As a lawyer, I see the devastating effects of "revenge porn" every day—Katie Hill won't be the last politician subject to it

The tragi-comic difference between a female politician felled by a consensual, but “unethical” same-sex relationship and the male politicians (and CEOs and religious leaders) surviving numerous credible allegations of sexual assault and harassment is hard to ignore.

But what effectively killed Katie Hill’s career in Congress wasn’t so much her relationship with a congressional aide (unethical as that may have been because of the power differential) — it was revenge porn. I should know: I see its devastating effects every day in my practice.

We will all be seeing more of it. Katie Hill will not be the last female politician to be brought down with this weapon. It’s far too effective at kneecapping the women who’ve achieved public prominence and power, and who’ve committed the increasingly common act of posing for or taking intimate photos of themselves.

Image-based abuse is squarely in the squalid tradition of slut-shaming: men using double standards to weaponize sex and keep women in line. It happens to non-politicians too, when vengeful exes (or malicious strangers) send intimate pictures to women’s bosses, professional contacts, mentors and educational institutions. The effect on the victims’ careers and prospects is devastating.

RedState, the right-wing site posting the pictures, can and will likely try to claim that no act of revenge porn happened at all. Why? Because like true gentlemen, RedState blacked out her nipples! California law requires an intimate body part to be visible to qualify as revenge porn.

Luckily it only requires plain common sense to see that a disingenuously redacted nude breast is still a nude breast, and no less intimate and private for that. Despite RedState’s nifty little hypocritical modesty bar, we are all, as intended, now aware that Katie Hill has topless pictures in circulation. The implicit threat is of course that more and unredacted pictures can appear at any moment, perhaps not on Red State but on PornHub or any of the other numerous sites delighted to profit from revenge porn.

For female politicians, image-based abuse poses a liability that their male counterparts just do not face in the same way. It’s a textbook example of how misogyny works on both the personal and political level: someone leaked Katie Hill’s intimate, private pictures without her knowledge or consent, to a publication that politically opposes her. We need to see this as a feature not a bug, a blueprint for how female politicians and women, in general, are now going to be kept in line. They’ve already come for AOC, and with deepfakes on the rise, no intimate photo need even exist in the first place: they can already be manufactured with exquisite realness. Our politicians are now, happily, younger and more female than ever. The likelihood of them having intimate pictures is rising; so is the likelihood that those images will be deployed against them.

Are we really going to let image-based abuse be the price of admission for being a young female elected official? For being a woman? That is the direction of travel, one more way the internet has made it easier to undermine the very idea of a private life, and to troll.

How do we fight back? The sooner we stop focusing on irrelevant technicalities of which specific body parts are visible, and instead focus on the victim’s consent and privacy, the sooner we will frame the issue properly. And we had better do so quickly, because this issue is not going anywhere.

The law, clearly, needs to catch up. But our culture does too. A crucial part of revenge porn’s destructive blast radius is because we as a culture buy into the shame. We assume that these pictures are the victim’s wrongdoing, her private moral mistake. “Well, why did you take them in the first place? Ladies, be smart!” I wish the outlets that criticize the victims for being dumb in managing their intimate feelings and photos would devote just a fraction of their energy haranguing men not to post pictures that aren’t theirs. There seems to no end to the patronizing advice doled out to women, often by the very same outlets that attract eyeballs by playing up the salacious. It’s a neat trick, which the tabloids (among others) have mastered for years: to piously blame women for the crime against them in which they are complicit in, and profit from.

Despite complex and varying legislation across the United States, and pernicious double-standards belonging in a museum, the issue really is simple: taking a picture of your own body is not a crime, and it’s not morally wrong. Posting someone else’s pictures against their will is. And that is where the shame belongs.

It may be that over time, the sheer volume of intimate images in circulation will denature that shame culture. It used to be you couldn’t be confirmed as a federal judge if you had smoked marijuana, and you certainly couldn’t run for President if you were gay. Jennifer Lawrence, when her intimate images were hacked, called it a sex crime and was applauded.

Those now sacrificed at the altar of public hypocrisy about sex, like Katie Hill, may someday be seen as martyrs on a path of progress, like abortion rights activists and gay activists before them. But until we treat all revenge porn victims with the same solidarity and high-fiving admiration that we extended to Jeff Bezos, we are handing misogynists and their political allies (wherever they may be found) a big fat stick with which to club female politicians, and women everywhere.