The Craigslist scandal
Hells bells, it's been over a week since I started writing this comment. Real Life intervened, and I put it aside, and now I'm rehashing old cold news.
Except it isn't. Just because the events happened all of a fortnight ago, doesn't mean the consequences have stopped.
A few weeks ago, a man by the name of Jason Fortuny, together with an anonymous female friend, carried out a fascinating but highly unethical accidental sociology experiment. He took a hardcore advert and placed it on Craigslist, then collected all the responses he got in 24 hours and published them, in full, complete with photos, email addresses, names, phone numbers, EVERYTHING, to a public wiki.
Unlike real sociologists, who often have some modicum of respect for the subjects they study, or at least are scared of the Ethics Department rejecting their experiments, Fortuny seems to have been motivated purely by the desire to laugh at the freaks and fuck with their lives. There was no real scientific curiousity here, just a mean-spirited prank (in the sense of setting fire to somebody's house for laughs is a "prank").
Violet Blue has written a detailed post about the events that took place, and the consequences. The issues she raises are worth reading. Normally I would simply link directly to her post. However, in this case, she has included an extremely hardcore (although low-resolution) photo of a woman in a pornographic pose that might put some people off their feed for a week or two. Or not -- if you're curious, knock yourself out and click here.
For others, I reproduce Violet Blue's post, sans photo, here.
I know women who have been on the receiving end of some pretty creepy emails, some solicited, some not. Sexually-explicit, unsolicited emails are just beyond the pale; but even when solicited, not all responses deserve to be treated with respect. A hypothetical personal ad like "SWF, 25, looking for white knight to carry her away for nights of passion" doesn't deserve a response of "bitch, i wanna fill u with my cum". A response like that to such a soft and fluffy ad is not just mind-blowingly stupid, but also nasty and even frightening, and arguably the sort of jerk who would write such a response deserves to be tarred and feathered, or at least publically humiliated.
But that's not what we've got here. The faux ad published by Jason Fortuny and his anonymous female accomplice was far from soft and fluffy -- it was hard core and explicit and invited equally hard core and explicit responses. It read, in part:
Not surprisingly, the ad received a lot of responses along the lines of "I'm a rough, tough, motherfucking bastard who'll treat you hard". Only with worse spelling and usually with a photo of the author's cock attached.
Let's pretend for a moment that the ad was genuine. Extreme BDSM might not be your thing, but we're all adults here. If somebody is looking to be hurt, well, she ain't no child anymore. (Besides, there is hurt, and there is hurt-so-good. There are very few people who have never felt that, if not from sex, at least from sport, or a hard massage, or even from just scratching a really tough itch. We're all masochists to some degree.) Some folks like eating hot chillies that would melt steel, and some people get off on being flayed. If they're all consenting adults, it isn't anybody's business what they do.
Even more so than other sexual kinks, BDSM contains a lot of posturing -- submissives claim to be less than dirt, dominants claim to be the toughest hombre this side of Hell. Especially in the case of doms, those who talk up their qualifications the most are usually the ones who aren't anywhere near as confident, tough or skillful as they would like to believe.
I've read -- well, skimmed, there are only so many variations on "i'm too much man 4 u bitch" my brain can take before it explodes -- the replies to the ad, and frankly 90% of these guys give BDSM a bad name. So many posers, such arrogance and pretentious wankery, and I have no doubt that behind it all are frightened, terrified little boys. The tougher they talk, the meeker they walk. Even if they are 30-something, toned and ripped, with good jobs and high incomes and enormous hard cocks, their replies stink of terror that they aren't manly enough.
But wankery isn't a crime, and when responding to an ad begging for wankery, it isn't even a social transgression to the only two people whose opinion matters: the sender and the receiver. These guys, pitiful and even stupid though they are (for fucks sake, don't give out your real phone number to an anonymous Internet ad!), didn't deserve to be outed so humiliatingly for this. Especially not in a country which is filled with prudes and self-appointed moral guardians. Many of these people will lose jobs over this, whether they deserve it or not.
