Creepshots and revenge porn: how paparazzi culture affects women
Really worth reading the entire thing.
The parts about the pressure on schoolgirls, the testimony from young celebrities, the websites set up specifically to disseminate pictures which were not intended to be shared and are in fact often stolen by hackers... this really should open some eyes to what's really going on here.
...
Laws has been researching possible legal routes for victims of such sites, which has brought her into contact with Mary Anne Franks, associate professor of law at the University of Miami. "What unites creepshots, the Middleton photographs, the revenge porn websites," says Franks, "is that they all feature the same fetishisation of non-consensual sexual activity with women who either you don't have any access to, or have been denied future access to. And it's really this product of rage and entitlement."
Franks finds it interesting that the response to these situations is so often to blame the woman involved. Ali Sargent, a 19-year-old student and activist, says in her school years there were a few incidents of girls being filmed in sexual situations, without their knowledge or consent, and the attitude of other girls was dismissive at best – displaying that dearth of sympathy that distances people from the thought that it could ever happen to them. "It was mostly just, 'well, she was pretty stupid,'" says Sargent.
Franks echoes this. She says the argument goes: "'You shouldn't have given those pictures to that person', or 'You shouldn't have been sunbathing in a private residence', or 'You should never, as a woman, take off your clothes in any context where anybody could possibly ever have a camera'. That's been shocking to me, that people aren't just outraged and furious about this, but they're actually making excuses for this behaviour, and blaming women for ever being sexual any time, at all.
"Even in a completely private setting, within a marriage – it couldn't be any more innocuous than the Middleton situation – and yet people are still saying things like: what was she expecting, she's famous and she's got breasts, and therefore she's got to keep them covered up all the time. I do think it's a rage against women being sexual on their own terms. We're perfectly fine with women being sexual, as long as they are objects and they're passive, and we can turn them on, turn them off, download them, delete them, whatever it is. But as soon as it's women who want to have any kind of exclusionary rights about their intimacy, we hate that. We say, 'No, we're going to make a whore out of you'."
= new reply since forum marked as read
Its hard to pick out just 4 paragraphs to highlight. Just great stuff. I know this will drop like a stone here but I'll kick it again in the am - Sunday nights are pretty slow on DU.
More from the article:
"In recent years a genre of websites dedicated to sharing humiliating pictures of women – and occasionally men – has cropped up, known as "revenge porn" sites. The idea is that vengeful people can post humiliating, sexual pictures of former partners, photos often clearly intended for personal use only, if they were taken with consent at all.
Charlotte Laws first encountered these sites in January this year, after her daughter Kayla, who is in her mid-20s, had her computer hacked. In Kayla's email account was one topless photo she had taken of herself – it hadn't been shared with anyone – which was then posted on a notorious revenge porn site, Is Anyone Up. She was distraught, and Charlotte, an author and former private investigator, spent 11 days, non-stop, working to get the picture taken down. One of the nastiest aspects of the site, which has since closed, was that humiliating photographs would be posted alongside details of the person's social media accounts, so they were immediately identifiable.
Laws wanted to find out more about the experiences of those whose images ended up on the site, so began an informal study. She called 40 people – a few men, but mainly women, reflecting the site's make-up – and says that 40% had had accounts hacked, while others were victims of vengeful exes. She spoke to three teachers, one of whom had lost her job due to the site, and another whose job hung in the balance. One woman was terrified the photos would be used against her in a custody battle. Another had seen her business ruined – even though the nude images the site ran alongside her social media profiles weren't actually of her. There was a woman who had taken pictures for her doctor, of her breasts bandaged after surgery, and those had been hacked from her computer and posted. All the pictures were open to biting discussion of looks and desirability."
Post surgical photos?? Naked pictures of a person that isn't really them and now they're in jeopardy of losing their jobs??!! 
A HUGE K&R!
K&R 
The distance involved were such that he had to be using an extreme telephoto lens to get the shot. The distance was approximately half a mile away. This wasn't like any passerby could see her topless, so now he did not "simply took a photograph of something that was visible from a public street."
http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/celebrity/snapped-from-afar-topless-shots-spanned-1km-20120917-261a1.html
PB
attitudes about women, sex, and human bodies, this type of perverted weirdness will perpetuate.
"OOOO OOOO, Mr. Slate, Mr. Slate! This is Fred! Hold the presses, you ain't gonna believe this! I got a clear shot of the the Queen's tits! This is gonna be HUGE!1!!1 (laughs like a brain damaged chimpanzee - hoo hoo hoo!!11!1)
How incredibly juvenile and idiotic is that? Grow the fuck up, for godsake.
IMO, this passage in the book of Genesis is the primary dogmatic basis of western patriarchal religion perpetuated sexism, misogyny, and possibly many sexual fetishisms in, (such as idiotic, immature, silly human beings sneaking around taking pictures of unsuspecting women's bodies:
23 The man said,,
“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”
24 That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.
25 Adam and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?”
2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’”
4 “You will not certainly die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
Somehow, these women, and this culture, like so many others like them, did not get the news about how they were now inherently and intrinsically ashamed of their naked bodies.
Sorry. There's no way I can take all this patriarchy affirming, misogynistic text literally, and the perpetuation of literal interpretations of historical allegories into religious dogmas by authoritarian control freaks is holding back human evolution.
Until we can, as a significant body of individuals, and subsequently, collectively as a society, sufficiently emancipate ourselves from this, and other types of institutionalized mental slavery, these juvenile attitudes toward sex, women, LGBT's, and human bodies, will not change significantly, and will continue to irreparably, permanently harm so many children, in so many ways.
“If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.”
― Frank Zappa
And it's extra depressing that the purpose and result is humiliation
