So some celebrities had their phones hacked and very personal and private photos stolen, which certain less savory and much more piggish individuals have been happily disseminating on the internet. There is the issue of the hypocrisy of people concerned about privacy celebrating this.
There is also the issue of the illogical, irrational arguments in defense of the privacy violation that people are commonly making.
But jesus fuck, I had no idea how stupid the arguments could get.
You deserved this because a girl like you would never date me in real life, no matter how nice and courteous I was. Karma!
Sorry but it’s not fair that only the guys of your choosing get to see the photos while the ugly, less fortunate guys do not.
Seriously, dude? You honestly believe that women owe you dates and naked pictures? That they don’t get to choose who they are intimate with?
I owe you one photo of me puking in a bucket.
I’m still trying to wrap my head around his logic. Is he saying that she’s public property and anyone who wants to should be given “access”? If so I want access to his bank account because there’s no way he’d give me lots of money no matter how nicely I ask it. It’s not fair only he has access to his money while the rest of us do not.
There are terabytes of free internet porn, but he specifically has to have images that violate someone popular and prominent’s privacy? Is that really what’s going on here?
Or is it that he wants to punish those women for being popular, prominent, and beautiful?
I have to say that I’m glad that I’ve never been this stupidly needy and pathetic.
Also, while we’re on the topic of public rights, if he’s that ugly, he better be wearing a bag over his head in public. Why do I have to see that?
Bag or get the fuck out.
Or simply for being women.
Well, it’s good that male sexual entitlement has a poster child.
Silver lining, people. Silver lining.
This twit’s tweets are pretty self-depreciating. I theorize that this J. Matthew has some real self-esteem issues. He feels that society dangles an image of sexual perfection in front of him with the expectation to achieve it of be considered a failure. However, will never be able to achieve, so he thinks that has the right to take it,
Of course, I could be way off, and J. Matthew is really some hyper-confident jerk. Even if it was true, hating yourself is never an excuse for being an asshole.
Anyone want to bet that this guy would vociferously deny that male entitlement is a thing?
You deserved this because a girl like you would never date me in real life, no matter how nice and courteous I was. Karma!
Come on: it has to be a sarcasm, right?
…
right?
….
…
….
right?
blokquote fail, here again:
Come on: it has to be a sarcasm, right?
…
right?
….
…
….
right?
J. Matthew sounds like he looks up to Elliot Rodgers as a cool guy with the right mindset. I hope people close to him take another hard look at his behavior soon, before he can emulate his hero further.
Akira MacKenzie:
The two aren’t mutually exclusive. A huge ego is often a fragile ego.
I read it as sarcasm.
But then I still have some faith in random people on the internet for some reason.
http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2014/09/01/jlaws-leaked-nudes-for-men-who-hate-women-the-violation-of-privacy-is-part-of-the-thrill/
Well. That makes for a remarkably shitty way to start the day.
I’m trying so hard to decide which of the two is stupider and more objectifying. I think I’m gonna have to go with the second one due to the use of the word “choosing” in a negative way.
Artor #11
That’s who I immediately thought of too after reading those.
This is what happens when unsupervised children have access to the webz. Holy FSM but we are doomed.
His actual argument is “I’m an ugly toad, therefore I get to invade your privacy”.
Holy crap, Redditors are suggesting turning this into a positive thing: if you look at the pics, donate to a cancer charity! Because that makes the violation ok! Breast cancer, maybe? After all, this is about bewbz, right? No, apparently prostate cancer is the deserving cause, because dudes.
artor @ 11:
sparks @ 17:
Nice job of bringing in the pointless, harmful speculating, and othering, before the 20th post is made. FFS, how about not doing this sort of shit at all? How about clicking all the links in the OP and being a bit more fucking informed before commentary?
hyperdeath@12:
Yeah, Nice Guy-ism is often a weird mix of self-hatred (“I’m ugly and undesirable”) and ego (“but I have so many awesome qualities that she would totally fall in love with me if she would just give me a chaaaaaaance!“).
hyperdeath @ 12
Not my personal experience, but I’ll take your word for it.
Local radio DJ this morning: “Let this be a lesson to you. Do not take nude photos of yourself.”
Female co-worker, five minutes ago: “That’s what you get for keeping nude photos on your phone.”
Me, silently: “WTF?!”
That’s what you get, ladies, for engaging in consensual sexual activity with your partners. You “deserve” public shaming and scolding. You “deserve” have your private moments shared publicly among total strangers, because you have no agency and are public property, simply for being women who have sex.
I would challenge my co-worker but she is one of those conservatives who flatly do not listen to anything that doesn’t conform to their worldview. Earlier this morning she was ranting about her daughter’s social studies class, which was described as “discussing current world events.” She claimed that meant her child was being “indoctrinated,” and that “they should stick to history.” Just didn’t have the heart to point out that history can be distorted in many ways, too.
J. Matthews: Entitled Assclam.
–
So they presumably learned not to upload personal photos onto “the cloud”. Privacy advocates aren’t up in arms about this because they already don’t do that.
You can’t expect a robust level of protection online unless you take steps to secure files yourself. This is the message privacy advocates have been trying to get across.
“That’s what you get for….
I’m afraid that part of this environment of victim-blaming can be laid at the feet of the FBI/NSA/GCHQ/CSE, etc — the agencies of the police state that have consistently pushed the idea that you have no expectation of privacy if you store data anywhere where they can get at it. It used to be a crime, to do what they do openly now (not that they didn’t do it covertly, then) and the government-sponsored erosion of privacy rights leads inevitably to desensitization in the populace.
hint #1: the fact that these people did not publish the pictures, means they wanted them to remain private.
hint #2: the fact that they stored them intending them to remain private – shows they had an expectation of privacy; if they didn’t want them to remain private they wouldn’t have put them on “my cloud” they’d have published them.
@Iyéska:
The classy cesspool of the slympepit also linked to ‘The Frappening’. In fact, one Slymer expressed dismay that no one within the slymepit had yet to mention the Frappening. There was much dismay and quick correcting of that oversight. There were others on the SlymePit who indicated a lack of interest while other posters sarcastically replied with ‘you are not supposed to post those links because it adds to their harassment’ per the Guardian article.
Clueless gits…I bleached my eyes afterwards in order to get rid of the toxic bile being displayed by the truly enlightened.
@ironchew Fuck off with your victim-blaming. “You can’t expect a robust protection unless you take steps to be secured in a chastity belt, covered in a burka, and locked in a prison by your owner.” You are disgusting.
Yeah, classic “Nice guy”. Absolutely text book.
I’m sad to say that I had some of this attitude (without the bullying, accusative element) when I was about 14. “But…I’m nice! Why won’t girls just throw themselves at me?”
Thankfully I learned the shocking revelation that women are people, not things you get as a prize for being “nice”.
It’s the web equivalent of saying you didn’t secure your front door well enough. Of course you deserved to get your shit stolen.
A lot of this “she deserves it” stuff is just self-justification for doing something they know is wrong. Look, I get that people want to see naked pictures of celebs. I get that they really want to see naked pictures of celebs they haven’t previously seen naked. Hugh Hefner made a lot of money getting celebs who haven’t previously been seen naked to pose nude for Playboy and I don’t think anybody was too surprised when that turned out to be a successful business strategy. But, that’s not what happened. These were private photos meant for specific people who are not you. It’s no different than sneaking into her house and putting in spy-cams “Revenge of the Nerds” style. Just own up to it. She didn’t deserve it, she shouldn’t expect it, and you’re not entitled to see them; but you want to see he naked and you don’t really care how you did it.
@ironchew, #25
Except several women have indicated that these were photos that have since been deleted or were not even on their Cloud account, SO THERE GOES THAT THEORY.
Oh, and anyone who wants to come in here tsk tsking women–any women–for having had pics taken of them naked (consensual or not, because it’s not difficult to take naked pictures of someone who trusts you, esp. someone you’re already intimate with), go read this first, and understand that you’re no different than someone who blames a rape victim for their rape.
Donnie @27,
Can’t say I expected any better from the Slymepit. But, on a minor note of optimism, I did notice that D.J. Grothe’s Twitter feed (though notably silent on any of the weekend’s other developments) sided with the victims, as did the usually anti-feminist Russell Blackford’s.
Sorry, but that’s not a police state conspiracy. It’s a basic tenet of network security where you don’t automatically trust any incoming requests because there might be human or nonhuman entities compelled to exploit that trust.
I apologize if that sounded like victim blaming. The fact that what happened to them was presumably embarrassing and they won’t trust the weak link of third-party online storage in the future is practicality, not a moral judgment.
There are so many ways that these photos could have been stolen that it’s not funny. Privacy advocates shouldn’t just try to wash their hands of these data breaches and others by blaming the people that don’t have the technical understanding to avoid common mistakes. And with the number of services that synchronize mobile phone data for you, this is bound to happen… frequently.