Stupidity will get you hurt, but the victim's stupidity in no way excuses the victimizer's actions. Civilized people don't blame rape victims for being raped, even if they wore short skirts or acted foolishly. We accept that their behaviour contributed to the crime by putting them in danger, but it was the rapist, not the victim, who committed the crime.
These people put their jobs, their relationships and their reputations in danger by being stupid enough to post real names and photos from addresses that could be traced to themselves, without making any effort to check if the ad was genuine. But that does not excuse Fortuny, or make what he did any less reprehensible -- even if some or many of the responders are arseholes who deserved to be humiliated in public.
The first principle of justice is that we punish the guilty for the crime they commit, not random people and hope that they did something to deserve it. If you pretend that Jason Fortuny wasn't just a nasty, selfish jerk getting off on fucking people over, but an avenging vigilante, he's still in the wrong. He ain't no Dirty Harry, meeting out tough justice to villains; he's more like an out of control Travis Bickle, attacking anyone who becomes the target of his obsession, whether they deserve it or not.
No matter how little you like BDSM, whether it just isn't your kink or it turns your stomach, the victims of this "prank" are more pitiful than anything else. The real villains of this story are the vicious minks and stoats like Fortuny and his LJ friends who are laughing themselves sick at the thought that Fortuny has taken advantage of the foolishness of some really sad losers to fuck them over but good.
I also notice that the attention has been almost entirely focused on Fortuny. His female accomplice, Demure, has missed out on virtually all the opprobrium. Because she's female? Because she's cute and anonymous? Because both men and women assume, in this patriachal society of ours, that when a man and a woman act as dicks, it is always because the poor little lady is a lost lamb led astray by the nasty bad man?
Puh-lease! Fortuny might be getting his giggles from this episode, but Demure was a willing participant, old enough to know better, and just as much of a weasel as Fortuny. The flip side of treating women as if they were children is that they often get away with murder (literally as well as figuratively, but that's a discussion for another day). Fortuny may have fired the gun, but Demure not only handed it to him but egged him on.
Except it isn't. Just because the events happened all of a fortnight ago, doesn't mean the consequences have stopped.
A few weeks ago, a man by the name of Jason Fortuny, together with an anonymous female friend, carried out a fascinating but highly unethical accidental sociology experiment. He took a hardcore advert and placed it on Craigslist, then collected all the responses he got in 24 hours and published them, in full, complete with photos, email addresses, names, phone numbers, EVERYTHING, to a public wiki.
Unlike real sociologists, who often have some modicum of respect for the subjects they study, or at least are scared of the Ethics Department rejecting their experiments, Fortuny seems to have been motivated purely by the desire to laugh at the freaks and fuck with their lives. There was no real scientific curiousity here, just a mean-spirited prank (in the sense of setting fire to somebody's house for laughs is a "prank").
Violet Blue has written a detailed post about the events that took place, and the consequences. The issues she raises are worth reading. Normally I would simply link directly to her post. However, in this case, she has included an extremely hardcore (although low-resolution) photo of a woman in a pornographic pose that might put some people off their feed for a week or two. Or not -- if you're curious, knock yourself out and click here.
For others, I reproduce Violet Blue's post, sans photo, here.
I know women who have been on the receiving end of some pretty creepy emails, some solicited, some not. Sexually-explicit, unsolicited emails are just beyond the pale; but even when solicited, not all responses deserve to be treated with respect. A hypothetical personal ad like "SWF, 25, looking for white knight to carry her away for nights of passion" doesn't deserve a response of "bitch, i wanna fill u with my cum". A response like that to such a soft and fluffy ad is not just mind-blowingly stupid, but also nasty and even frightening, and arguably the sort of jerk who would write such a response deserves to be tarred and feathered, or at least publically humiliated.
But that's not what we've got here. The faux ad published by Jason Fortuny and his anonymous female accomplice was far from soft and fluffy -- it was hard core and explicit and invited equally hard core and explicit responses. It read, in part:
[...] looking 4 ruff man, harley rider.
dom fucker, get this..........u better be fuckin tuff enuff 2 handle me and a fucking bastard
who thrives on giving pain.....my safe word is code blue. i need it extreme/edge, that is the
only way......if this isn't ur bag.......then fuck off.
