9/18/14 The Morning Coffee: Photosexual Politics

A good morning to you—

I'm probably the last person to comment on this, as I've never shot a single nude photo of anyone. (I don't know how ordinary or unusual that makes me among lifelong photographers—I don't have any reading on that metric.) And I don't need to see Jennifer Lawrence naked so much as I need to her cast in better-written movies. Hunger games, bah humbug.

But "This Idea Could Stop People From Posting Women’s Naked Photos Without Permission," written by Tara Culp-Ressler on ThinkProgress, is one of the most interesting photographic articles I've read in a long time. To me it doesn't seem reasonable to blame the people who shared their photos privately in the first place—romance is full of hope and excitement and trials of intimacy, and to expect people to remain guarded and legalistic in their thinking while in that state isn't very generous to human nature. But then, is the act of disseminating those private photos later, without permission, properly thought of as an act of sexual violation or aggression?

I lean toward sympathy with the latter position. Personally I'm very big on the idea of consent as a general principle. "Revenge porn," so called, goes against the grain of the way I tend to think human relations are best conducted. But as I say, maybe I'm not close enough to the issue to comment.

Have a good Thursday, and be considerate to others.

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Tim McGowan: "You have something in common with Ansel, he too did not shoot nudes."

Edie Howe: "Mike, Thank you for speaking up on this subject: as a survivor of sexual assault, the thought of having intimate images of myself distributed without my permission does indeed cause the same level of fear and anxiety that remembering my rape trauma does. Yes, it is a form of sexual assault. Nice to have an ally in you."

Jerome: "This not a technical problem, and it won't be resolved with technical cleverness. It is a problem of what behaviour we reward, and what behaviour we punish.

"The hacker: Let's start with that weird hacker apotheosis. Hackers are criminals. They break in, steal, extort, blackmail, intimidate. It is beyond me that hackers are celebrated and elevated to being heroes, some sort of robin hoods of the digital era. They are not. Just a bunch of thugs, that found a substitute for physical strength to commit crimes.

"Let's try an analogy. Imagine a burglar break into your house, steal your belongings—and then see him nut running off into the darkness, but all giddy and bursting with pride, showing off, surrounded by a cheering crowd that can't get enough of your stuff, and resells it with huge profit? And they point fingers at you, how stupid you are for having belongings, or being victim to a burglar. And don't even dare to speak up, or that crowd will turn into a raging mob, defending their burglar hero. But that wouldn't happen, the perpetrators would end up in jail in no time. Because we all agree that these are criminals, and their behaviour is not to be encouraged.

"You see? That's the difference. The burglar is labelled a criminal. People who resell stolen goods are also labelled criminals. Nobody cheers.

"Not so our hacker. He has no reason to fear any persecution, and he can monetise whatever he stole without a problem. This needs to change.

"Security: It is amazing that users are blamed  for not being experts in securing their computers. Life is not long enough to become an expert in everything. IT security is a moving target, today's security fad is obsolete and ridiculed tomorrow. You just can't keep up with all the vulnerabilities, leaks, vendor's policy changes if you have a life to live.

"You will be hacked. No smug comment on how clever a password you have will change that. No user can constantly double check on the iClouds, Dropboxes, OneDrives of this world to see if there isn't any loophole waiting to be exploited, a new default setting that might backfire in combination with a new convenient (but potentially risky) feature and a bug in whatever device you used any given day.

"Hackers are experts in that, and they will find their way. Just like the burglar, who will pick a bigger crowbar, or just smash a window to get in. Security measures are just a hope to inconvenience the criminal enough to make him go to the next house.

"Pick a vendor you trust, set your passwords, and hope for the best. As a user, there's nothing more you can do, and nothing to feel guilty about.

"Shaming: Now this is the most troubling aspect. Who is shamed? Not the criminal who stole the pictures is shamed, not the media that publishes the stolen pictures. No, the victim is the one who gets public shame.

"Shaming means that you did something wrong. Something to be ashamed of. You stepped out of line, and now the crowd scoffs, points fingers and puts you in your place. Who do you think you are? How dare you do this, and expect to be treated respectfully afterwards, to still be one of us?

"Let's not fool ourselves here. It's women who are publicly shamed. The thinking is: they stepped out of line. Now they deserve to be punished. And this line of thinking needs to be stopped.