I’ve been an Android user for a few years now and have owned four phones in that time. All of them have had data synchronization services enabled by default, or had enabling them as the default choice when prompted. So many people just tap through the setup wizards and probably don’t know how to reverse a choice made in those screens. So many of those configuration options are out-of-box-experience and not expected to change over the course of ownership. Since they’re not expected to change, they end up buried in obscure menus.
So, really, it could have been iCloud accounts that were illegally accessed. It could have been an open WiFi network. It could have been a network advertised as secure, but with a compromised key. Like I said, there are numerous ways to break security on modern mobile operating systems and their associated services.
It’s a basic tenet of network security where you don’t automatically trust any incoming requests because there might be human or nonhuman entities compelled to exploit that trust.
Ironchew, you shouldn’t try to teach your grandbeing to chew cheese.
No, seriously, throwing around words like “trust” doesn’t mean you understand network security. In fact, your sentence is meaningless or at best incorrect. Are you trying to say that endpoints don’t understand transitive trust? Of course they don’t. The point is that the reason the human placed the data there was because they trusted it; the reason it leaked is because that trust was misplaced – by definition. Don’t treat the word “trust” in the computer security context as having special meaning beyond the human context; it doesn’t.
@ironchew #35
You don’t get it. It’s not about where they stored their files. We have plenty of incidences of people’s private phones & computers & voicemail systems being hacked by media, by government agencies, by private agents. We have incidences of people’s computers being physically stolen. We have incidences of people who had been entrusted with pics betraying that trust. The only “practical” solution is a) complete isolation or b) we go back to being chattel.
@thetalkingstove #29
I, too, had a bit of that attitude but without that sense of entitlement and resentment. I think part of it was due to the “harem” anime that was becoming more popular. You know where the Nice Guy (who actually is a decent person in many cases) winds up getting four or more women interested in him just by virtue of a simple act of kindness. It was fun in fantasy but I knew the real world was more complicated and you had to take a more active role and not just wait for women to fall into your lap.
I still see myself as a nice person, but I don’t expect anything for it. It’s one of the things you learn when you grow up.
In case it’s unclear, the so-called practical solutions I mentioned as alternatives are those which follow from ironchew’s victim-blaming logic. The only real solution, given the personhood of women, is to change the culture so that women’s bodies–even those of celebrities–are not seen as public property, available for the pleasure and profit of men as long as someone is a clever enough hacker or has access by some other means to exploit them.
Ibis3 #40,
I don’t see that changing. To me that sounds like a world where there’s no longer rape or theft. What can change, however, is how the public reacts to such crimes (“that’s what you get,” etc).
sparks @17:
Sadly, it’s not just children who think that men are entitled to womens bodies.
****
Artor @11:
ER sprung to mind when I read this post as well. The sense of entitlement both displayed toward womens’ bodies is horrifying.
****
Iyéska @20:
I agree with you on the comment by sparks, but not about artor’s comment. I don’t think it is othering to note similarities between J. Matthew and Elliot Rodger, especially in light of these comments:
In expressing his odious views, J. Matthew is showing that his views on women are similar to Elliot Rodgers’.
****
Ironchew:
Your comments so far have shown that you think the victims should have known better, or that they will know better in the future (“women should know better than to wear certain kinds of clothes; in the future hopefully they’ll think about what they wear before going out”–that’s what you sound like). The thing is, they didn’t do this to themselves. This was done to them by outside parties. You’re framing this as if the victims are at fault here, rather than the perpetrators. What you’re doing is victim blaming, whether you want to admit it or not.
@Ibis3 #38
Yep. I’d like to see people take more steps to protect themselves. But failing to do so does not in any way justify anyone doing anything illegal to them nor does it justify blaming them if it does happen. If a guy forgets to lock the door to his apartment one morning and someone comes in and robs him while he’s at work, will the internet say it’s all his fault and he deserved to be robbed? Probably not. But that sort of victim blaming only seems to happen when it comes to women and sex.
Alverant @39:
Sadly, not everyone learns that lesson when they grow up. They *should* though (of course that raises the question of how they are supposed to learn this lesson).
Do you have any idea what an “expectation of privacy” is?
here’s a hint: it’s not the same as impenetrable network security.
If you have any fucking clue what “expectation of privacy” means, then maybe you shouldn’t be explaining the “facts” of expectations of privacy to people who are light-years more informed than.
Your arrogant ignorance is appalling. Why not fuck off to some little corner of the internet where the level of education isn’t so far beyond yours that you appear catatonic by comparison? It might even be good for your ego.
That’s what we here in the population that understands the difference between “adamantium bars on the windows” and “reasonable expectation not to be burgled and/or raped” call a “win-win”.
Shoot, forgot to address my #45 to ironchew, in response to ironchew’s #35.
Saad @41:
That still qualifies as the type of cultural change that Ibis3 is talking about, no (albeit not to the degree xe spoke of)? If the public reaction stops being “that’s what you get”, does that not signal a change in the culture surrounding victim blaming and the sense of entitlement men feel about womens’ bodies?
In general, I’d rather no one talked about the Slymepit. They’re obsessively monitoring us, but I really don’t give a freaking fuck what they’re doing over there.
@Crip Dyke
The implicit assumptions behind both are the same, though, because they address the same platform (the internet). There is no automatic expectation of privacy *because* of the occasional assholes and bots, which is the same motivation behind the netsec perspective of not automatically trusting incoming requests. This isn’t some government conspiracy; it’s an emergent property of communication platforms.
Don’t flatter yourself. It’s not working.
PZ,
Seconded.
Jenny Trout’s post on this topic is well worth a read:
The Sexual Violence of Non-consensual Nudity
From her comments, I found out about something that might be an even deeper horror than the one PZ wrote about:
Meet the men who spy on women through their webcams
“There are terabytes of free internet porn, but he specifically has to have images that violate someone popular and prominent’s privacy? Is that really what’s going on here?”
Maybe such a broad availability of pornographic images warps our expectations. This dude’s attitude about sex is just “I get horny and get whatever I want”, since he has always had an embarrassment of pornographic riches. Having people cater to you is fun and for straight guys it is relatively easy. We have so many ways to access women’s bodies and images of them, internet porn, strip clubs, escorts, the bikini barista drive thru coffee places everywhere around Seattle, that I think many of us fail to learn that sex is something you do WITH another person, not TO them.
Learning to set your own boundaries, respect others’, and criticize your own desires to develop a healthy sexuality takes hard work and guidance – and those are topics that aren’t spoken of in many social circles.
I agree that there is entitled cruelty and spiteful violence in his attitude, absolutely. But in addition to his misogyny there is society’s misogyny in his ignorance of healthy sexual behaviors and expectations.
So I’m saying he’s not demanding JLaw’s nudes in spite of having access to terabytes of porn, but partly because of it.
On the rash of celebrity victim-blaming, this is my favorite article to date:
Wow that’s such a blatant demonstration of rape culture. That tweet demonstrates a feeling of entitlement to women’s bodies.
@ironchew, #49:
Hello? Hello? Is this thing on?
Ironchew, I’d like to introduce you to something called a “link”.
It’s a handy thingy, used everywhere, but in this case I’d like to call out #45 of this thread. It may help you to understand why everyone else does, in fact, make a distinction between:
and how the rest of the universe gets more out of “expectation of privacy” than “irrational belief that hacking doesn’t exist”.
@ironchew:
You’re mistaking the engineer’s realm of concern with the users. Engineers need to worry about how a bridge reacts to high winds – but for the most part, it shouldn’t be a matter of concern for those driving across the bridge as well. A disaster like the Tacoma-Narrows bridge could certainly happen again due to a negligent (team of) engineer(s), or sloppy construction. But that doesn’t make it the fault or (normally) the concern of the drivers. Sure if the bridge is whipping about like pantaloons in hurricane, the driver probably shouldn’t go on it, and if a site’s had a password breach you’ve heard about, you should probably change your password.
But don’t blame the users because the engineers fucked up. And don’t try to pretend that the users need to have the training of the engineers to use the end product. They are not responsible, the engineers are.
And even more than that, if someone purposefully exploits a flaw unknown to the engineer, it’s the exploiter that’s at fault. Because they’re doing shit they shouldn’t. If you want to spread the blame more, blame the engineer as well, if there’s a reasonable expectation they should have known how to prevent the flaw (e.g., SQL injection).
But it’s still not the end-user’s fault that the engineer fucked up, and/or a bad actor exploited the system for their own (or even another’s) profit.
the netsec perspective of not automatically trusting incoming requests
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
Nothing is automatically trusting incoming requests. The attack that was apparently used appears to be a basic failure in the authentication system that allowed very quick turnaround attempts without a lockout or exponential backoff, so the attackers were able to brute-force some accounts. It’s a fairly common flaw in badly designed systems, where you have an authentication server that can be used as a brute-forcing engine. And, oh, yes, it should have showed up in the system logs and generated an error (which it apparently didn’t). Gosh, the first time I saw a bug like that was the SunRPC authentication server, back in 1989… Anyhow…
THE FACT THAT THERE IS A PASSWORD ON THE ACCOUNT INDICATES THAT THE USER EXPECTS PRIVACY. If they wanted the data public, there are public places (tumblr, pinterest, pastebin, twitter) a’plenty where they could publish it. Ultimately, the difference between “published” and “unpublished” is tied to the expectation of privacy.
