Revenge Pornography

Gender, Sexuality and Motivations

Matthew Hall, Jeff Hearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317300243
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Forensic Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Facilitated by developments in technologies, the non-consensual posting of sexually explicit images of someone else for revenge, entertainment or political motive – so-called revenge porn – has become a global phenomenon. This groundbreaking book argues that fundamental and recurring issues about how victims are violated can be understood in terms of gender and sexual dynamics and constructions, binary gender and sexual positioning and logics, and the use of sexual meanings.

Using a discourse analytical approach the authors examine revenge pornography through the words of the perpetrators themselves and study the complex ways in which they invoke, and deploy, gender- and sexuality-based discourses to blame the victim. They explore strategies to curb the phenomenon of revenge porn, and by placing their research in a broader social and political context, the authors are able to examine the effectiveness of current legislative frameworks, education and awareness raising, victim support and perpetrator re-education programmes, along with wider political considerations.

This enhanced understanding of the perpetrator mindset provides important insights into the use of social media to facilitate gender violence, and holds the promise of more effective interventions in future. This is a unique resource for students, academics, researchers, and professionals interested in revenge pornography and related issues.

1
MAPPING THE TERRAIN

What is revenge porn?

Despite the relatively recent media attention, revenge porn has been around for years. The term revenge pornography, or its abbreviated colloquial usage, revenge porn, appears to have originated in the last decade or so, although people have participated in this activity for some time (Rosen, 2010). For example, the 1980 Hustler Magazine started Beaver Hunt, ‘a contest that published reader-submitted images of naked women. Beaver Hunt photos were often accompanied by details about the woman: her hobbies, her sexual fantasies, and sometimes her name. Some of the photos were stolen. Exes submitted many more’ (Levendowski, 2014, p. 1). According to Levendowski, women sued Hustler for publishing their photos without their permission throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, ex-Olympic figure skater, Tonya Harding, had her video Tonya and Jeff’s Wedding Night made public by her husband, Jeff, after they split up (Hillyer, 2004, p. 57). In 2000, the Italian researcher Tsoulis-Reay (2013) identified a new genre of pornography where explicit pictures of ex-girlfriends were being shared in Usenet groups.¹ Yet a search of the newspaper archive Nexis indicates that the term ‘revenge pornography’ appears to have been first used in the mass media by Richard Morgan in the magazine Dossier (2008).

Online, the term first seems to have appeared a year earlier in the Urban Dictionary (2007). JonasOooohyeah (a user’s pseudonym) defined it as ‘Homemade porn uploaded by an ex-girlfriend or (usually) ex-boyfriend after particularly vicious breakup as a means of humiliating the ex or just for own amusement.’ What is immediately noticeable in JonasOooohyeah’s definition is that pornography is classified as amateur, ‘Homemade’: it’s mainly committed by men and boys ‘ex-girlfriend or (usually) ex-boyfriend’; it happens outside a relationship ‘after particularly vicious breakup’; and the motivations for doing so are ‘a means of humiliating the ex or just for own amusement’. However, the non-consensual aspect of revenge porn is only implicit in this definition. Yet other definitions do incorporate this; for example, Dictionary.com (2015) defines the act as ‘sexually suggestive images of someone, typically a former romantic partner that are posted online or otherwise shared without the person’s consent’. Arguably, a strength of this definition is that pornography is broadened from sexually explicit material to ‘sexually suggestive images’ thus potentially capturing more forms of Internet crime such as cyberstalking (see Weisskirch & Delevi, 2011, p. 1697). What is only implied is the perpetrator’s motivation, as in ‘typically a former romantic partner’. We do get a sense from the inclusion of ‘typically’ that revenge porn might not only be committed by ex-partners. Similar definitions are offered by other organisations, such as

• the UK Safer Internet Centre (2015): ‘Revenge Porn is a term used to describe sexually explicit media that is publicly shared online without the consent of the pictured individual’;

