Nude photos aren’t the problem: spitefulness is
Iremember the first time I was told that young women need to be careful. It was at Brownies, so I must have been about 8, and just about to be kicked out of the group for refusing to comply with the yellow/brown uniform colour scheme. (Honestly though, who wants to dress like an ageing banana?)
We were at the annual summer bake sale, the mums were arranging doughy splatters on a pretty plate, and discussing a spate of recent acid attacks reported in the papers. Young men in the neighbourhood had thrown acid in the faces of women who’d broken up with them.
‘‘He knocked on the door, she opened it, and woosh, he threw the acid in her face! She never saw it coming!’’ exclaimed one mum with wide-eyed relish. ‘‘She’s blind now!’’ The other woman sighed, ‘‘it just goes to show, young women need to be careful about who they date . . .’’
I remember standing there, fist clenched around a concrete muffin, cold with terror.
Was I going to get acid thrown in my face when I grew up? How did you spot these men anyway? Did men come with labels in the adult world: 10 per cent cotton, 40 per cent elastine, 50 per cent vile, vindictive mofo who’s gonna throw acid in your face if you break up with him? How was I supposed to be careful when I didn’t know what I was looking for?
That was the start of the continuous loop about the need to be ‘‘careful’’ that all young women hear while growing up. The one that impresses upon us the need for young women to be safe about literally everything. Be careful when you’re walking home, be careful what you wear on the street, be careful about how nice you are to men . . .
Just this week, the usually badass Nancy Pelosi argued that we should be teaching young people right from kindergarten to be ‘‘careful’’ who they send naked pictures to. The comments were in response to the resignation of young congresswoman Katie Hill after someone released naked photos of her (allegedly her estranged husband, whom she labelled as ‘‘abusive’’), prompting her to admit to an affair with a female staffer.
Now there’s a lot of things wrong with telling women to be careful. Everything from the fact that it encourages victim-blaming, distracts focus from the real offender who’s committed image-based abuse, and it sounds a little, well, sanctimonious.
You’d hope that, given how normal nudes are in a relationship, we could stop discussing them with the undertone of, ‘‘Heavens! I’m appalled at your terrible behaviour, Gladys!’’
We all take nudes. If you have a camera phone, you take nudes. They’re as normal in a relationship as a shared bank account or smug round-robin Christmas emails.
And I’m not just talking about Millennials and Gen Z: an American study earlier this year showed 25 per cent of those in their 40s and 50s, and 11 per cent of those aged 60-plus, have sent nudes too. So before you chastise a young woman, just go through your own mental dirty photo Roladex.
But my point is, while I know when we often tell young women to be careful, some of us are just trying to say, ‘‘Be aware there are vindictive people out there who’ll exploit you . . .’’, that’s still incredibly unhelpful advice. It puts all the onus on young women to spot these people – and yet there’s no guidance on how to do that.
We all take nudes. If you have a camera phone, you take nudes. They’re as normal in a relationship as a shared bank account ...
It also completely ignores the fact that detecting someone’s level of internal vindictiveness is incredibly hard. As is implied with Hill’s case, it’s likely going to be the ex-partners of young women who target them with revenge porn. Research out of the UK shows that 43 per cent of revenge porn cases are perpetrated against women by very recent male ex-partners, with women being twice as likely to be the victim as men.
So when you’re telling young women ‘‘be careful’’, what you’re actually saying is, ‘‘Be able to tell whether the guy you’re in a relationship with is spiteful enough to try to humiliate you should you ever break up with him.’’
How on earth are you supposed to know that? Everyone starts a relationship being lovely. Noone’s Tinder bio reads, ‘‘I’m secretly a total dick who’ll try to ruin your life when you dump me!’’ It’s only when the chips are well and truly down that you see the depths of petty vindictiveness that someone is willing to sink to.
Which leaves young women exactly where I was at the Brownies bake sale.
Young women are told to ‘‘know’’ who’s going to be dangerous. But we’re never told how. Probably because no-one wants to admit that they don’t know either, and that working out the depths of someone’s reservoirs of cruelty is an almost impossible task.