Not surprisingly, the ad received a lot of responses along the lines of "I'm a rough, tough, motherfucking bastard who'll treat you hard". Only with worse spelling and usually with a photo of the author's cock attached.
Let's pretend for a moment that the ad was genuine. Extreme BDSM might not be your thing, but we're all adults here. If somebody is looking to be hurt, well, she ain't no child anymore. (Besides, there is hurt, and there is hurt-so-good. There are very few people who have never felt that, if not from sex, at least from sport, or a hard massage, or even from just scratching a really tough itch. We're all masochists to some degree.) Some folks like eating hot chillies that would melt steel, and some people get off on being flayed. If they're all consenting adults, it isn't anybody's business what they do.
Even more so than other sexual kinks, BDSM contains a lot of posturing -- submissives claim to be less than dirt, dominants claim to be the toughest hombre this side of Hell. Especially in the case of doms, those who talk up their qualifications the most are usually the ones who aren't anywhere near as confident, tough or skillful as they would like to believe.
I've read -- well, skimmed, there are only so many variations on "i'm too much man 4 u bitch" my brain can take before it explodes -- the replies to the ad, and frankly 90% of these guys give BDSM a bad name. So many posers, such arrogance and pretentious wankery, and I have no doubt that behind it all are frightened, terrified little boys. The tougher they talk, the meeker they walk. Even if they are 30-something, toned and ripped, with good jobs and high incomes and enormous hard cocks, their replies stink of terror that they aren't manly enough.
But wankery isn't a crime, and when responding to an ad begging for wankery, it isn't even a social transgression to the only two people whose opinion matters: the sender and the receiver. These guys, pitiful and even stupid though they are (for fucks sake, don't give out your real phone number to an anonymous Internet ad!), didn't deserve to be outed so humiliatingly for this. Especially not in a country which is filled with prudes and self-appointed moral guardians. Many of these people will lose jobs over this, whether they deserve it or not.
Stupidity will get you hurt, but the victim's stupidity in no way excuses the victimizer's actions. Civilized people don't blame rape victims for being raped, even if they wore short skirts or acted foolishly. We accept that their behaviour contributed to the crime by putting them in danger, but it was the rapist, not the victim, who committed the crime.
These people put their jobs, their relationships and their reputations in danger by being stupid enough to post real names and photos from addresses that could be traced to themselves, without making any effort to check if the ad was genuine. But that does not excuse Fortuny, or make what he did any less reprehensible -- even if some or many of the responders are arseholes who deserved to be humiliated in public.
The first principle of justice is that we punish the guilty for the crime they commit, not random people and hope that they did something to deserve it. If you pretend that Jason Fortuny wasn't just a nasty, selfish jerk getting off on fucking people over, but an avenging vigilante, he's still in the wrong. He ain't no Dirty Harry, meeting out tough justice to villains; he's more like an out of control Travis Bickle, attacking anyone who becomes the target of his obsession, whether they deserve it or not.
No matter how little you like BDSM, whether it just isn't your kink or it turns your stomach, the victims of this "prank" are more pitiful than anything else. The real villains of this story are the vicious minks and stoats like Fortuny and his LJ friends who are laughing themselves sick at the thought that Fortuny has taken advantage of the foolishness of some really sad losers to fuck them over but good.
I also notice that the attention has been almost entirely focused on Fortuny. His female accomplice, Demure, has missed out on virtually all the opprobrium. Because she's female? Because she's cute and anonymous? Because both men and women assume, in this patriachal society of ours, that when a man and a woman act as dicks, it is always because the poor little lady is a lost lamb led astray by the nasty bad man?
Puh-lease! Fortuny might be getting his giggles from this episode, but Demure was a willing participant, old enough to know better, and just as much of a weasel as Fortuny. The flip side of treating women as if they were children is that they often get away with murder (literally as well as figuratively, but that's a discussion for another day). Fortuny may have fired the gun, but Demure not only handed it to him but egged him on.
posted by Vlad the Impala @ 10:34 am
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