Commentary on my “Sexting as media production” article

Commentary on my “Sexting as media production” article

Technology: Fear and promise

As the details about the NSA’s monitoring programs continue to emerge, I am working on my book’s introduction today, and thinking about this:

If network technology is inherently revolutionary—it leads one to wonder why existing governmental, bureaucratic, corporate, and financial elites are so enthusiastic about, and so heavily invested in, the success of this technology? (Barney, 2000: 19)

More on the NSA: from the Atlantic, the Onion, and danah boyd.

Victoria, Australia on the right track with sexting reform

In Victoria, Australia, the Law Reform Committee has conducted an Inquiry into Sexting. There’s comprehensive information form the inquiry online, including transcripts, submissions, and the final report.

What’s amazing is that the inquiry took recommendations from a range of wonderful feminist academics working on sexting, including Lara Karaian, Kate Crawford, Kath Albury, and Amy Shields Dobson. Check out recommendation #4: 

That the Victorian Government ensure that educational and media campaigns directed toward sexting focus on the appropriateness of the behaviour of people who distribute intimate images or media without consent, rather than on the person who initially creates the intimate images or media.

This is amazing to see in an official government report. As I discuss in my chapter on self-esteem and anti-sexting education campaigns, the blame-the-victim response is absolutely ubiquitous. I can’t wait to see what the new PSAs coming out of Australia look like if they actually take this advice.

The legal reforms the report suggests are also really interesting and are a pretty big departure from the response from many US states to criminalize youth sexting further. Instead, the report recommends reforming child pornography laws with defenses for close-in-age youth engaged in legal sex acts and discretion for judges in putting convicted sexters on the sex offender registry. It will be interesting to see what happens with the child pornography reforms, since in the US, Vermont’s attempt to decriminalize sexting for teens was met with national outrage–I talk about this case at length in the book.

The report’s attention to consent and harm is also really exciting. The press release explains:

While in most circumstances little or no harm is done to willing participants in sexting, real and significant harm can occur when images are distributed to other people without consent. The Committee recommends that legislation be introduced to make it an offence for any person to intentionally distribute an intimate image of another person without their consent. The Committee believes its recommendation for a non-consensual sexting offence that applies to adults and youth is a world first.

It may not exactly be a world first (North Dakota, for example, created an age-neutral misdemeanor offense in 2009 “for a person who knowingly acquires, possesses or distributes any photograph or visual representation that exhibits a nude or partially denuded figure without the person’s consent”), but thinking about the harm of sexting (1) in terms of non-consensual distribution and (2) in an age-neutral framework is really a step in the right direction.

I’m not sure that criminal law is the way to address the harm of nonconsensual or malicious sexting, given the huge problems with the prison system. Since other information-related harms (libel, slander, breech of confidentiality, publication of private facts, etc.) are in the domain of civil law, my latest thinking is that we should deal with the privacy violations of abusive sexting with lawsuits as well. Privacy laws in the US would have to get a lot better and easier to use, but so far it seems like the best legal solution.

Privacy and implied confidentiality

Woodrow Hartzog discusses developing the existing legal concept of “implied confidentiality” to help people address privacy violations. He explains:

We should have a better national dialogue about a romantic partner’s obligations of confidentiality. Salient norms of confidentiality would strengthen our relationships as well as the legal remedies for those whose trust has been betrayed.

Instead of prohibiting a certain kind of speech, confidentially law enforces express or implied promises and shared expectations. The tort of breach of confidentiality is currently very limited in scope, but could be made much more robust to sit alongside the more commonly asserted privacy torts.

I think this also fits nicely with my consent-based model–distributing a private image without consent would indeed be a breach in implied confidentiality.

The impact of abstinence-only education on rape victims

Famous kidnapping survivor Elizabeth Smart speaks out against abstinence-only education:

When Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins University panel last week, she explained one of the factors deterring her from escaping her attacker: She felt so worthless after being raped that she felt unfit to return to her society, which had communicated some hard and fast rules about premarital sexual contact.

“I remember in school one time, I had a teacher who was talking about abstinence,” Smart told the panel. “And she said, ‘Imagine you’re a stick of gum. When you engage in sex, that’s like getting chewed. And if you do that lots of times, you’re going to become an old piece of gum, and who is going to want you after that?’ Well, that’s terrible. No one should ever say that. But for me, I thought, ‘I’m that chewed-up piece of gum.’ Nobody re-chews a piece of gum. You throw it away. And that’s how easy it is to feel you no longer have worth. Your life no longer has value.”

Survivors of rape and trafficking, she said, need to be “given permission to fight back,” and that requires them “to know you are of value.”

Full video here.

“Am I beautiful?”

In the 2008 BBC documentary Virgin Daughters Randy Wilson explains why he holds purity balls. He says, “There’s a core question that the … woman has in her being that needs to be answered and that is, am I beautiful? am I worthy of being pursued?” One of his daughters elaborates in an NYT article:

“Something I need from dad is affirmation, being told I’m beautiful,” said Jordyn Wilson, 19, another daughter of Randy and Lisa. “If we don’t get it from home, we will go out to the culture and get it from them.”

Luckily, multinational personal care company Dove (owned by Unilever, which in turn owns over 400 brands including, by the way, Slim Fast) has the answer for girls and women as well, and it is YES: “You are more beautiful than you think.“

Then again, Katie Makkai has another answer which I quite prefer: This is the wrong question.

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Jazzy Little Drops agrees as well:

Dove was right about one thing: you are more beautiful than you know. But please, please hear me: you are so, so much more than beautiful.

Watching slut-shaming

In the past few months, there’s been a lot of media attention to girls who’ve died by suicide after being raped in public settings (eg. at parties) by multiple assailants, shamed and humiliated by peers, and failed by the adults in schools and justice departments who should have supported them. Audrie Pott was 15 when she took her own life and Rehtaeh Parsons was 17 years old. Parsons’ father wrote in a public statement:

My daughter wasn’t bullied to death, she was disappointed to death. Disappointed in people she thought she could trust, her school, and the police.

Some of the media coverage makes these tragedies seem like technology problems, and in all these cases digital photographs and distribution indeed heightened the slut-shaming both girls experienced. When tragedies like this happen in other parts of the world, people often blame a misogynistic culture that is supposedly uniquely terrible “over there.” When it happens here, it’s much easier to blame technology. 

These are not the first, nor will they be the last girls to commit suicide after being raped and then slut-shamed for it. It’s well established in the literature that suicide attempts are strongly correlated with child sexual abuse. These particular cases get so much attention because of the heightened shaming these girls experienced through social media. What’s genuinely new in these cases is not the slut-shaming from peers by the fact that the rest of us can see it. The evidence that is left behind when people socialize online makes once-private locker-room talk and whispers in the hallway public and visible to adults.

My hope is that youth educators and parents who are shocked by what Pott and Parsons’ peers said about them online can understand that what these girls experienced was not an exception but merely a highly visible (and, I hope, extreme?) version of what happens to survivors of rape all the time. Social media lets us see slut-shaming and rape culture in the light of day, but when we talk about these cases we have to recognize that these attitudes are not unique to teens or to a few bad people–they are absolutely endemic in (adult) mainstream culture.

update: Beth Lyons has a great post at Shameless about how the media have been reporting Parsons as a victim of “bullying”–which is really, really the wrong word for what happened to her.