Yesterday, Charles Clymer wrote on Facebook regarding the Ashley Madison hack:
The thing about the Ashley Madison leak that truly fascinates me is the hypocrisy of internet privacy activists, whom are predominantly male.
No, I don't think it's necessarily fair to judge every person who has "cheated" on their spouse or with someone who is married. People engage in infidelity for a lot of reasons. There are trapped relationships, repressed sexualities and gender identities, abusive marriages, etc. I get that "cheating" isn't always black-and-white and that people have a right to privacy.
But what blows me away every time some internet privacy incident comes up is that so many of the same people who rant and rave about government surveillance or compromised private information or unauthorized data collection... are the same folks who will gladly share a nude picture of a woman whose computer or device has been hacked.
These are the same people who view celebrity women as commercial products and thus, not entitled to any privacy.
These are the same people who, because of whatever bullshit "friendzone" grudge they hold against women, seem to gleefully-even obsessively-post stories, anecdotes, videos or whatever about women who have been caught cheating.
And not because of some moral crusade against infidelity but because they feel the need to control, in however small a way, women's sexuality. If they're not getting any, neither should women.
If they feel they have been denied sex by the women of the world (apparently a collective), they'll go out of their way to publicly humiliate women in compromising situations.
Can women be cheating assholes or abusive or simply awful human beings? Of course. Every rational adult knows this.
But these angry, insecure men who spend their waking hours glued to Reddit and 4chan aren't rational. They don't view women as having the potential to be assholes because they're human beings; they view a woman as an asshole because to them, she's a product who is expected to perform to their liking. A robot devoid of character and personality, dreams and nightmares, needs and wants.
This is about a vicious sense of entitlement to women's minds and bodies by a large population who wield enormous influence over the primary means of communication among human beings.
It's not just about hacking a nude photo or revenge porn or the unceasing stream of harassment women receive online.
It's also about enabling a culture that communicates to men that it's perfectly fine to assault, rape, and kill women for not giving you what you want.
This whole Ashley Madison fiasco is simply another illustration of male entitlement and rage over the loss of that entitlement.
So, yes... while it's a bummer to see privacy violated, I'm not exactly inspired to "join the cause".
Shoot me an e-mail when your ethics are consistent and don't blatantly and violently discriminate against women.
Fine, I'll bite, since it's a little weird to have Charles Clymer tell me that my anger over the Ashley Madison hack is "simply another illustration of male entitlement and rage over the loss of that entitlement" (which, you know, I never had), and that I'm one of the people who looked at the leaked nude photos last summer. I didn't -and in fact, have been speaking out against this sort of thing for years-but the conflation Charles makes in this post sure is a convenient way of avoiding the issue of privacy and online shaming.
Are there people who oppose the Ashley Madison hack but supported the celebrity nude photo leak? Certainly. Are there entitled, sexist men speaking out right now against the Ashley Madison hack? Certainly. Unfortunately, you're going to find horrible people in just about any political camp, including the most feminist camps out there. (TERFs, anyone?) That other people are ethically inconsistent doesn't mean I have to be.
When it comes to ethical consistency, which Charles is trying to lecture us about in this post, you have to support what's right and oppose what's wrong based on what's right and what's wrong, not based on what your friends and your enemies happen to be doing.
I've already stated my opposition to the Ashley Madison hack in a variety of ways, so here I want to get a little more meta and point out a disturbing trend that Charles Clymer is far from the only progressive writer to play into. That's the idea that finally this whole sexual shaming thing is impacting straight white men, not just women, queer people, and people of color! Rejoice!
I think I won't. Yes, I belong to some groups that have suffered for millennia because of the idea that our private sexual lives should be anyone else's business and that we should be judged and punished for living those lives. And you know what? It gives me no joy to see this virus spread. Revenge may be a valid impulse, but it doesn't tend to lead to a better world for anyone. I don't want straight white men to have to deal with public sexual shaming. I don't want anyone to have to deal with it. The fact that it's starting to hurt them too is not a good sign! It means we've really started to accept this as just the way things are.
Further, everyone keeps conveniently ignoring the fact that straight white male lives were not the only ones potentially ruined by this hack. It is impacting LGBTQ people. It is impacting women. It is impacting people who did not join the site to cheat, but because they needed things to be "discreet" for some other reason, and if you really can't imagine any other reason someone might need things to be discreet, well...what you lack in imagination, you make up for in privilege.
I do recognize that for some people, this hack turned out to be a good thing. The people who found out that their own ostensibly monogamous partners were cheating on them, for instance. Maybe the hack gave these people a way to get back control over their lives. It's almost inevitable that unethical actions will genuinely benefit some people who themselves did nothing wrong; that's one of the reasons ethics is hard. That's why I didn't really see anything wrong with people using the hack to find out if they were being cheated on.
As for all the people I know-many of whom I greatly respect-who were gleefully feeding their entire email address books into that app so that they could spy on the lives of their friends and acquaintances and that one random person they emailed once about a potential sublet, that only fills me with horror and fear. Horror that I have friends who care so little for others' privacy; fear that one day I'll get doxxed, and people I thought were my friends will cackle at their laptop screens as they violate my consent.
I keep coming back to this patronizing undertone in all this-that I should somehow be glad for this. That this is keeping people safe. That if we all watch each other, if our world becomes like a panopticon, then we can be safe from being cheated on, from being discriminated against, from being hurt. I don't agree. I don't want this. I didn't ask for this. This does not feel safe to me. I would feel much more safe if we all just finally agreed that it is unacceptable to dox and shame people unless they present a real, direct threat to someone else. I do not feel safe when my friends say, "Well, we'd never dox you, you haven't done anything bad." But someone else thinks I have! Everyone has done something bad according to someone.
Sexual shaming is an old, old problem. For a while it seemed to be getting better, but now I'm not so sure. We've started to accept its premises rather than challenging them. Some of us celebrate the fact that people who were always safe from sexual shaming are no longer. That shows them, right? They deserve it after what they've done to us, right?
We're in the middle of the ocean and the water's streaming in through the cracks in the hull, but rather than patch them until we can get to safety and build a better ship, we've apparently decided to just sink the motherfucker along with everyone on it. Nobody gets any privacy! Everyone gets their sex lives posted online and scrutinized! Anyone can lose their livelihood-even their life-for doing a disapproved-of thing!
Is this what justice looks like to you? It's at least a twisted sort of equality, I'll give it that.
But some of us have boats and life jackets and others don't. Some at least have a wooden plank to grab onto, and others don't even have that. Who do you think will be the first to drown? Who will be able to float away to land? Most importantly, wouldn't it have been better not to sink the ship to begin with?
This is what Charles Clymer refers to as "a bummer."
Revenge may taste sweet, but it's not nutritious. It won't keep us alive. Only justice can do that.
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Further reading: " Our Shared Affair: The Sexual Shaming Behind the Ashley Madison Hack " by Katherine Cross, who has seriously been a consistent breath of fresh air to me in all these discussions about online doxxing and shaming.
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