"There's nothing shameful about human bodies. There's nothing wrong or shameful in owning / taking nude pictures. This is a part of our human nature, and deserves the respect and privacy that we owe the person, regardless what gender, whether naked, clothed, crying, laughing...you get the idea.

"The one who needs to be scoffed, shamed and prosecuted is the one who steals or exploits stolen photos. The victims need and deserve our empathy and support.

"Please, give this a thought. If you agree, be vocal about it. Don't be a silent bystander when you see friends, colleagues ogling stolen nude photos and shame a (probably a female) neighbour, friend, colleague. This is the only way to stop this madness: to stop encouraging such behaviour."

Comments

[Carl Weese]

I've almost never shot any nude pictures, and the reason is actually quite simple. Except in commercial work (which somehow never included nudes) I don't "set up" pictures. So, short of joining a nudist colony just to take pictures, the odds of my running into naked people without arranging a set-up photo-shoot are pretty bad.

[Crabby Umbo]

"...I've never shot a single nude photo of anyone."

For some reason, this makes me think of the old Second City TV bit on the life of "Tolouse Van Treck" "Lust For Paint", where Flaherty says to Andrea Martin: "...I want to paint you in the nude...", and she mixes it up and says to him: "...who wants to see you in the nude..."

[Speed]

If you want to keep a secret, don't tell anybody.

If you want to keep your nakedness covered, don't make any naked pictures.

[Dave Levingston]

I'm afraid this post is going to inspire a bit of a rant from me. As someone who does photograph nudes...and has since the 1960s...there are several very disturbing things about this story.

The most serious problem is the attitude that nudity equals pornography. This is so wrong and absurd that I don't know where to begin. Nude does not equal sex. In the internet age when pornography of every ilk is readily available to anyone, yet non-sexual innocent nudity is the object of such outrage...well, it's a chilling example of Orwell's "new think." Porn is everywhere. Blatantly sexual advertising and editorial content inundates the media, yet simple nudity is banned and attacked. It is a sad situation, particularly for our young people who can't help but internalize this awful attitude that the body...their body...is shameful rather than the embodiment and source of all our ideas of beauty.

Also, these new laws intended to ban "revenge porn" may have serious consequences for photographers who work with the nude. What is going to be the legal situation for a photographer who has done nudes with a consenting model who later changes her mind and does not want her nude photos shown? Of course a model release provides evidence that consent was given, but in the past that has been a case to be decided in civil court. Will a photographer in the future find him/herself charged with a crime if a model changes her mind?

I deliberately do not pay any attention to the circus of celebrities that goes on these days...it's just half of "bread and circuses" as far as I'm concerned. But I think a better response to this supposed porn scandal would be one similar to how Amanda Palmer reacted to a newspaper review of a concert that mentioned only a "wardrobe malfunction" during the concert and neglected to mention anything about her music or the performance. Her response was healthy and witty and put the entire thing in proper perspective. You can read about it and watch her response in a concert here: http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2013/07/14/amanda-palmer-gets-naked-in-response-to-daily-mail-nipple-story/

I seem to recall that Jennifer Lawrence had a somewhat dismissive response to all of this. If so I count that greatly to her credit. I've not seen any of the Hunger Games movies, but I did greatly enjoy her performance in "Silver Linings Playbook." She seems to be a fine actress when given the chance.

Over the decades that I've been doing nude photos I've watched a discouraging change in the attitudes toward nudity in the US. At one time nudes were a regular part of most photography magazines. Not today. My work is published much more often in Europe than in the US. The attitude toward nudes is much healthier there. Does anyone remember the Candid Camera movie, "What Do You Say To A Naked Lady"? A movie that played in regular theaters in the 1970s, but couldn't even be made today.

I'm a product of the 1960s. The pendulum has been swinging in the US toward the prude end of the arc throughout my life. I look forward to the reversing of the direction of the pendulum. I hope to live long enough to witness it.

[MattS]

It is very hard to make this point without it sounding like victim-blaming, but I'll try:

The people who accessed these women's accounts (most likely obtaining not just photos and videos but contacts, calendars, reminders, notes, iWork documents, driving directions from Maps...) committed a series of reprehensible crimes. Those who sold, bought, shared or even just viewed the photos compounded the crimes.

