The idea that a “large slice” of revenge porn comes from photoshopped heads onto porn stars body is absolutely absurd. Also I would never blame anyone who has their private nudes put online but the idea that all these women are being “hacked” seems ludicrous as well. I do feel for anyone who has their private photos put online but I am sure 99% of it comes from someone they sent the photos to in the first place.
Everyone needs a hobby. Hers seems more useful than most. Good on ya Charlotte.
Yeah, I think I’m gonna trust “spent almost two years assembling a comprehensive dossier on the subject” over “dude on the internet with opinions.”
Besides which, who gives a fuck what the exact percentages are? You think it’s more okay to victimize someone who trusted you than a stranger?
Yeah, now that I reflect on it, I’m not sure it matters much, either. I ended up clicking on the “heart” anyway, because I can imagine reasons why a woman would want to say that she’d been hacked, considering how much nudes/sex pix can ruin the life of a woman in the picture, so it was more out of thinking it’s a shame that women would feel the need to say it was hacking in cases when it might be because someone they had trusted did it to them for revenge.
It was disgusting enough that many of those revenge sites were targeted at ex-BFs who wanted to ruin lives. It’s worse when it’s someone who says something like, “Hm, let’s see if I can get in this pretty school teacher’s email account and see if she has nudies of herself that I can use to ruin her life because she has icky girl parts.”
Yeah, I didn’t do my usual thing of being gender-neutral on that. I could be wrong, but I don’t think us guys face the same level of harassment when dick/sex pics get online.
Well I do have probably more of an expertise in this than you’d think. Perhaps google my name in relation to Hunter Moore or Camille Dodero.
But whatever the case, I think betraying someone who trusted you with nudes is totally despicable.
I just think this like hacking/photoshopping conspiracy is a bit much.
I actually have first-hand experience. I was forced to resign in 2007 from a state job because someone “hacked” into my old email account and sent a grainy cell photo (back when camera phones weren’t as nice as they are today, thankfully) of me sitting in a bubble bath. You could sort of see one boob if you squinted, but it wasn’t a great photo.
I had sent it to my email to then forward to my then long-distance boyfriend. A YEAR LATER some meth-head asshat I worked with several years prior and hadn’t seen or spoken to since got into my old email account (I will tell you that my password was not as strong as it should have been), and sent that photo to EVERYONE on my contacts list, along with some other emails – including shit he just made up, pretending to be me.
I was working as an admin asst for a higher up in a state department. I was forced to resign and it was a HUGE mess and really mortifying. Thankfully I have awesome family and friends because none of them cared, but the bosses sure did. I had no money so I couldn’t afford lawyers and resigning was better than being fired.
The state capitol police also called me and said, and I quote, “Well, we believe you, so we wont’ be pressing charges.” O_o
Thankfully that was really the end of that, and I eventually got a better paying job so it sort of worked out.
But damn, that was an awful month. And I’m not tech stupid! I just had one weak account and he had some good tools and was persistent.
I once had an ex-boyfriend that had installed key-logging software on my computer and even though i’m not tech-stupid it took until well after we broke up to even realize it. Some of these women may just not really fully know who did it.
Also, you’d be surprised at how many assholes exist. The asshole that eventually led me to my resignation was some older dude who did (does, probably) do a lot of meth and I think he just didn’t like me because I was young and female. I mean seriously, we worked together for a while and that was it. We got along okay, and nothing of note happened during the time we worked together. I caught him because he was able to log into an account that tracked IP addresses and he was still workin’ the same shitty job at the same place (even having the IP address did not help me any because I was broke).
I don’t know. I think as a man you might not understand. I’ve had other weird stalking instances as well, and I’m not even what you’d call hot.
Sympathies for your plight, but I am a bit puzzled. It was a pic of a boob, not a pic of anyone doing a donkey. Is this an American thing? You actually risk getting fired for something like that? Then it seems like this is not only a problem of sleazeball revenge-site-owners, but also a problem with the puritanism of your society as a whole.
