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Life

07th Jul 2017

No one deserves to have their nudes posted online

No matter who they are...

Jade Hayden

Woman phone

No one deserves to have their nudes posted online without their consent.

No matter who they are, what they’ve done, or how many people they’ve slept with, no one should have to deal with having their privacy being violated in such a cruel way.

And yet, they do. All the time.

You’d have a hard time meeting anybody who hadn’t at least seen an intimate photo – online or otherwise – that was shared without the subject’s consent.

Phone text

The assumption with revenge porn is that sexuality is something to be ashamed of. By sharing sexual images online without consent, the person hopes that the victim will be embarrassed, or shamed into submission.

In a lot of cases, they are. In some cases, the victim speaks out and calls the act what it is – an attack. But in very few cases, do people ever question why sharing intimate photos seems like an appropriate reaction to something.

If somebody has annoyed you, you give out about it to your mates. If someone has ended your relationship suddenly, you question why it happened, maybe have a bit of a cry, and move on. If someone has cheated on you, you get angry.

You don’t post their nude photographs online, share them with your friends, or use them in any way that could cause harm, embarrassment or shame.

There really is no excuse.

Sex attack

Using revenge porn against somebody isn’t just a total breach of trust, it’s an attempt to gain control over another person by deciding who gets to see their body, and what they get to do with it.

It is for this reason that a lot of lawyers, researchers, and sexual assault victim advocates are trying to mute the use of the phrase ‘revenge porn.’

Instead, apparently ‘image-based sexual abuse’ is preferable. Law professor, Clare McGlynn says that ‘revenge porn’ suggests that the act is not a crime and should not be treated as such – a concept that becomes even more problematic when we consider that many countries, Ireland included, are on the brink of making the unsolicited sharing of nude or intimate images totally illegal.

People walking with phone

But laws like this won’t stop everybody from sharing revenge porn, as the act’s prominence suggests that many are still blissfully unaware of how damaging it could potentially be.

Even more insidious, however, is the assumption that the victim deserved what happened to them because they were in any way promiscuous. Why shouldn’t someone be okay with hundreds of people seeing their nudes if they made the decision to share them in the first place?

The difference here is that they most likely didn’t want hundreds of people seeing their nudes. They probably wanted one person to see them, and instead, this privacy was violated.

It’s sometimes difficult to understand why some people don’t see revenge porn as a crime, but it’s even harder to understand why the act is sometimes seen as a joke, a bit of light entertainment, or something that shouldn’t be taken all that seriously.

Blac Chyna Rob Kardashian

This week, Rob Kardashian posted nude photos of his ex-fiancée Blac Chyna to his Instagram account. The photos were taken down almost immediately, with Rob’s account being suspended shortly after.

Many were instantly critical of Rob’s actions, but others shrugged it off claiming that Chyna deserved it for cheating on him.

There has been talk that Kardashian could face jail time for posting the photos, but he probably won’t. Revenge porn is illegal in California, but Rob is, well, a Kardashian.

At most, he’ll probably have to pay the $1,000 fine that acts as an alternative to a prison sentence for sharing a sexual image under Calafornian law.

What’s more likely is that nothing will happen at all.