That being said: if you're famous, in some cases making tens of millions of dollars a year, why aren't you paying a professional to lock down your digital life, assuming you can't be bothered to figure it out for yourself?

And even if you're not rich, famous, beautiful, or making homemade erotica, why haven't you locked down your accounts anyway? I guarantee there's something in there that could be used to harm you if it fell into the wrong hands.

Not backing up your photos etc. in the cloud is not a viable form of protection, because it's truly worthwhile to have that backup. Syncing across devices is a useful feature. We can't just shut off all things useful because they come with risks, but we can reduce the risks.

iCloud in particular can be made much more secure than the default setting, specifically using two step verification. It's a slight hassle, but not all that complicated. Enable it now.

And if you deem it too much hassle, at least review your security questions and password to make them unguessable using easily found information.

A burglar is still a criminal if he entered your house via the unlocked back door. I don't condone the crime, but I still have to ask why you left that door unlocked?

[Thingo]

While I've at least a few sample photos made in a variety of genres, nudes are conspicuous by their absence. The public face of a person strikes me as more interesting.

To take another's photos & maliciously post them strikes me as just theft. In all sorts of ways.

[Tim]

I don't much mind if revenge-porn is banned, but it seems to me inappropriate to view the reddit/4Chan leak as such a thing.

From what I've read (especially Apple's response), it seems what actually happened was someone ran a dictionary attack against iCloud and found some weak user/password combinations leading to naughty pics(TM), which they then publicized.

Seeing it in such terms reveals large chunks of media-response for the agendas they hold - some quite "politically lefty" but no less agendas for that. Portraying it as "iCloud hacked" is gratuitous political spin, and unhelpfully wrong.

Now to distribute responsibility. Obviously, the responsibility for choosing to run dictionary attacks and publish the results lies only with the perpetrators of such. But the responsibility for choosing stronger passwords and for learning how to configure sharing on their iDevices lies solely with the users involved too.

[Stephen McCullough]

Mike
These Morning Coffee posts are making me think way too hard. Whatever happened to the good old "Full Frame is better and everything else sucks" discussions? Now there is real thing to get our minds around.

Seriously though, loving it. Keep going.

Oh, and Full frame is so dead. Or not.

[Joe Kashi]

I agree that such postings are incredibly tacky. Depending upon the laws of each state, there may be some useful legal recourse.

"Revenge porn" postings are probably actionable in most states through civil lawsuits for invasion of privacy. Some photos postings may rise to the level of a separate claim for libel in the sense of depicting the person in a "false light". Again, this varies from state to state. Obtaining specific legal advice from a knowledgeable in-state lawyer is an important first step.

Contact an Internet-patrolling company like www.reputation.com and see whether it is feasible to get the offending images removed. That would help satisfy the initial legal requirement that the offended person take reasonable steps to mitigate the damage to them.

However, even if successful in suing the poster and obtaining a judgment from the court that survives appeal, collecting anything upon such a judgment may be difficult. It might not be worth much unless the poster has the sort of good-paying job where wage garnishment is feasible or, better, has homeowner's insurance with a company that's not sharp enough to have already excluded coverage for that sort of act.

Insurers usually get such exclusions into their policy exclusions within a few years after the first widely reported case of this sort, so this may be a transitory advantage for the person violated by the posting.

Punitive damages additionally awarded to punish and deter reckless or malevolent acts are usually non-insurable both by the exclusions found in most insurance policies and more generally by public policy because they don't punish and deter if paid by someone else.

Depending upon how cyber-stalking laws are written from state to state, there is also the possibility of a criminal act.

It would be very important to immediately secure evidence of the entire posting as well as the EXIF data in the posted images. The EXIF data can be used to tie the camera to the poster.

Generally, later legal process is not a fully satisfactory remedy. It makes more sense to avoid situations and people where "revenge porn" postings might occur in the first place.

[Hugh crawford]

I read that article 3 times and could not find the idea mentioned in the headline, what was it?

Nude self portraits are covered by copyright law, unless you are a monkey I guess. Maybe some lawyer with time on their hands could dry the pants off of the infringers.