@ Marcus Ranum
Yes, but will that continue to be a rational expectation? After enough incidents like this, people will start to realize that third-party sites that voluntarily backdoor themselves to the FBI, NSA, etc. are not places where you can reasonably expect privacy.
More victim blaming from the douchenozzle.
@ironchew
We’re not talking about the future, we’re talking about the recent past. And then, as well as currently, that is a reasonable expectation for the average user. Whatever the future may hold, it doesn’t (yet) change the past.
So I’m saying he’s not demanding JLaw’s nudes in spite of having access to terabytes of porn, but partly because of it.
I don’t buy that, though I understand your reasoning. There is a culture that specifically wants to see certain women naked. There are terabytes of porn of other women – but it’s Scarlett Johansen or Jennifer Lawrence or whoever that they want to see. It’s not as if those pictures are especially good, either – the porn or the glamour photos that are all over the internet are better photographed, more explicit, or even more humiliating if that’s what they’re looking for. It’s not just any pixellated flesh they want to see — it’s someone well-known or successful or public or popular.
I recall a few years ago, there were some pictures of Kate Moss that some assclown shot while she was sunbathing. Well, Kate Moss has appeared nude in plenty of art and commercial venues (off the top of my head, the Pirelli calendar shot by Herb Ritts) Why is it interesting to see an unpublished photo of Kate Moss when there are vastly better and more revealing photos already available? Because there are people who are not in it for the naked pictures they want more: they want to violate privacy, to break and enter, to steal and take. It’s aggression – it’s not eroticism. And it’s aimed at women who are public. It’s about violating the public/private boundary; my guess is that it makes the attacker feel special. In my opinion that is the same totalitarian spy-urge that makes some people feel special when they can pull up so-and-so’s emails and read them; I’m looking at you NSA creeps.
By the way, it’s certain that those pictures already are/were in an NSA database and any of a largeish number (on the order of several hundred) analysts who wanted them, could get at them.
If you’re going to talk about practical solutions, then we should talk about harsh deterrent sentencing for the perpetrator and a lawsuit against the cloud operator for their shitty security. iCloud should give restitution (voluntary or forcibly) for not properly protecting their users’ security/privacy. From what I’ve heard, they retained the images after they were deleted years after they were taken.
Of course, those practical solutions don’t blame victims, but y’know, whatever.
ironchew
There are two sentences on that meme-picture at the top of the OP. Why are you only addressing the first? The topic of this thread, as regards that meme is the hypocrisy highlighted by the contrast between the two. Please address that.
The great thing about those practical solutions is they might actually prevent it happening in the future.
Crazy. An actual solution. Rather than just idiotic distraction and dismissal.
but will that continue to be a rational expectation? After enough incidents like this, people will start to realize that third-party sites that voluntarily backdoor themselves to the FBI, NSA, etc. are not places where you can reasonably expect privacy.
You apparently can’t read.
I said earlier that there’s an expectation of trust and then there’s the question of whether or not that trust is justified. Those are separate things. The fact that the government is violating people’s expectation of privacy doesn’t mean it’s right – my point in raising that issue was to illustrate that the government is committing the same crime as the attackers; the difference is the government is institutionalizing it. Both crimes suck; I’m not going to play “which is worse?” they’re both bad.
@ironchew, #57:
First: no one here used the phrase “rational expectation” – that’s all you, ironchew.
Second: “rational expectation of privacy” is a specific legal term which has as much to do with casual use of the English language as “probable cause” which turns out to be much less than a 51% chance of winning a conviction in court if the arrestee were tried on the information then known by the officer. “A truly improbable cause, but one which is not directly contradicted by known evidence, when endorsed by the presumably-educated guess of someone who somehow managed to get hired as a law enforcement officer” might actually be more accurate, so let’s make sure that, instead of taking care when we import legal language into non-legal communication, we entirely undermine the protections of the 4th constitutional amendment in the US, shall we?
Now that the preambles have been disposed, let’s consider this restatement of your oh-so-important argument:
then we should talk about harsh deterrent sentencing for the perpetrator
Harsh sentencing doesn’t appear to have a deterrent effect. So, you’re just making something extra-super illegal but we’ve already acknowledged that it’s wrong.
… and a lawsuit against the cloud operator for their shitty security
They have almost certainly disclaimed liability under their terms of service, which someone at some point agreed to. A lawsuit would be a complete waste of money. Click-wrap licensing is a flaw in the legal system that has been embedded there because it serves wealth and power, I’m not saying it’s right.
Yes, Apple should have had better security. One thing we are learning is that writing software that is ultra-reliable is outside of the ability of most of the people who are writing software for a living. I’m not trying to excuse Apple; this is a paradigm of bug that has been seen before. To my shame, I made a similar mistake in the authentication service of the first firewall product I wrote.. :(
Getting this stuff right is really really hard. If you want to portion out the blame, remember that when apportioning blame you can give more than 100%.
@ doublereed
I’ve seen that wording used too many times to justify illegally detaining prisoners for far longer than the law dictates the maximum sentence should be. And no, they don’t get to stack sentences for each photo. I would think a reasonable sentence would be deterrent on its own, personally.
I do agree with prosecuting the service provider, though. People forget that private companies are the main facilitators behind a mass surveillance society and all too often they claim ignorance and get to dodge charges of criminal negligence. Hopefully not this time.
From the Apple iCloud Terms and Conditions (http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/icloud/en/terms.html)
Standard click-wrap license: “It’s a miracle it works at all. You have no expectation it will work at all. If you don’t like it, fuck you.”
Okay, whatever. A reasonable sentence. That’s fine. Finding and punishing the guy is the main deal. That’s all I was getting at.
And Marcus, I think you and I both know that while getting this stuff right is very difficult, security only gets tightened when there is serious incentive to do so. If an actual lawsuit doesn’t work, then I think Apple should give restitution voluntarily. There should be public pressure for Apple to do so. Without any consequence to Apple, then I do not believe Apple will fix their larger security issues (rather than the specific problem that caused the leak).
While it’s true that harsh deterrents to individuals don’t work that great, harsh deterrents to corporations actually do.
YES, YOU SERVILE SCUM!
ironchew,
I have a reasonable expectation of privacy when I go to a toilet in a bar, or in a public toilet on a beach. But really, I have no way of being sure and you can read stories about creeps putting hidden cameras in public toilets.
That’s why, if I ever find out about a video of me pissing, it would be my own fault because I foolishly expected privacy in a public toilet.
Right?
I have an expectation of privacy when I try on clothes in a store, but really, no one actually guarantees my that. So if someone barges in and assaults me or someone secretly videotapes me, it’s my own damn fault for being a moron, expecting privacy in a place like that.
Right?
If an actual lawsuit doesn’t work, then I think Apple should give restitution voluntarily. There should be public pressure for Apple to do so.
That all sounds nice. So nice…
Unfortunately, when most of everyone wasn’t looking, software managed to achieve the status of “too big to fail.” Using the same arguments, BTW – “It’ll drive costs through the stratosphere!” “nobody will write any more software!” “there will be no incentive to innovate!” I’m sure you’ve never heard those before.
@Saad #41
Am I wrong to read these tweets are sarcasm/satire? I almost feel like Poe’s Law is in full effect on this one?
Or am I way off base?
Sorry about the blockquote fail. Since ironchew’s having enough difficulty with the straightforward stuff I’ll repost:
@Saad #41
FT because I’m not looking for utopia, only a world in which women are actually treated as human beings instead of things. Or are you saying the two are synonymous?
@ironchew #49
Your skull seems pretty impenetrable. The “platforms”* are irrelevant.. Go back and read #38. Then read it again. Maybe if you try hard enough it will sink in. If it doesn’t work, go read the Dispatches comment thread that I linked to above. If you come back into this thread with your victim-blaming attitude, you are a vile piece of shit.
*Feel free to sub in “clothing” or “location” or “whether sex happened before” or “whether the perpetrator is a stranger or not” or “whether she said yes to part of it” or “whether force was used” or “whether she ever had some alcohol or drugs”
Please tell me that a joke. Surely, nobody could be that outrageously oblivious. FFS, the whole point of privacy is that you DO get to decide who gets to see the pictures. THAT’S WHAT PRIVACY MEANS!
Ironchew:
I was a victim of “revenge porn” before it was a “thing”. I had taken a grainy cell phone photo of myself, in 2006 — before cell phone cameras were actually decent. I was taking a bubble bath, and you could sort of see one boob between the bubbles. It was mostly a joke photo, taken for my then long-distance boyfriend who at one point had been in a bubble bath advertisement for a magazine. My then boyfriend did not take and leak the photos; instead, a year later, some asshole wanna be hacker whom I had worked for several years prior, had gotten into my email account, and POURED through my emails — the photo was in the sent folder, buried among THOUSANDS of other emails. He spent a long time looking for that picture.
