Revenge Porn Isn't Porn. Stop Doing That.

Author's Note; I don't usually write about real things. I apologize to the four friends and twenty spambots who comprise my readership for talking about a current event, and I promise to throw you a list of "Top Five Action Movie First Aid as Foreplay Scenes" next week.

So this is one take on the existence of revenge porn. I like feminists and I'm all for a healthy dialog, but I get really uneasy when something happens that mean the existence of porn is innately bad.

You know how rape isn't sex? Revenge porn isn't porn. 

To be sure, this is an extremely alarming website/bullshit cultural misogyny event-of-the-week. It's evidence that the law needs to keep up with technology as far as abusive conduct, harassment, and our greater understanding of consent. And I think it's important to have an ongoing critique of mainstream porn in terms of its underlying assumptions & artifices. Still, I disagree with is the idea that "it isn’t possible to separate ‘revenge porn’ from ‘porn,’" or the assertion that "When women are objectified, they lose power and men gain power." or: "The male gaze is a disempowering one." Taking that stance allows for no complexity whatsoever, and ignores a history of resourceful resistance by women & others who find ways of working with, making money off of, critiquing, and directly addressing the male gaze. 

The stance taken also polices desire in a way that ultimately makes me uncomfortable.

Murphy writes: "Just as revenge porn isn't simply about naked bodies, neither is mainstream porn. It’s the power dynamic that’s ‘sexy’ and it’s the degradation that separates both revenge porn and ‘regular’ porn from straight-up nudity and sex." That seems to me a highly personal interpretation of porn that simply cannot be applied across the board, and robs all sorts of pervs and gender nonconforming and otherwise atypical people and sex workers and queers and trans people of their ability to make their own judgments and decisions about how they use their bodies.

So... not ultimately on board. Just as rape isn't about sex, online harassment like this douchebag's site is not about porn. It's about breaching trust and consent: it's an extension of harassment and stalking, and should be criminalized. It's about entitlement to women's bodies, which I think should be resisted on all possible levels. But dragging PORN ITSELF into it is like blaming death metal or hip hop for youth violence; there are much bigger, more life-threatening cultural patterns at play--concepts of masculinity, structural violence, and interlocking oppressions-- that need to be addressed rather than the mere existence of adults interacting sexually on camera for money.

Stop doing that.