[ctein]

Dear Mike,

The contempt I feel for the people who think this is in any way the victims' fault is huge. If I were as mean-spirited and wrongheaded as they are, I would be saying, “You know what? I hope your credit card and Social Security data gets stolen from your medical provider/department store/bank, your identity hijacked and your accounts looted, because really, you know that kind of thing happens when you let that data out, it's been in all the papers, so it's really no one's fault but your own. And I hope some black hat hijacks your computer and steals all your personal files and sensitive information and then locks you out of the machine because, you should know, no firewall you have is really going to guarantee against that happening. So, you know, if your life gets ruined, you deserve it, because you should've known better.”

Fortunately I am not as mean-spirited as them. I do not wish them ill at all.

I merely wish they didn't exist.

The people who are blaming the victims in this case are absolutely no different than the troglodytes who have blamed women for getting raped because they “didn't know their place” (socially, morally, or physically).

I shouldn't have described my feelings for them as contempt; they are beneath that.

pax \ Ctein
[ Please excuse any word-salad. MacSpeech in training! ]
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-- Ctein's Online Gallery http://ctein.com 
-- Digital Restorations http://photo-repair.com 
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[Daryl Davis]

In California, we have a law against revenge porn. We also have a law against recording a private conversation without both parties' consent.

[Tim Bradshaw]

In response to the claim that this isn't a problem with iCloud because it was a dictionary attack: such an attack should be effectively impossible on a properly designed system as it will back off to make it enormously slow. So, in fact, although iCloud was not 'hacked', design deficiencies were exploited.

[Christoph]

Thanks for the link to the article, but I have to say that I find it interesting only as an illustration of the trend towards puritanism Dave Levingston commented already about. By coincidence, I also read today an interview with Jean-Paul Gaultier, the fashion designer, by Cordula Reyer, where he comments on this trend too. In the comments on Ms. Culp-Ressler's article David Agosta remarks, that her proposal would "have made it illegal to publish the photos of Anthony Weiner."
It is not so much a question of professional nude photography, where usually contracts determine publication rights, as of private, "hobby" photography, and also street and news photography. As per Ms.Culp-Ressler's proposal, no more holiday snaps on European beaches on flickr, because, there in the 13th row, fifth to the left in Lloret del Mar, there is a topless girl sunning herself. Exit also the art photography of Massimo Vitali. Exit reporting on all events involving female (and it seems specifically female) nudity, as the person concerned would be free to prohibit use of the pictures. While the article talks about "revenge porn", the intent seems to be much larger: "These measures clarify that it is illegal for people to distribute nude photos online without the consent of the people depicted in the photos". There already is a copious body of law regarding the relative value of "the public's right to know" versus the necessary protection of individual privacy. There is also legislation and jurisprudence concerning "data theft". Is it really necessary to add other legislation to that?

Most important, adding this kind of activity to sex offenses takes away from the gravity of the crimes against the actual bodies of the victims. When I describe myself as an "ingrown toenail survivor", it belittles the experience, the suffering and the fortitude of those who actually merit the description.

As an aside, congratulations to Amanda Palmer for her very clever reaction. Showed the Daily Mail for the dorks they were, and put them to work for her benefit. Hopefully, she has many new fans.

Christoph

[adamct]

Just wanted to thank Jerome for his great post. Thanks, Jerome.

[Sophia]

i just want to say thank you to Ctein and Jerome.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Yeah, and the California law requiring both parties consent to recording a conversation makes all sorts of things impossible to prove; it's a horrible law.

People who would never consider allowing nude photos to be taken probably don't think of it as a common and normal activity. It's true that if they're never taken, they can't get out. But, statistically, I believe rather a lot of people have nude photos taken at one time or another, some with the intention of their not getting out. Treating it as a basic an inherent mistake is, I think, attempting to enforce the crazy.

If the photographer is willing to cooperate (which for nude selfies would be a given), stealing and distributing these photos could be prosecuted, perhaps even as criminal copyright violation.

I do have to say that American's general attitude towards nudity is quite crazed. We're crazy about pretty much everything we associate in any way with sex. "Sex is nasty and dirty and you should do it only with the one you love best", and similar nonsense. That slops over into this, since we associate nudity with sex. (The fact that we associate them so strongly is part of the crazy, I'm pretty sure.)

(I want to emphasize -- I'm an American, and I'm pretty sure my attitudes are afflicted by the crazy. I don't really know what sane is in this area, I've just learned enough to recognize that this isn't it. So I don't know the right attitude, I just know that ours is brodly wrong.)

I guess I've worked with half a dozen models nude over the years. It's interesting.