I know marilove will answer for herself, but being American I can wholeheartedly say yes. We’re weird like that. The weird scenario in that awful National Lampoon’s European Vacation where a picture of Ellen, naked, on a billboard with the caption “Slut in the Shower”? Yeah, that’s a life-ruining event over here. I grew up in the Midwest, still live in the Midwest, and I don’t get it. I get deeply personal photos being highly embarrassing, but I don’t get the life-ruining aspect of it. At all. I would have never taken photos of my wife like that, because she’s a teacher and if something happened where the photos got out to the Internet, we’d have to move if she ever wanted to hold down a job as a teacher and hope that none of the holier-than-thous got wind of where she moved to.
Yeah it is probably a fairly American thing. We’re not known for being welcoming of the sexuality of women. Just a boob can really cause people to FREAK THE FUCK OUT.
And you’re not wrong, btw, about the puritanism of our society. Sociopaths take advantage of that quite well, and not just when it comes to “revenge porn”.
It’s a never-ending cycle, really.
I was luckier than you. I’m a man, and had a stalker back when I was 19. Somehow he got my phone number and was coming by my work (at the mall) – all of this before the internets went mainstream.
No matter what the tools, some assholes (and I guess good guys in her case) win out through sheer persistence.
K Thanks. Glad that you got a better paid job. I think the lady in the article might get a book publisher soon as well. She’s earned it. Fighting sleaze balls for the better part of 2 years seems like a financial black hole.
On a related note, about puritanism. Your early pilgrims, one of the groups that later went to either Plymouth or Roanoke (can’t remember which one) took a detour across the channel to Leiden in Holland to settle. There they got very upset about the tolerance of Dutch society (jews and papists in the street, shudder), so they decided to go across the big pond instead. So instead of being founded by people escaping religious intolerance (as the official version goes), your country was instead founded by intolerant religious people. A bunch of Taliban really. This has no doubt contributed to the moronic attitude visavi nudity expressed by parts of your society.
But does it really help a woman to say that she was hacked? It does not seem like the backlash is decreased much if at all. Also, now she has to deal with men calling her a liar and telling her that she must have sent the pictures to a boyfriend.
I heart you for speaking your experience but your experience was really horrible and want to make it perfectly clear that I in no way heart THAT.
What I don’t understand is why you would have to resign. And why would the police be calling? For crying out loud, it was a private picture. Did they press charges against the guy who broke into your account?
It doesn’t really matter what she did or did not do, you know, the men would find a way to use it to her disadvantage. No, it probably doesn’t matter, but when you’re actually going through something like that, you sometimes do/say things to try and help the situation or at least not make it worse. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t, it’s sort of not the point.
Nope. It was a gmail account so i would have had to get subpoenas and shit to prove anything, even though I had his IP address. And yeah, the police called me because they wanted to make sure I wasn’t harassing whoever received the e-mails. Not surprisingly, I got very little information. I was called into a meeting with the HR lady – alone – and she showed me a b& print out of the picture that was mailed and a couple e-mails. It was … mortifying. Not a fun meeting.
I had to resign because it was a “sexually provocative picture” (her words) sent from MY e-mail account with MY name, and it was sent to very, very high-up executives. Also, I live in a right-to-work state so … I was basically up shit creek. It was just easier to force me to resign than deal with me.
Maybe I could have done something but with no money and a lack of resources, it’s not that easy.
Do you know how much it costs to actually fight this kind of shit? Most normal people cannot afford to fight it. And not just money, but time and effort. Finding the resources to fight something like that is NOT easy.
Hard to argue with that. Anthony Wiener actually had a real shot at being elected mayor of New York City AFTER his first batch of unsolicited dick pics were made public. If a married female politician was outed sending photographs of her genitalia to young men the very idea of a political comeback would have been unthinkable.