• the Speech Project (2016): Cyber-exploitation, Nonconsensual Photography or ‘Revenge Porn’: ‘The distribution of sexually graphic images without the consent of the subject of the images. The abuser obtains images or videos in the course of a prior relationship, or hacks into the victim’s computer, social media accounts or phone’;

• the UK Criminal Justice and Courts Act (2015): ‘revenge porn – usually following the breakup of a couple, the electronic publication or distribution of sexually explicit material (principally images) of one or both of the couple, the material having originally been provided consensually for private use’ (Parliament.UK, 2015); and

• the US National Conference of State Legislatures (2014): ‘the posting of nude or sexually explicit photographs or videos of people online without their consent, even if the photograph itself was taken with consent. It can follow a spurned spouse, girlfriend, or boyfriend seeking to get revenge by uploading photographs to websites, many of which are set up specifically for these kinds of photos or videos’.

At the time of writing, September 2016, there is no definition of ‘revenge pornography’ or ‘revenge porn’ in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Combining these provides us with a more comprehensive definition of the revenge pornography act (non-consensual), mode of pornography (mostly home-made sexually suggestive or explicit images and/or videos, but also includes those commercially produced), perpetrators (largely male ex-partners), victims (predominantly female ex-partners) and context (post-relationship revenge, but also including hacking and commercial pornography), location of the act (online largely from offline practices) and motivations (revenge, entertainment or political motive).

It should be noted, at this point, that sexually suggestive or explicit images and videos of someone do not need to be of the person in question. For example, in 2014 a woman from Houston, Texas, began a lawsuit against her ex-partner for superimposing images of her head onto naked body shots of someone else and posting them on Facebook as if they were ‘really’ her (Mazza, 2014). This suggests that one can become a victim of revenge porn despite never having participated in the production of sexually explicit material. Thus, any definition needs to incorporate the experiences of victims and the motivations of perpetrators as well as types of perpetrator such ex-partners, current partners, ex-friends, people known to the victim, others distributing others’ revenge posts and Internet hackers, both as individuals or as groups such as ‘human flesh search groups’² (Citron & Franks, 2014; Lyons et al., 2016, p. 1; Stroud, 2014; Tungate, 2014). Thus, in this book we refer to revenge porn as the online and offline non-consensual distribution, or sharing, of genuine or fake explicit images of someone else by ex-partners, partners, others or hackers in order to seek revenge, for entertainment or for political motives.

The problem of naming

In this book, we generally use the term ‘revenge porn’, as these are the most well-used words to describe the phenomena and actions under examination. However, we need to state early on an important major caveat to this analysis, namely, that the terms ‘revenge porn’ and ‘revenge pornography’ are themselves open to severe critique. This is made clear by Franks:

The term “revenge porn” is misleading in two respects. First, perpetrators are not always being motivated by vengeance. Many act out of a desire for profit, notoriety, or entertainment, including hackers, purveyors of hidden or “upskirt” camera recordings, and people who distribute stolen cellphone photos. The term “revenge porn” is also misleading in that it implies that taking a picture of oneself naked or engaged in a sexual act (or allowing someone else to take such a picture) is pornographic. But creating explicit images in the expectation within the context of a private, intimate relationship – an increasingly common practice³ – is not equivalent to creating pornography. The act of disclosing a private, sexually explicit image to someone other than the intended audience, however, can accurately be described as pornographic, as it transforms a private image into public sexual entertainment.

(Franks, 2016, p. 2)

For these reasons, there is a strong case for using the term ‘non-consensual pornography’, or even often the more elaborated ‘online non-consensual pornography for the purposes of revenge’, even though the purposes may not always be clearly for revenge or solely for revenge, but rather for other reasons and motivations. Other namings and framings include: cyber-exploitation, hate speech and hate crime.