He got into my email account, and not only stole that one grainy photo of my boob, but also stole access to my accounts. He sent a ton of emails — pretending to be me — to everyone on my list, including my family, and including my bosses. These emails including nasty things about my character, threats to other people, and of course the grainy photo of my boob. (I STRONGLY suspect he had key-logged the computer we shared when we worked together, and therefore new some of my passwords.**)
I was forced to resign, and was even threatened, briefly, to be actually charged with a crime — harassment –, because the emails came from my email address, and because they were sent to a state agency (where I worked) and to many higher ups (including my boss). And Google refused to give me any information without a subpoena. The reason I knew it was him, btw, was because he was a dumb-ass and he logged into online accounts that logged IP addresses and it pointed to the place where we worked together — where he still worked — and which still had his photo on the website. Thankfully I was able to gain access to all of my accounts again, because aside from forgetting to change my email password, I was smarter than he was (and fast at figuring out I was compromised).
The threats BY POLICE to be actually the one charged kept me from doing anything further, and besides, I was broke and couldn’t afford a lawyer even if I thought it was something I could do. This was 2007! I figured no one would give a shit, and would instead blame me (which was probably fucking true).
**So, should I have assumed my activity would have been KEY LOGGED *while I was at work*?
And what about the photo I forgot about, in my sent folder?
And what about the password I hadn’t changed, and the fact that my email account was of course attached to facebook and livejournal (where I caught the IP address)?
All little mistakes. Things that people do every day, even nerds like me. I’m only human. I can’t remember everything. And shit happens.
Is it all my fault? Because it sure seems like you’re blaming me for expecting that my passwords wouldn’t be key logged and stolen while at a place of business, where I was employed. It sure sounds that way. You’re an asshole, truly, who does not understand this subject matter at all, and who seems to be completely forgetting the human aspect of it.
I was punished because I wasn’t perfect at “internet security” and because I assumed that I wouldn’t have my shit key logged while working.
Should I change my password every time I log in at work now? Is that what you expect?
What if another asshole wanna be hacker decides he wants to ruin my life?
Marilove, I’m truly sorry for what happened to you.
ironchew is a douchegabber of a high order (though something less than the rarefied air of the first order, in my estimation) and I expect he’ll learn nothing from what you’ve said, taking it instead of “proof” of his perspective.
But I do hope (and, ahem, expect) others more able to reflect on what’s actually happening here are reading and will benefit. Thanks so much for your story.
marilove,
I’m sorry that happened to you, both the initial attack and the reactions you got.
Assumes all women who are “like them” (whatever that means. The means of mental categorization will be ugly) are in fact bad people as a group because they won’t give sexual access if he does the right inconvenient social ritual. I highly suspect that he sees women as a means to the end of sexual use instead of people with all the same value as him.
Take this as a warning everyone (especially my fellow men), if you don’t put friendship as a higher social priority than sex and develop ways of figuring out if you are doing it right you will screw everything up. It never even enters this person’s mind that they are in fact a shitty person to date.
It’s “not fair” that a woman gets to control what she does with her body. Fuck everything that is involved in creating that logic.
I think it’s not fair that I have to endure seeing people act like this without consequences. I think it would be bad for society if I got the solutions that part of me wants deep down…
@ironchew
If it helps the issue is one of a community emphasis on placing consequences on abusers and minimizing consequences for victims. It’s a matter of the approach being functionally victim blaming independent of intent. If the primary effect of a comment puts all the effort and pressure on the victim it fundamentally does nothing to fix the problems of changing the behavior of abusers and bullies.
Sure as a general rule taking precautions is a good thing. But social advancement is about eliminating the things that make the precautions necessary. Imagine all the precautions that we get to utterly ignore because we have public sanitation? So in this context efforts to point out what the victim could or should do end up functionally inhibiting changes for abusers by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio of attempts to have conversations about them.
If you are functionally acting as an ally to abusers intentions don’t do much, and appeals to “the way things are” misses is huge part of what drives this community. You can have different drivers but you won’t get far if you are not willing to engage the local culture in fair trade.
@ PZ Myers
I like strategic awareness of the attention of people that use the ‘pit, but it’s your blog and I can understand people being tired of them.
It’s gotta be said,
A nice and courteous person would not cheer or think it was fair that someone would commit a crime against another person and make public private pictures for the sake of a cheap sexual thrill. He can claim to be nice and courteous all he wants, that won’t make him so.
By the way – if you have an SMS capable phone and use Google services (email, chat, whatever) you really really really should take advantage of the free 2-step verification system for authentication. What it’ll do is SMS you a code to your registered phone # whenever you try to log in from a new device; this goes a very very long way toward preventing a huge range of attacks including keyloggers, sniffers, credential-stuffing, brute-forcing, etc. It’s amazing that everyone doesn’t use or support similar capabilities (especially heinous if you’re Apple and you’ve got, you know, duh, an iPhone you can use as a credential!)
If you manage to lock yourself out, BTW, you are thoroughly locked out. The Google system gives you a fallback paper authentication code – when they say “Don’t lose this” they really mean “don’t lose this.” Put it in a safe deposit box.
At a major security conference last year I asked for a show of hands from the audience as to who used Google. Almost everyone. “Keep your hand raised if you use Google 2-step verification” Almost nobody except me and 2 other guys who I already know are more perfectionist than I am. It’s really sad. This stuff is free and it’s really really good. For fuck’s sake, you can get an authenticator for World of Warcraft that does two factor authentication and marks you proudly as a gamer (and you get a core-hound pet, which is really neat!)
This stuff is serious. I had a phone conversation with a very upset guy who called me on a saturday morning because his brokerage account had just been used in a pump-and-dump because someone got his password with a piece of keylogging malware. He had $400,000 worth of IBM the day before and when he logged in that afternoon he had $19,000 in some junk penny stock. The online brokerage pointed to the clause in their terms saying “user must protect their password” … Before you complain about the inconvenience of using 2-stage authentication, consider how inconvenient losing your entire retirement can be, or experiencing the kind of horrific attack marilove@#77 suffered. This stuff is serious.
Ironchew: if you continue to play the obstinate ass who doesn’t give a damn what anyone else thinks, you’ll have to go somewhere else to play Vulcan. This is a warning.
@72 Marcus
Actually those arguments are all totally new to me, because I only work on the security side. Is that seriously the arguments they use for having bad security? I figured they just simply didn’t bother and think it’s a general waste of money.
And come on, if there was actually a public outcry to Apple for some restitution then they might do it. I don’t know. Might be some good PR, and it would show they actually take privacy seriously.
Oh, and for FSM’s sake, if you must use passwords, use phrases at least 15 characters long, and don’t use the same one on any two accounts. I know this is going to seem counter-intuitive but you’re better off writing them on a post-it note and keeping it somewhere safe than using something you will effortlessly remember (because the attacker now has to physically access the post-it note). Disregard the post-it note comment if you live with human beings and not cats (cats don’t care about your passwords, trust them). When it asks you if you want to link your everything together so it just uses your facebook or wordpress or google login, a good answer is “no.” You’re constructing a single point of failure if you do that.
Example of passphrases:
ILike3ToppingsOnMyPizza
The2ndAmendmentIsOutdated
MyFirstCarWasA1967PlymouthValiant
@Brony:
Your statement to ironchew was well and generously written. There are reasons that there is no “one right approach”. Maybe you will get through where others have failed.
But really, I salute you regardless of the success or failure of your attempt – only ironchew controls whether ironchew reads for content and learns something. We can only write with clarity and power – and you did both.
Yea, getting an authenticator is super easy and very good for security. I have it on most of my stuff (you can also get one for facebook and such). It’s pretty commonplace nowadays to provide that service for free. They make it really easy to set up.
THREE toppings? You’re mad, marcus. Mad with power.
Instead of post-it notes, I use literally, a little black book. One of those 3″X5″ address books with alphabetical tabs. List the site, user name/e-mail, and password.
Doublereed@#84
Well, Bruce Schneier and I flogged the hell out of that dead horse at RSA in 2012; I won’t post the youtube link so as not to annoy anyone but the video is 5rSScJinPoQ We’re actually violently in agreement, but I lost the secret coin toss when we decided who took which side.
One of the key points that I made, which is a serious problem, is that large well-funded corporations will not hesitate to use regulation as a club against competitors and a barrier to entry against smaller companies. You just damn betcha they would; if a software start-up needed to insure for liability lawsuits they’d need many times more capital if they could even get it, because liability represents unknown unlimited downside. Worse, it’s potentially controllable by one’s competitors – imagine if Google, early on, had decided to have 3 or 4 engineers do nothing but hunt flaws in Twitter to drive Twitter’s costs up. I know for a fact that one company deliberately outed a major vulnerability in another vendor’s code 3 days before their IPO. Imagine if there had been lawsuits following that… Ouch.
