Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, history has been made in North Carolina: Legislation to criminalize “revenge porn” is here at last. If this is signed into action, the sharing of nude or sexually explicit photos online without the individual’s affirmative consent does not just make you a bad person, but also a criminal.
Our First Amendment rights have kept revenge porn from being criminalized in the past. Victims of revenge porn have found little protection from the law because our right to free speech usually favors pornography unless it is judged obscene — which is funny, as one would typically anticipate that pornography would be judged obscene. However, conflict arises when revenge porn contains pictures of unknowing and non-consenting individuals and is posted along with identifying information such as the victim’s name, address, age or workplace due to privacy laws.
As students, we face certain censorships, and while, as a writer, I’m not fully comfortable with that in the case of this new legislation, I am perfectly at peace with our right to what some may consider restrictions of “free speech.” A form of sexual exploitation is going to be criminalized, and that is a victory.
When someone is the victim of revenge porn, his or her life is forever altered. These individuals can be fired from their jobs, expelled from school and harassed because of their perceived promiscuity. Many have to change their legal names and move to escape the effects of the images. Victims often suffer from mental and emotional trauma and face irreparable damage to their reputation. Revenge porn follows those who are victimized throughout their lives, and it exploits a double standard that harms women more than men.
Celebrity hackings and nude photo leaks have been all the rage in recent years, and even celebrity Marilyn Monroe, in the height of her career back in the 1960s, experienced a similar phenomenon when nude photos of her were leaked. While celebrities often receive sympathy and do not suffer major damaging effects to their lives or careers, normal people experience a much less forgiving world.
Taylor Swift brings about glorious acts of revenge against ex-lovers through the intimate lyrics of her songs. This, in turn, brings her extreme levels of success. It is no surprise that we are socialized to filter any complexity of emotion that we often do not know how to deal with through a lens of anger and revenge. In the name of becoming uninhibited and more honest as a culture, we have reduced sex to its most primitive expression: one of power.
Revenge porn is evidence that all power corrupts. As Stephen Colbert performed a skit that played on the “Hunger Games” Tuesday night titled “The Hungry for Power Games” regarding the inimitable ambition of people vying for the presidential seat in the upcoming elections, I could not help but think of the parallels between the current state of political affairs and our disturbing revenge porn trend. The radical themes that color the current campaigns is just as much about American anxiety of losing power as revenge porn is generally about male anxiety in the wake of feminist social trends.
Revenge porn is both despicable and pathetic. I wish we didn’t have to have a law for people to understand its grievous effects on the targeted individual. If sexuality did not hold the social taboo that it does, people would not use it as leverage to ruin the lives of others. I’m glad to see this act has become criminalized even though in an ideal world, it should not have to be so.