In addition, another broader set of arguments disputes the specificity of revenge porn, and instead argues that all pornography is revenge porn (Tyler, 2006). Furthermore, some feminists and gender activists argue against both labels: ‘revenge pornography’ and ‘pornography’. For example, in the project on online violence against women organised by the Women’s Rights Association in Iceland, the survivors of ‘revenge porn’ oppose the use of the words, as they felt it was degrading to talk about such acts of violence as pornography. This suggests that the very labelling and naming itself elaborates and extends the violating actions initially into language use, and then beyond into further social degradation. Thus, in using the term ‘revenge porn’, we do so throughout, in a sense, in inverted commas, as the cultural reference that it has become, not as a distinct analytical or political category.

Revenge porn websites

Revenge porn can appear in various different online and offline locations and formats. Unsurprisingly, it can be found on pornographic websites such as Cliphunter, Xvideos and PornHub that allow the uploading of amateur personal images and videos, as well as specific revenge porn sites such as Anonymous Image Board; Expic Net; Ex-Girlfriend Pictures, MyEx.com, My Fucking Ex-Girlfriend and Revenge Porn Net. There are also some women-specific sites that include revenge porn, such as ‘She’s A Homewrecker’ (http://shesahomewrecker.com/), which features individual women who are alleged to have, usually deliberately, broken up previous marriages and relationships. However, non-consensual sexually explicit material can also be found on more mainstream platforms, such as Facebook and Tumblr, although there seems to be a move by some of these large organisations to tackle this problem. Until recently, Twitter also hosted revenge porn specific pages, ‘Twitter bans revenge porn and vows to stop pervert stalkers publishing their victims’ home addresses’ (Hamill, 2015, The Mirror, March 12). Non-consensual category specific websites are also available for groups such as older mothers (colloquially known as MILF) SubmitYourMom (http://www.submityourmom.com/) and girlfriends/wives PsVoyeurOfWives (http://psvoyeurofwives.tumblr.com/).

There are also other media for the creation and distribution of revenge porn: some are close relations to bespoke sites, such as cheating sites; some in the process of rapid change and development; some not so new forms of media, for example, a man was found guilty of auctioning a CD with his ex-partner’s naked images on eBay (Miller, Miami New Times, 2013). And increasingly, there are multiple linkages and convergences between e-media: for example, Internet via mobile telephones; interactive television with Internet, video-chat and telephone; tablets with Internet access, video distribution; audio-visual communication on the Internet and so on. Thus, revenge porn can circulate with ease and speed.

While a significant amount of revenge porn happens online, the explosion of ‘sexting’ (DoSomething.org, 2015; GuardChild.com, 2015; Hasinoff, 2015) means images and videos can be circulated solely by texting, or shown to others in the perpetrators’ and victims’ social circles in person by electronic devices. Indeed, the Internet security company McAfee (2013) found more than 50% of adults shared sexually explicit material through their mobile devices, about 50% also said they stored these images online and 16% said they had shared sexually explicit images and videos with complete strangers. Apparently, one in ten ex-partners have threated to expose risqué images online, and 60% of those who threatened this course of action carried out their threat. It appears from examining the various websites hosting revenge porn that the vast majority of victims and perpetrators reside in the more developed nations of Europe, North America and Australasia and in particular the United States and the United Kingdom. However, revenge porn can also be found in smaller quantities for those reported to be living in the Asian, South American and African countries as dispersed as Armenia, Belize, Bahrain, Ecuador, Guam, Ghana, India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Thailand, South Africa, and so on.

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Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimer and terminology
• Introduction
• 1 Mapping the terrain
• 2 Responses
• 3 Situating revenge porn
• 4 Online interactions
• 5 A discursive approach to revenge porn
• 6 ‘She took my kids, ruined my life’: heterosexual men’s accounts
• 7 ‘Just wants to use you for sex’: heterosexual women’s accounts
• 8 ‘…Cheater! liar! thief!’: gay and lesbian accounts
• 9 Discussion
• 10 Future interventions
• Index