I don’t know if you recall when Microsoft did their secure software initiative; it really seriously did cost them on the order of tens of millions of dollars ( http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/2012/jan12/01-12twc.aspx ) arguably more if you want to imagine that Google was gaining user-base at Microsoft’s expense while Microsoft engineers were running around fixing their (admittedly shit-covered) code.
Anyway – yeah. Clickwrap licenses are the big gotcha. Microsoft Windows’ shrink-wrap that you must agree to in order to use Windows says that you cannot use it for any important purpose whatsoever. Think I’m kidding?
Basically the license says “it’s a miracle it works at all, don’t expect it to keep working, and if you don’t like that, you bought it already, fuck you.” Only less succinct. Apple’s clickwrap license, as I already showed, basically says “whatever! oh yeah and we’ll share it with our partners if we want to!” and Google’s says “fuck you.” They all say “Oh, you wanted good software? This isn’t it. Use at your own risk.”
@Crip Dyke
Thank you. We will see if it helps. Like in the post at Dispatches from the culture wars that Ibis3 posted in #33 I often do not get responses when I do what I try to do. That is hard to interpret, but there is information in non-responses to posts or individual points. Figuring out what it means can be fun if done right.
Yea, I kind of assumed that legally they have their bases covered, which why I would instead go the route of public outcry.
I think it rather disturbing how casually you assumed that corporations write their own regulations. Because that’s how fucked up our political system is right now.
And I must say that I find the phrase “violently in agreement” to be rather amusing.
Ibis3 #75
Not at all. Think I’m on the same page now. I thought you were describing a world where nobody would be committing crimes like these at all.
disturbing how casually you assumed that corporations write their own regulations
It is a fact that they do. I don’t think that it’s right.
I believe the whole system needs to be ploughed under. But that’s not today’s project.
Thanks, guys! Honestly, it all worked out. In the moment it was pretty terrible (and there was other stuff going on at the time as well that was stressful, probably more so). But in the end it all worked out. I was able to find a much better paying job, anyway,. And it all sort of disappeared. No one in my family or circle of friends seemed to give a shit, and the guy wasn’t really smart or clever enough to do anything else with the information. And thankfully, it really was a pretty mild photo of a grainy boob in a bubble bath. I’d be willing to bet he’s since lost it.
The guy was a paranoid meth-head who is, last I heard, doing about the same, which is to say not well. Miserable man, really.
It’s not really inconvenient. Not everyone has access to a safe deposit box. I don’t.
I suppose I’m at least partially fault if I get “hacked” again, because I didn’t use the 2-step verification… That’s nice.
Your suggestion is great in general, and it’s possible that a lot of people don’t know about this service so it’s a good thing to mention, but your “inconvenient” comment is borderline.
I don’t have a safe deposit box, nor access to one, and I am not at a permanent address right now and have no safe way to store such a thing. But sure, I’ll just go ahead and risk losing access to all of my Google stuff, if I have to up and move suddenly (again) and lose stuff (again, and largely out of my control).
“It’s not MERELY inconvenient” I should have said.
I’d like to see these sorts of practices outlawed and the field taken over by companies that are innovative, motivated, and ethical enough to do business without viewing it as a battle against the consumer in which the field must be tilted 89 degrees in their favor or they’re taking their ball and going home.
Also, the photo was probably the least embarrassing part, although being confronted by the HR manager of the state department I worked for *ALONE* where she told me I should just resign, or I would probably be fired and it would just make things worse. I wonder now if she did that so she didn’t have to deal with it. She gave me no chance to talk about it with her or anyone else, or do anything about it. She is also the one that told me the police were going to give me a call. I’m not sure her behavior was illegal, but it seems highly unethical. And it was awful. As were the two calls by police — I was told that I was lucky they believed me, or I could have been charged with harassing state officials. How nice is that?
But I think the worst part was the shit he said, pretending to be me. Ugh, what an asshole.
I do wonder, what are the statues of limitations on that sort of thing? Do I want to even know (maybe I just missed it by a hare)? Does it matter? Do I care?
I don’t think his motives had anything at all to do with sex. I think he really just wanted to fuck with me, and possibly ruin my life, but most importantly humiliate me — because he thought I didn’t like him. Which is true. He was an idiot. He read my distaste of and annoyance with him correctly, that’s for sure, and he punished me for it.
That would only require a drastic change in the present tort laws, where one can easily pick a nice, generous venue, and class-action is the only way to go. Make it a bit harder, with a selection of part of the jury from those who understand safety, and are skeptical of showboating by attorneys.
your “inconvenient” comment is borderline.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear – the usual argument given against using 2-factor authentication is that it’s inconvenient. I was responding in advance to that.
Locking your car before you leave it with valuables in it does not mean you’re at fault if someone breaks in and steals them or even if it’s unlocked and someone breaks in and steals them. The person who politely suggests you put up with the inconvenience of locking/unlocking your car is not blaming you for being a victim; they are trying to give useful advice in a world in which there are people who victimize others. Perhaps, if some of the people who’s privacy has been violated had been using 2-factor authentication, they would not have been victimized but the others still would have been. Pointing out that 2-factor authentication works is neither blaming those who didn’t choose to use it, nor excusing the attackers. It’s definitely the attackers we should be going after because if they weren’t able to victimize a particular target because of 2-factor authentication, they’d have victimized another. We should focus our ire on the people who deliberately acted in a way they knew would hurt, no?
PS – the usual argument I’ve heard as to why not to have a safe deposit box (offsite!) in which to store authentication credentials and a USB hard drive with backups is “it’s inconvenient.” In that situation, when there’s no active attacker to blame, there’s no victimization – if the person has a fire and loses all their data (and their backup disk next to their computer also is destroyed by heat) they just made a bad risk assessment and the RNG came up ’00’
I still think the suggestion of 2-part verification is a good one because there are a lot of people not aware of it, but it should have been made with no qualifiers, and your insistence of “inconvenience” and “bad risk assessment” is still quite borderline.
Plus, I really dislike this analogy, especially in relation to photos of me nude being stolen/used against me. The focus should be on the reaction, not on the fact that I was hacked, in this case, full stop. Also, the rest of your analogy is really weak to me — who warns adults “politely” to lock their shit up? This is common sense, and people who warn me to “lock your car” or “remember to lock your house!” annoy the fuck out of me because, no shit, I am a grown ass adult — and generally this sort of advice comes from men, as if I am a woman needing a reminder of basic life skills knowledge of independent people.
So I made a “bad risk assessment” when I didn’t change my passwords often enough? That’s not helpful, either, nor does it make me feel as if you really understand my or others’ points…
So I made a “bad risk assessment” when I didn’t change my passwords often enough?
Really? I understand your point(s) quite well; I think that you’re trying to find a disagreement where there is none. I am not criticizing your actions.
You’ll notice that I only used the term “risk assessment” in relation to a situation where there was not an active, harmful actor. If you’re making a decision whether or not to protect your data from fire, you either choose well or badly depending on how RNG rolls. That’s not the case with an attacker; I clearly pointed that out when I wrote ” if they weren’t able to victimize a particular target because of 2-factor authentication, they’d have victimized another” I am NOT blaming you for your experience at all, no matter how much you seem to want to think I am.
Also, Marcus, I assume you’re a man? Please forgive and correct me if I’m in correct, but I am going by your user name. I take it you don’t have any need to judge your “risk assessment” about shit like this. You are likely under no risk of someone hacking into your email for any reason, let alone to steal and distribute nude photos of you (even if you have dick pics; unless you’re a married politician sending them to a woman who didn’t request it, no one gives a shit, and even then, no one really gave a shit).
But as a woman in this society, I am already CONSTANTLY making “risk assessments” in regards to my personal safety and privacy, every single time I walk outside.
It’s exhausting. So sometimes I don’t have the time or energy to consider every single risk assessment ever, and this includes when it comes to technology, and I’m certain I’m not the only one. But if I fail at that, my risk is losing my LIVELIHOOD (in my case, a job), up to losing my life.
Consider that the next you lecture a woman who has been violated in this way about “convenience” and “risk assessment”.
You should have merely stated: “There is a 2-step verification process, and it’s pretty handy, and can help minimize, although not erase, security risks.”
Done. That’s it. No talk about how some people find it inconvenient because we’re too lazy to use safe deposits, or because we didn’t properly assess risk. Would have saved you the trouble of trying to defend your statements.
Marcus, I think the problem is less with the substance of your comments than in your choice of how and when to raise them.
If this was a thread about “how to protect your privacy online,” then your comments would be fine. But it’s a thread about the moral bankruptcy of the people excusing or justifying invasions of privacy. Which is not what I think you’re doing; I think you’re trying to be helpful, but “here’s how you could have avoided that” is not a great response to “here’s a shitty thing that happened to me.”
It’s like how it would be fine to post “don’t smoke” in a thread about “how to live a long and healthy life,” but it would be pretty shitty to post it in a thread about “I was just diagnosed with lung cancer.”
There’s a time and a place, you know?
