“A bill banning “revenge porn” — nude or sexual photos, generally of former wives or girlfriends, posted online by an angry ex — has been signed into law by California’s governor, but the chief advocate for the legislation says it doesn’t go far enough to help victims.
The law makes it a misdemeanor to post nude photos of someone else online without their permission, and the person posting the photos or videos must have done so with the intent of causing emotional distress or humiliation. A conviction could result in six months in jail and a $1,000 fine.”
Comment:
Hear, hear! So nice to know that Americans themselves are so much more sensible than the posse of free-speech fundamentalists, one of whom is calling this the “rape of liberty” (Brian Wilson, at LRC).
If that inaccurate analysis is typical, I’d say we have a bigger problem with the rape of language.
Wilson starts his exercise in confused thinking quoting Congreve (“hell hath no fury like a woman scorned”), although the point of revenge sex, as he himself acknowledges in para 2, is that it’s an act most often committed by scorned men, not women.
Hint: Porn involving their own selves isn’t usually a means by which women “revenge” themselves, is it?
Of course, the confusion has already begun in the article’s title:
“The first amendment is not a guardian of taste” it reads.
Taste?
Since when did posting nude, sexual pictures of someone online (caps: ONLINE), without their permission, become a matter of taste?
It’s a matter of aggression against them.
It takes their most private physical images and disseminates them permanently, to the entire world, to be recycled forever in the most salacious contexts.
It is as though you took your clothes off in a public restroom or doctor’s office, only to find that tapes were running, sending the images all over the world. Or, imagine that your husband took a picture of the moment you delivered a baby, and that picture was then sent all over the world. It might not cause people to stalk you (or it might); it might not give you the label of slut, but it would certainly cause you intense distress.
Then there are the cases where the images are not even real. They are photo-shopped. Or the emails are spoofed or misconstrued. They are then sent to the target, anonymously, with threatening messages.
I know how that works. It was done to me. Material was taken from private conversations and emails, misconstrued, and used to threaten me….even though there was no substance to any of the threats.
Any more than there is substance to all the multiple posts calling me CIA, RAW, a prostitute, and stock fraud.
A casual remark, cut and pasted, can be made to look like something else. A vulgar image can be tacked onto a name; a baseless innuendo can destroy a reputation.
People have committed suicide over less.
Mr. Wilson is quite right on one thing, though.
This isn’t rape. It’s much, much worse than rape.
The emotional pain of rape can last for years, even if the actual event has been obliterated from memory. But it ends. The physical effects end even sooner. If there is no disease transmitted or baby created, they end with the healing of injured tissues, in a few weeks or months.
That is one solace. And there is another.
Beside the victim and the perpetrator, no one else needs to know about this most private crime, a crime which is treated, and has been treated for most of civilization, as if it humiliates and shames the victim more than it shames the perpetrator.
And what’s more, rape has always been treated as if it humiliates and shames the victim’s family, despite changing mores in this regard over the last half century.
But a virtual rape of the internet kind is NEVER erased.
It is never healed, because it is forever visible. It is the most private of injuries occurring in the most public of venues.
Dr. Jacobs will live with her boyfriend’s cyber-crime every second of her life. It will affect every decision in her life, every relationship she has, from peer interaction… to marriage.. to her relationship with her children.
It will have an impact on every career move she makes, every public word she speaks.
She has been permanently “disfigured” in those areas.
The closest comparison to “revenge porn” as a crime is acid-throwing in Asia. The same kind of mentality is behind both. The attitude of the scorned men: “If I can’t have her, she’ll not be fit for anyone else to have.”
In one, the face is mutilated for ever. In the other, the moral life is mutilated.
In my estimation, the moral harm in virtual rape is even greater than in acid-throwing. An injured face can be repaired to pass in society. The injury to Ms. Jacobs is well-nigh beyond repair.
I can understand Marxists and atheists arguing the opposite. They, as a rule, can see nothing beyond what they can touch, smell, and shove up an orifice.
But LRC is supposed to cater to Christian libertarians as well. No Christian libertarian could ever argue that injuries to the body are worse than injuries to the moral life of a human being.
And, since the net is the most public forum ever devised, it stands to reason that virtual offenses are in fact the stuff of public adjudication, libertarian cant notwithstanding.
Virtual rape is so devastating in its effects that the intelligence agencies have put it to use, not least, because unthinking people will tend to gloss over it and pass it off as not “rape-rape,” as Whoopie Goldberg, to her everlasting disgrace, put it.
That is the same reason the intelligence agencies use “no-touch” (mental or psycho-sexual) torture. Virtual torture is every bit as bad as “real” (physical) torture….but it provides useful cover, when discovered, because it doesn’t “look” as bad as the real deal.
Of course, it is much worse. Cyber-rape is rape of a type too profound for us to fully grasp, because our paradigms are still materialistic, still Marxist. It is the body all the way, with us.
And that is where the danger lies, because let’s not forget the bigger picture – where we are at this moment: We are in a war, not so much against another country, as against ourselves.
A war of culture, in a sense, but not the one that divides red state from blue.
We are in a war of culture dividing those who get what’s at stake…. and those who don’t.
What is at stake is the possibility of freedom itself. It is the soul.
War is being waged against our own minds and souls all the time.
Cyber-crime, hand-in-glove with propaganda and disinformation, is in the vanguard of that war.
And, Dr. Holly Jacobs has just won a battle against it.
She’s a hero for that. I applaud her.
If you want to help Holly Jacobs and the millions of young women (and men and children) world-wide whose dignity of person has been irreparably injured by the CRIME of revenge porn, please sign here.