situating the “revenge porn” genre within a larger universe of misogynist humiliation.

Jill says:

Once you’ve been face-to-genitals with someone, sending them a nude picture doesn’t seem like it should be such a big deal.

Society sees it differently – at least when the nude photo is of a woman. There aren’t popular revenge porn sites with pictures of naked men, because as a society we don’t think it’s inherently degrading or humiliating for men to have sex. Despite the fact that large numbers of women watch porn, there are apparently not large numbers of women who find sexual gratification in publicly shaming and demeaning men they’ve slept with.

And that is, fundamentally, what these revenge porn sites are about. They aren’t about naked girls; there are plenty of those who are on the internet consensually. It’s about hating women, taking enjoyment in seeing them violated, and harming them.

(Emphasis mine.)

This is so true, and so not limited to revenge porn.  It hasn’t been that long since the media was all in a stir about photos, taken from very long range by a very determined peeping tom, of the Dutchess of Cambridge topless.  After that, there was an unfortunate photograph of Anne Hathaway, and Matt Lauer’s inability to restrain himself from commenting on it (and Hathaway’s wonderful response: “I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants,” starting around 1:20 after the Les Mis clip).  A few years ago there was the photo of Britney Spears getting out of a car with no underwear.  And all the sex tapes.  And the Vanessa Hudgens photos, where her lawyer says she was a minor.  And so on.

In fact, there’s a whole industry, a whole subgenre of porn that is finding famous women just slightly more exposed than they wanted to be: nipple slips, car-exit crotch shots, et cetera.  This isn’t a creature of the internet.  Before the Internet, there was Celebrity Sleuth magazine.  (I would guess it’s still around in some form, though I don’t care enough to go look.)

The paparazzi hunt celebrities and embarrass them when they can, not just women; but it’s different with women because there is the entire subtext of sexualized humiliation that seems only to apply to men when they’re with other men.  (That last bit opens a can of worms; I can’t do justice to the analysis of gender expression and orientation and the way the leering “filthy sexxx!” attitude applies across less-normative gender expressions and sexual orientations, but broadly I think the mainstream uses it to police femininity more than femaleness … I would even say that the way the media treats more gender-conforming gay men in scandals is different from how they treat more gender-nonconforming gay men … as I say, longer conversation and one where I have to listen more than I talk.) 

Zooming out even farther, the whole culture serves up the humiliation of women as indoor winter sport.  The entire “Real Housewives” franchise is built around women being mean to each other; and many other reality TV shows (Dance Moms, I’m looking at you) could just as easily be subtitled “judge the bad woman.”  It’s not all highly sexualized; some of it is “judge the bad mom” and some of it is “judge the bad housekeeper” and some of it is “judge the bad cride” but there’s a whole cultural edifice of holding women up to public judgement and criticism and dismissal.  One might say that this happens to men also, but men are about 85% of the speaking roles in Hollywood movies, so the impact of the representation is different.  A whole host of cultural product about judging women is a huge portion of all the representation women get, while a bit of judging men settles in in a quiet corner next to presidents and CEOs and leading roles that are not there for the primary purpose of being humiliated.

The sexualization of that is only one aspect, and revenge porn is only one tiny corner of that, but seeing it in context is important. 

There’s another axis on which I want to contextualize revenge porn, and that’s the sexual assault axis.  When my friends put up Anne Hathaway’s response to Matt Lauer on Facebook, my immediate remark was that I want to see Anne Hathaway naked when she wants me to see her naked.  We have a relationship, Anne and me.  Our relationship is artist-viewer.  It can be, in part, a sexual relationship: to the extent we both consent.  If I don’t want to see her engage in sexual performance, I’m free to not watch any movie or scene that makes me uncomfortable.  And at least at her level of the business, she has a lot of freedom to choose what projects she’ll do and what scenes she’ll shoot.  And so, both Anne and me are consenting adults, and we can have some good artist-viewer fun together if we want, and neither of us has to do anything we don’t want to do.

The whole culture of celebrity stalker sexualization is to do away with that consent: to make avialable the sexualized image of the famous woman to the viewer when she doesn’t agree to it, doesn’t want it, doesn’t like it.  What was it Anne Hathaway said?  “I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants.”  Sexualizing the unwilling, conceptually, is sexual assault.  Always.  We can bullshit and nitpick about that, but it’s just bullshit and nitpicking.  We have a society with a tremendous tolerance for coercion and people can sit around thinking up all the times when it might be okay for someone to be sexualized against their will … I’m not going to dignify that exercise, whatever the law might be and whatever the policy arguments, we’re better off starting from the proposition that sexualizing the unwilling is always a sexual assault before we entertain questions of intent and mistake and exception.

Revenge porn is really just doing that to someone who isn’t famous, usually with the complicity of someone they trusted.  The whole point is to humiliate, but not just to humiliate; to violate. 

I’ll close this by thinking, as I often do, as a parent.  If the culture tells my kids that it’s hot and exciting to violate a woman’s boundaries with a camera, what lesson will they take about violating a woman’s body with a body?  MRA-types and other assholes who reflexively deny the existence of rape culture will go on shaking their heads no matter what is put before them, but for the rest of us, this isn’t hard to understand.  The rapists are the minority, and people say their behavior is aberrant and abhorent, so how do they keep getting away with it?  In a culture where violation of a woman’s boundaries in some ways is lauded and sought after, the attitudes the rapists have and the tactics they use just don’t seem that out of place.  That’s the Social License to Operate.