@Marcus Ranum
Why are you derailing this thread with a prolonged focus on precautions someone can take to [have the illusion that they can] avoid getting their privacy breached? Maybe you ought to read what I said back in #38 too. You want to give password tips, maybe you should do that in the Lounge or something. The problem isn’t the network security. There’s some skeezy asshole out there who will make it his raison d’etre to invade whatever barriers are put up. You are like the nail polish designers. Good intentions maybe, but you know the predators are just going to find a way to work around it or pick an easier victim.
I take it you don’t have any need to judge your “risk assessment” about shit like this
Again, I used that term only relating to situations where there is not an active attacker.
I am already CONSTANTLY making “risk assessments”
Please stop trying to tag me with a term I did not use. I would have said “Threat assessment” if I were talking about an active threat. And, yes, I understand that you are constantly making those.
You should have merely stated: “There is a 2-step verification process, and it’s pretty handy, and can help minimize, although not erase, security risks.”
Thank you.
Done. That’s it. No talk about how some people find it inconvenient
I already explained why I misspoke regarding that. Do you want to hammer on me some more?
because we’re too lazy
I never used the word “lazy” — you realize that now you’re resorting to putting words in my mouth and hammering on me for them?
to use safe deposits, or because we didn’t properly assess risk. Would have saved you the trouble of trying to defend your statements.
I think my statements were pretty reasonable and wouldn’t require defending under regular circumstances. More to the point, since you’re putting words in my mouth you can hardly criticize me for “defending” things I never even said.
Screechymonkey, I see your point.
I think we just got started talking about security and privacy and such and it got Marcus into the mode of doing a PSA about 2-factor authentication. He didn’t mean anything by it.
But yea, 2-factor is not that inconvenient at all. They make it pretty easy to set up and such. I’ve never heard ‘inconvenience’ arguments. I just think most people don’t know what it is.
@marilove
I’m sorry that happened to you and I’m glad you got out of it okay.
Marcus, you are bordering on Vulcan “mansplaining”. Stop that.
@Marcus Ranum
This thread is about active attackers. Specifically, active attackers who target women and exploit them because they feel entitled. So blathering on about fires and risk assessments is insensitive and obnoxious. Comparing women’s privacy and right to consent to what is done to their bodies and images thereof to valuables in a car is also pretty crass.
If religion didn’t shame the female body soo much, maybe they would care that this is victimizing the woman. But as long as religions teach women that men can’t control themselves and that only women can prevent this, females will continue being shamed while men enjoy their privileged position to be sexual deviants.
Prostate Cancer Foundation has rejected their donations.
@doublereed:
How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:
One.
Ta-whoooo.
Three.
Okay, just one. One necessary and sufficient way. Ah, ah, ah!
But it’s number three.
Since this thread was already over 100 posts long, I skipped over some of it, so I apologize if anyone else has already said the following:
It looks like a pair of guys who are intentionally trying to be as big a pair of assholes as they possibly can. Sarcasm was likely involved, but I get a vibe that it’s more of a chance just for them to revel in taking cheap shots at a woman and they really don’t care about what they’re saying so long as it hurts her.
FWIW, LastPass is a password manager that allows for using Google’s 2 factor authentication. It can recall and apply all your different passwords for the sites you visit automatically. The 2 factor authentication keeps someone from accessing the encrypted passwords. It even helps you create really complex passwords you won’t have to remember.
ironchew @ 57:
Fortunately, ironchew listed sites we can certainly trust with any stuff we have, such as…
well, there’s…
hunh, I can’t seem to find the Definitive List Of Safe Storage Places On The Internet Everyone Knows About that ironchew posted.
Repost, please?
Our feel-good movies sell the idea that if you are a nice guy you get laid with the hot chick.
This is, to some extent, on the other extreme of PUAs, but I wonder if it also contributes to create delusional expectations and the perverse sense of entitlement.
I agree that this is fueled by ego, which our men are burdened with (a reason more for men to be feminists) but I would add also helplessness.
If I am allowed to set aside entitlement and misogyny for a second (for no other reason than we agree already that it is a very important issue) our society (TV, friends, adults etc..) bombards young men with suggestions that are ambiguous and inconsistent at best about how a man is expected to behave to become “more attractive”, whatever that means. From the top of my head, ideas such as: “have money”, “be a gentleman”, “be yourself”, “play the guitar”, “be cool”, “write a poesy”, “dress this way”, “play hard to get”.
The same suggestions do not spare women and actually hit them much harder, but again since this is a non-controversial topic in the feminist movement, I hope I can set it aside.
Now. Pleasepleaseplease. Yes I’m going to ask something potentially stupid.
I’m not trolling, I’m not an MRA in disguise, I am genuinely and personally interested in this, feel free to insult me but at least first check my posting history.
Assuming we have successfully educated our men to be compassionate and respectful human being who understand they are not entitled to a woman’s body and neither to her feelings and that rape is wrong no matter what, what kind of suggestions should we give them?
“You can’t do anything about it” is a legit answer but not one that is easy to accept; if this is your answer how would you help the person to accept it?
F.O.:
Can’t do anything about what, exactly? Accept what?
Think about this. If people are compassionate and respectful, understand they’re not entitled to someone else’s body or feelings and rape is wrong… then what is the problem here? Why does anything about this need to be fixed or accepted?
Because if you’re about to say ‘but then how does anyone ever have sex again?’ and you think that logically follows from the above? THAT is the problem.
There’s something really existentially nauseating about the entitlement complex some of these people show. It seems like they’re getting off on the unwantedness of this exposure, the humiliation of it all. If I had to guess, based on “JMatthew’s” posts in the OP I’d say it’s not enough that he gets what he wants (to see whoever nude); that person also has to suffer.
As long as I live I will never comprehend this approach to others, this less-than-zero-sum mentality. Especially with, as it’s been said, terabytes of pornographic imagery and video out there. But it may explain why said TiB of porn aren’t “enough.” Ugh, and this probably explains why the degrading and painful stuff is popular with a certain demographic too, now I come to think of it…
*goes to purge mind with snuggly drawn yuri…*
You seem to be sort of contradicting yourself. I don’t know how one gets to “you can’t do anything about it” being hard to accept if they genuinely don’t feel entitled to a woman’s body/feelings and understand that rape is always wrong. Which is not to say that being disappointed when the person you’re interested in doesn’t return your feelings but that doesn’t seem to be what you’re getting at here.
Sorry my 124 was addressed to F.O @ 121
@121 F.O.:
I assume the suggestions are of the “how to end up in rewarding romantic relationships” variety. There’s not much that can be said there – social skills are still skills and are relevant, but the whole “you get the hot chick” mindset is toxic bullshit that is inherently objectifying, and with it gone straight men are just going to have to accept the fact that there are no guarantees, and that some people are going to end up in situations where they aren’t in rewarding romantic relationships even if they’d like to be, even in an egalitarian society (though it’s pretty clear that plenty of people are, and it’s not some super-rare thing).
That’s pretty much standard though. Some people end up screwed in lots of respects to life – maybe they end up with few friendships because of outside circumstance, maybe they end up horribly poor, maybe they get some sort of nasty debilitating illness or injury, maybe they don’t end up with a romantic life despite wanting one. Maybe they end up victimized by some sort of horrible crime – you know, the sort of things the existing attitudes downright exacerbate.
F.O. #121
In a world that understood and embraced the personhood of women your question would be nonsensical. Those folks would understand that you can’t lump individual people into some amorphous amalgam titled “women” when dealing with something as personal and varied as romantic relationships.
The fact that you’re asking this implies that you do not consider women to be individuals. You might want to take a good hard look at why that might be.
Gymnast McKayla Maroney has announced that the stolen photos of her were taken when she was under 18 so if this asshole (the one who stole the photos) is caught he could face much harsher penalties. On another note, this happens to women all the time and I wish it was taken as serious when the victims are not celebrities.
@F.O., 121
I’m going to be cruel here, but this is something I see over at We Hunted the Mammoth all the time, and frankly, it’s fucking tedious as hell. This thread is about the criminal hacking of women’s private accounts and the criminal sharing of their private photos, as well as the public’s reprehensible reaction that “they deserved it.”
This is not a dating site where we tell you how to get laid. Fuck off.
—Assuming we have successfully educated our men to be compassionate and respectful human being who understand they are not entitled to a woman’s body and neither to her feelings and that rape is wrong no matter what, what kind of suggestions should we give them?—
‘bite me’ seems like it would be a good response to your posting.
This question has been answered approximately 10 zillion times. The answer to the question is obvious, if you bother to take your head out of your ass and think about it for two seconds.
I’ll answer FO:
Make friends first. Make lots and lots of friends, male and female, with no expectation of “hooking up”. Friends beget friends. More friends beget more friends. One of those friends of the female variety will eventually let it be known she wants something a little more. The social cues aren’t that tough. My nephew’s wife approached him at a bar and said something to the effect of “we ought to go out.”. It’s that kind of world. But she already knew him as part of his larger social circle and hung out with him while he was dating someone else.
