Women try to get recourse for revenge porn photo posts

[Demo_Chris]

146. Obviously posting someone's picture without their permission is wrong

Obviously none of us here would excuse or condone this.

Equally obvious is that allowing such pictures to be take of yourself involves trusting someone else that might not be worthy of that trust. None the less, it is going to happen. People will take these pictures and share them, and the wrong people will see them eventually. And as time goes on, more and more people are taking and sharing these pictures.

Which suggests to me that it might one day be a self-correcting problem. But let me back up a step.

The one non-negotiable offense here is the violation of trust. I think we can agree that violating a trust is basically always wrong. In many cases however, these images come from people's private facebook and photobucket accounts either because someone hacked the account, or guessed the password, or the security settings were wrong, and the pictures are out there. And once they are out they are out.

It seems to me, however, that the next offense is not that these pictures were taken or shared, but in terms of how other people respond to them.

It wasn't so very long ago that someone coming out of the closet and telling the world that they were gay was cause for shock and sometimes dismay or worse. It was like confessing to being a criminal almost. Today, people are far more tolerant, and with every year that passes an ever larger pool of people will respond with indifference. One day, hopefully soon, everyone will say "No one cares if you are gay Bob."

I expect one day the same thing will apply here. As more and more women and men share these images online (and make no mistake, a lot of these pictures are shared knowingly) an ever growing number of people will simply not care. I am already there myself. I don't care if there are naked pictures of you online, I don't even care if there are naked pictures of me online (though how they got there, who took them, and who in their right mind would want to see them would definately be interesting). In any case, If you want to look at me knock yourself out. It certainly doesn't hurt me.

If someone was sharing a face shot of their ex girlfriend no one would bat an eye -- damn near everyone in America has face shots of themselves online. So the problem isn't that it is a picture, it's that it is a picture showing naughty bits. The parts that our religions tell us we are supposed to be ashamed of. And it seems to me that addressing THAT is the begininning of the solution to the problem. Not the pictures, not the naughty bits, but this societal hang-up we have with nudity and sex.

And I think that we address that through education and time and a conscious decision to stop being so sensitive and defensive about one of the most important aspects of our short and often miserable lives.