How To Avoid Becoming A Victim Of Revenge Porn

By Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Erotic Entertainment for Women and Couples

Once upon a time, when I was younger, more naïve, and more trusting of the people around me, I snapped a photo of my boobs using a Polaroid camera and passed off the image to my then-boyfriend. To me, it was designed to serve both as a ready source of titillation when I wasn’t available to personally tantalize him, and as a kind of token of the trust between us — maybe even a test thereof.

Read on…

To put it mildly, my ex failed the test miserably, as the picture of my tits soon made the rounds among his friends, each of whom now literally had a clear picture of what I looked like when my top was removed.

Of course, given the form of the original and the technology of the time, the only viable copy of the picture was the original. I don’t know for sure whether my former beau ever tried making copies on a Xerox machine or anything like that, but it’s safe to say that if he did, then the outcome was probably disappointing.

Luckily, the picture depicted only my breasts, so even if it does somehow re-emerge out there, I have what foreign policy and intelligence types like to call “plausible deniability.”

I don’t know what happened to the Polaroid itself when all was said and done. It’s lost to history now, I suppose — and therein lies the key difference between sharing intimate images of yourself back in the early 1980s versus doing the same thing these days, smack dab in the midst of the Digital Age. These days, a picture is never lost to history.

The two things which have changed most over the years in terms of sharing intimate images between lovers are access and scale: a function of the ease of copying, distributing, and displaying digital materials. Whereas my former boyfriend could only simultaneously share the Polaroid with as many of his friends as he could pack into his living room at once, these days he could instantly share it with “friends” he has never met, the world over.

Beyond that, as has become abundantly clear in the post-Fappening world, your lover needn’t intentionally share the image with anyone for it to happen, because there are people out there with strong computer skills, a seemingly infinite amount of time on their hands, and absolutely zero respect for your privacy (or any other social norm, for that matter) who will merrily spend their time surreptitiously and remotely accessing computers, smartphones and the much-ballyhooed “clouds” run by giants like Apple and Microsoft, for the express purpose of ferreting out other people’s naughty pictures.

In an environment like that, even merely storing intimate images of your own without showing them to anyone could be a dicey proposition, potentially. And if you do hit ‘send’ on a text with such a picture attached to it? To paraphrase every gangster movie ever made: fuggettaboutit.

Granted, nobody will ever be as interested in naked and/or sexually-explicit images of me as they are in the same from Ariana Grande or Scarlett Johansson, but judging by the number of “revenge porn” stories you hear about these days, clearly the public’s interest in non-consensual eroticizing goes well beyond movie stars and pop music divas.

The safest rule for taking and sharing intimate images, of course, is: don’t do it. Realistically, though, people are going to keep doing it, because people have pretty much always done it, ever since the technology to snap a picture of one’s privates first came into existence.

Even with the increased access and greater extent of instant sharing available to those inclined to send such images around, the question of sharing images within a couple still comes back around to trust. There are ways to avoid those images being held anywhere hackers can get to them (it’s not mandatory to upload digital images to any sort of cloud, after all), but if you can’t trust your lover, the hackers are as irrelevant as it gets. Put another way, when you already have a fox in your hen house, it doesn’t particularly matter if there are other foxes are waiting in the wings to dive on the scraps.

So, if you and your partner feel you really must do the ‘private porn’ thing, proceed with caution — and maybe stick to woodblock prints as a medium.