Victims of revenge porn have gained an unlikely new champion: Amazon’s founder (and the Washington Post’s owner) Jeff Bezos. Apparently threatened with blackmail by the National Enquirer over leaked sexy selfies sent to his girlfriend, Bezos turned the tables on the tabloid by posting the threatening emails on Medium, complete with the phone number of the Enquirer’s lawyer. Bezos has been lauded for his courage, and now, in the spirit of Mae West’s “too much of a good thing is wonderful,” there are calls for him to preempt the Enquirer completely by posting his nude selfies himself.
Dan Savage, an American sex and romance columnist, argued earlier this week: “by self-publishing your own nude photos, you can turn the tables on the sexual and cultural hypocrisy that allows people like him to weaponize nude photos in the first place.” As a lawyer focusing on revenge porn, I’d be thrilled to see Bezos up the ante like this. As he points out himself: “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?”
But the answer, as Bezos acknowledges, is “not that many people.” While the shame blackmail depends upon would evaporate if everyone always called blackmailers’ bluff, we shouldn’t rightly expect everyone to follow his example. I applaud him for exposing the maddening hypocrisy of the norms (usually much harder on women) that say your nakedness is something other people get to exploit. But unfortunately, that solution is, unlike his business empire, not scalable. Bezos can do this because he’s literally the richest man on earth. He’s also straight and white and, frankly, his selfies seem safely on the tamer side. Releasing those pictures would cost him some privacy but not much else—unlike for most people, including my clients.
Revenge porn is widespread and destructive. The victims tend to not be owners of newspapers and business empires. They are ordinary people, and they’re predominantly women. The world, and certainly the online world, is much, much crueller to them than to Bezos. Sometimes our clients’ pictures or videos are more explicit. Sometimes they even document abuse. Sometimes our clients weren’t even aware the pictures or video were taken.
Part of what hurts is that those pictures and videos will travel the internet at lightning speed (often stored on Amazon-owned servers) and end up on porn sites. Our clients do get hurt by that, professionally and personally. Their pictures are often sent to colleagues, prospective bosses, family and parents at their kids’ school. It hurts their job prospects and personal reputations. They don’t get quippy headlines; they’re more likely to see lurid or hateful comments tied to their images online. They find themselves alone, shamed and ashamed.
Women and girls, in particular, are hurt by revenge porn. The reasons for this are wearily familiar: the “he’s a stud and she’s a slut” double-standard that continues to resist reality and logic with remarkable persistence. Victims can go into long depressions, be scared to leave home, commit suicide. As a society, we still struggle to take women seriously in general, and in particular if they are attractive or (horrors) seem to like sex.
Being a sexual being—in other words, being a human being—is still a liability to a woman in a way that it’s not to a man. Imagine if, say, Oprah Winfrey were blackmailed over explicit pictures she’d sent to Gayle King. She might get sympathy by going public with her predicament. Like Bezos, she is powerful and wealthy. But would we ever look at Oprah the same way again once seen such a sexual, intimate side of her? Would she still be the second most admired woman in America? I’ll wager that Bezos’s image will not suffer the same way if his sexy selfies come to light. If anything it’ll add to his allure as a fighter.