Friends. Friends. Friends. Without expectation of anything other than friendship. Everything else is bullshit.
You’re welcome.
Or else be up front about the fact that you want sex. You’re probably not going to hit a lot of homeruns with that, but women do enjoy a confident guy sometimes.
Along those same lines, like 9 times out of 10 when I talk to a self-described “nice guy”, what I really see is, no offense to all self-described nice guys, but a fairly boring person. I don’t mean you need to be a “bad boy” in order to attract the lllllllllllladies. I mean you should, like, work out and/or read some books and/or find something that you’re passionate about and do it. I think these are generally good things to do in life even if you’re completely asexual but, to put this in marketing terms, you have to create a product that your audience – in this case, members of the opposite sex (or same, depending on what you’re looking for, of course!) want to purchase. I mean, look at this from an entirely non-sexual perspective: if some dude came up to you and wanted to be your besty and yet brought absolutely nothing to the table except that he was a self-proclaimed “nice guy”, would *you* go out of your way to hang out with this guy on Friday nights?
F.O.
Life is disappointing sometimes for everyone, and there is no antidote against that. Everyone of all genders will experience disappointment at a failed attempt at a romantic relationship. This just isn’t a male-exclusive problem. The issue is that when women are spurned by someone they were attracted to, or when they are talking about someone who is ‘out of their league,’ their response is not usually to try to humiliate, harass, or assault that person. A lot of men do have that response because of their feelings of entitlement. If men did not have those feelings of entitlement? Well, they’d have to deal with rejection the same way women do… it isn’t really any more complicated than that.
This one, for instance?
I don’t see what kink-shaming has to do with the topic at hand. >.>
F.O. @121,
I agree with the responses that suggest you’re getting a little off-topic here, and that’s it’s particularly gross to turn a thread about invading women’s privacy into a “what about the menz? How do we help them get laid?” discussion. So I’ll just suggest that if you’re interested in the subject, Dr. Nerdlove tries to provide some non-toxic advice on that subject. (Standard I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-say-this disclaimer: I don’t endorse everything the guy says, hell, I don’t even read him regularly. But he may have what you’re looking for.)
The definitive list of trustworthy spaces to store your digital files is: .
Even government agencies with a major stake and plenty of funding for security mess up (which is how we know what intelligence agencies were up to). Normal users have no hope.
Today, my dad took me to see the safety deposit box where he stores the wills and some other legal documents. It was 0% computerized: big metal gates with keys and paper forms. Not so much because the bank is old-school as because it’s safer that way.
Someone who were to break in to the safety deposit box would be called a bank robber. Someone who breaks in to your personal data doesn’t deserve to be absolved on grounds that you didn’t make it impossible.
@ Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
You should watch the documentary “Hot Coffee.” The push to reform tort laws was conceived by Republicans and industry front groups, by using a particularly effective campaign to convince the general public there was an epidemic of frivolous lawsuits against corporations. It was never true. In fact, most of the increase in lawsuits against corporations are filed by other corporations for strategic purposes.
@ Iyeska #20
“Nice job of bringing in the pointless, harmful speculating, and othering, before the 20th post is made. FFS, how about not doing this sort of shit at all? How about clicking all the links in the OP and being a bit more fucking informed before commentary?”
Sorry, you seem to have missed the point. Now, how about fucking off? The adults are talking now little one.
sparks #138
You had a point?
sparks @ 138
Because dismissing the entire situation as unsupervised children was totally a cogent point without which the discussion could not have continued.
@ 134
I agree. I also don’t agree the problem is the accessibility of porn or strip clubs. The problem is the attitude of certain men that they’re entitled to women. Sex workers and strippers are people too, with agency, who usually enjoy their work, and get paid. They don’t appreciate being blamed for this misguided sense of male entitlement for doing the work they want to do. And yet they regularly are blamed for it.
I really liked this Think Progress article on the subject of victim blaming:
http://thinkprogress.org/culture/2014/09/02/3477906/celebrity-photo-hacker-message-to-all-women/
I especially like this paragraph:
As a woman I completely recognize that feeling of blaming myself, and expecting the blame of others for not doing that “thousandth thing.”
F.O,
My wife contends she has reduced all of human morality to 3 commandments:
1)Don’t be greedy (one could substitute “entitled” here as well)
2)Don’t be stupid
3)Don’t be evil.
When pressed, the only thing I could think to add was:
4)Don’t be pathetic.
In short, avoid being everything the assholes who pulled this stunt are, and if you cannot, kindly remove yourself from the gene pool and from human society in general.
“The adults” here agree with lyeska, shit for brains.
But this attitude is equivalent to xians saying that without religion, they’d be committing all kinds of crimes because they wouldn’t worry about the afterlife.
This is not a grownup, humanitarian way to view roughly half of the species, regardless of what you think you want.
Well, to be fair, I don’t think the people who blame porn and sex work for male sexual entitlement blame the sex workers themselves; they don’t seem to be able to conceive of strippers, porn actresses, etc. having any agency.
…oh, wait, that doesn’t help, does it?
sparks:
I didn’t miss any point. You did, when you decided othering was the answer instead of thinking. You demonstrated your inability to understand a point with this response, too. I suppose it’s good to know that 56.5 qualifies me as a little one.
@ Azkyroth Drinked the Grammar Too :)
Everybody needs to go read all the archives of Savage Love, STAT! ;)
Of course they don’t have any agency! That would imply that they actually want to be strippers and porn actresses, which would be horrible! I mean, if they actually want to do those jobs and enjoy being able to choose whether or not they express their sexuality, then they can’t be saved from that life by a dashing and heroic manly man who shows them how to respect themselves by being devoted and subservient to him!
Quite right and my thanks to all those who called me out on my lack of clarity. Apologies to all concerned. I did indeed have a point (badly made as it was) that I very nearly lost in the ensuing shit-storm.
Now then: By ‘unsupervised children’ I mean the perp who started this slimy ball of shit rolling in the first place. Bastard ought to be hung out to dry.
However, if you don’t want to be a victim of this kind of shit, why would you store naked pictures of yourself in the cloud in the first place? It just seems to me there is a fine line between victim-hood and personal responsibility here in our new interwebz enabled age. I don’t know where to draw that line. Clearly the victims have, in fact, been victimized. But don’t they share at least a small amount of the responsibility? Just as the victim of car theft would for having left the keys in the ignition?
Thanks–Carry on.
@ Sparks
The answer to your question is no. The victim of crime does not share the responsibility for the fact that they were victimized by a criminal. Period.
One night con artists called my grandmother, who suffered from demetia and conned her into believing there was an emergency at her bank and she needed to give them her account information over the phone, which she did. Within moments her account were cleaned out. Yet when we called the police, there was no talk of how it was her fault. They simply started the process of trying to catch the criminals who conned her, and stole her money.
The point is, some crimes are automatically treated differently than others, and the difference involves questioning the victim as though they brought it on themselves, rather than expressing outrage towards the perpetrator.
Stop blaming the victim. ‘Cause we’re all getting pretty fucking tired of it.
To put it to the question: Why is being a con artist illegal? They lie to steal money, and if they do a really successful job of lying, they get money. Yet if they get caught, they go to prison. Why? Shouldn’t the case be, in your view of the world, no one should ever go to prison for conning people out of money? After all, shouldn’t the victim have been more savvy and thwarted the attempted con?
Or do you believe that the porousness of internet security means the internet should be a lawless free-for-all with no rules or laws? If that’s the case, then how can we move to online banking? If I deposit money online, is it up for grabs? If not, why not?
I certainly hear what you’re saying but must point out that the situation you describe is completely different. A person with dementia (and my condolences regarding your grandmother) should not be in control of their own finances as they are, as you pointed out, not responsible by way of medical problems.
I’m not blaming the victim, and it doesn’t matter if you or anyone else is getting fucking tired of anything. Irrelevant. Of course con artists must go to jail for their crimes. Where did I say or imply otherwise?
Online banking? Really? It is up for grabs my friend, especially if you act stupidly regarding your account passwords. This doesn’t exempt a con artist nor does it exempt you for responsibility for your actions or lack thereof.
It simply …is… the world we live in today. It’s not perfect and you have to look out for yourself because the interwebz isn’t going to do it for you anymore than Sky Daddy is.
Cheers.
Ummm, whether or not it was possible for people to steal wasn’t the question. The question is: why do we have laws? If we’re going to take the view that, well, we’re all fucked and nothing can be done, because you can’t stop the criminals, then why bother? Why not just make an overarching law, sort of: let the living beware? Why not?
BTW,
It ISN’T irrelevant, since blaming the victim, and whether or not that is complete crap, is the entire discussion of this thread. Does that magically make things that shouldn’t happen not happen? no. But does that fact make my comment irrelevant. Also, no.
Plus, I notice you bypassed the actual question by claiming my grandmother can’t be held responsible because of medical problems. If she had just been elderly and naive it would have been her fault then? Why should there be a law against it, if the victim is entirely to blame, that is, if they aren’t medically proven incapacitated?
sparks,
Part of the problem is that, while you might understand the risks of saving confidential data…. well, anywhere, many, many people do not. I work in IT, and I come across people all the time who do not understand the cloud, how it works, or how it can leave you vulnerable. It is becoming increasingly impossible for people who do not understand some types of technology to just opt out if they want to participate in society, and it isn’t fair to tell them that they should know better when there is no formal education for online security. But the fact that something is password protected shows that the user has an expectation of privacy. They expect that apple (or whoever) has taken some steps to secure any data placed in their hands, and for breaches, there should be consequences for the person who knowingly violated someone’s private files.
–
I find it hard to believe that you do not have any confidential data anywhere online, or even on your hard drive (yep, that’s vulnerable, too). What level of hacking has to take place before someone transforms, in your eyes, from a careless individual to an unsuspecting victim? Do they have to have files stolen from their hard drive? Do they have to be spied on from their webcam? At what point are they no longer partially to blame?
You have yet to answer any of my questions about why we have laws to stop people from victimizing others in the first place, if the victims are to blame. Telling me about internet security, which I am already aware of, in no way answers that question.
No one today, unless they live in an an ice cave in Siberia, should be ignorant of the possibility that their personal information contained in their electronic devices is at risk of being hacked. Stories of this very type of thing are routinely reported in the news.
I might possibly exempt people who routinely watch FOX News, for obvious reasons.
But otherwise, acknowledging the reality of the world that we live in and adjusting our actions accordingly is a reasonable thing to expect a responsible person to do.
This certainly doesn’t mean that the perpetrators of this kind of personal violation shouldn’t be brought to justice or that some practical way to prevent this from happening shouldn’t be investigated.
harryballs99 #159
Seriously?
Do you know how an internal combustion engine works?
Do you know where your electicity comes from?
Your water?
Your food?
If you tell a person who is not tech-literate to just adjust their actions accordingly, they won’t know what to do. They rely on trusting other people who understand internet security to help them protect their data. Like, say, trusting a company like apple to do everything reasonably possible to protect the data that they store. If apple’s security protocols fail, then that sucks, but don’t blame the user who thought that apple’s security would be reasonable protection. Blame hackers who purposefully and maliciously stole data, and demand that internet security people beef up their protections, and hold both of those parties accountable as is appropriate. But it isn’t justified to tell a user that they deserve humiliation or identity theft or blackmail or any other possible outcome. They entrusted a legit company to help them because not everyone can be internet security experts.
Also, knowing that hackers exist is not the same as knowing how they work or what steps can be taken to avoid becoming a victim, unless they just opt out of electronic devices altogether, and as I said before, that is becoming increasingly impossible on both a personal and professional level.
Whether we know that such things can happen is entirely beside the point. Some victims of crimes are treated as though they are not responsible for the crime against them. Others are treated as though they are responsible. It is the attitude that they victims are responsible that allows the unacceptable security to persist, as well as the complete lack of corporate responsibility. I’m not saying that people who know hoe to protect themselves shouldn’t try to do that. However, basically asserting there’s no such thing as security, so you can’t protect your privacy, or bank account, or finances, or identity, or anything else, isn’t an answer.
Instead of finding new ways to blame the victims of crimes for failing to protect themselves from crimes, maybe we should be holding law enforcement and corporations accountable. That all starts with a conversation. Good thing we’re having one, amirite?
Wow, I’m a big pile of typos tonight. BTW, if I live in an ice cave in Siberia, am I still partially to blame if someone plasters my naked photos all over the fucking internet? Or do I get a pass then? And does that mean I get my photos back?
rabidwombat
Agreed! This is mostly what I was trying to say. We expect law enforcement and corporations to act to help ensure our privacy and safety in our society. If this kind of crime happened outside of cyberspace, say, nude pics in a safety deposit box in a bank, then law enforcement would be taking the crime very seriously, and the bank would be reviewing its security protocols and apologizing to the victim. Why do we expect less in online situations?
This!
You can’t opt out. Not anymore. Not if you want to be competitive in this world. So we have a system that is filled with expert-level technology that most people don’t understand. And for you computer geeks being all superior, that includes the nuclear power plant down the street, that you also don’t fucking understand, until something goes wrong that can kill you. We of the tech savvy bunch like to kid ourselves this lack of understanding can’t hurt us, until it does.
It doesn’t matter if it is a problem with understanding computer security, or your inability in an emergency to properly assess that you have a shitty surgeon. It affects all of us.
Until we start challenging the idea that the individual victim is to blame for the abject failures in our system, and the lack of oversight in system, we are all at risk. Only a fool thinks otherwise.
As a comparison, I can say that I actually do have elaborate and well planned strategies for dealing with a medical crisis, from surgeons I’ve vetted in my area, to which hospital they should take me to, to strong advocates with an extensive list of essential questions to ask, procedures to insist on, and documentation regarding all my medical wishes. Do you?
Let me ask you this: should the wrong surgeon get their hands on you, and wreck your health, should I drop by the hospital to tell you how bad you fucked up for not being prepared like me? After all, isn’t your life and health far more important than data security?
That’s exactly it. We live our lives online, and surrounded by technology we don’t understand, that we require for our very survival every minute of the day. We can’t continue to delude ourselves that every malfunction is the fault of the victim of the malfunction. We have to start addressing the total lack of accountability.
F.O. @121
What part of “you’re not entitled to sex or relationships” don’t you understand?
If men suddenly grasped, as a class, that women are human beings deserving of respect for that simple reason, it would be worthwhile in itself. You don’t get, or deserve, cookies for that. It’s a pretty basic element of human decency. It’s not a guarantee of anything.
harryballs99 @159
So, you just insulted my elderly mother and a host of other people who aren’t given much damn choice about whether their info is online, but who don’t know how it all works. Fuck you very much.
There are people out there who would reflexively blame me if my laptop’s hard drive was hacked into because although I used passwords of decent strength and kept my embarrassing pictures off the cloud, I still didn’t take the common sense precautions of hiding behind a hundred proxies, using 1024 terabyte encryption, program my own proprietary spin on the most obscure open source OS there is, or run my own shadow internet nodes.
True responsible computer users never rely on anyone else to provide their security for them because a safer society with division of labor is for chumps. They also grow their own food and power their computer by a hand-cranked generator because you can’t trust anyone else to do it properly. Ever.
And, of course, even if I did all that extensive stuff and got hacked anyway, it’d be my fault for attracting the higher breed of hackers. Everyone knows something with a big, sturdy lock on it is a tempting target, asking to be broken into.
Bronze Dog:
No True Internetter. Mmmm hmmm.
Oh, poor you! Poor, poor you. Must be awful to be “hammered on” by a victim of sexual violation who is merely trying to explain to you how to speak respectfully about such violation. Waaaaaaaaahhhhhh.
Yeah, you’re mansplaining, and I had to walk away from the conversation because of that. Fuck you, seriously.
“He didn’t mean anything by it.”
I don’t give a fuck that he “didn’t mean anything by it”, doublereed, I really don’t. As an ACTUAL VICTIM OF THIS SORT OF THING, he can fuck off with his mansplaining, seriously.
BUT HEY I suppose since he’s just trying to be helpful, my feeling rather awful with his insistence on continuing his mansplaining and near-victim blaming was just me over-reacting, eh? I mean, as a victim of this kind of crap, maybe I’m just too emotional about it, and I should listen to the oh-so-reasonable Marcus who’s “only trying to help!”
Ugh. Fuck that shit.
Harryballs99
Back when I was 19-21 (so before my pictures/info were “hacked” and I was forced to resign), I dated a guy who was abusive and controlling. He was apparently key-logging, and watching, everything I did online, and I did not even realize this until several months AFTER I left. Not because I didn’t know it was possible — I did — but because it never occurred to me that someone I thought I trusted and who loved me would ever do such a thing.
I suppose anyone in a relationship with someone who is smart enough to key log is just askin’ for it, right?
@ marilove
Oh no, I’ve got this one. It’s your fault for being stupid enough to date someone untrustworthy, and why didn’t you just leave? There, now they don’t have to bother to fucking answer. *spits*
You are not entitled to judge what a responsible person should “reasonably” do when you have zero knowledge of that person’s unique and private circumstances. While you can certainly make this judgement for yourself, and discuss it in private with those close to you.
But you have NO BUSINESS making such blanket judgements about strangers you do not know in a public forum.
Using this argument to defend blaming the victims also has the secondary effect of EXCUSING the internet for this. It is accepting the insecurity as just the way things are and not subject to change. The companies that sell cloud storage for private use have a RESPONSIBILITY to maintain the security of their product. If security is inadequate, then THEY are the ones to blame.
sparks @150:
This is victim blaming.
It also doesn’t make a lot of sense. Storing nude pictures of yourself does not automatically lead to those photos being leaked. Someone has to deliberately seek to invade your privacy and hack your computer to acquire those photos. Hacking isn’t a force of nature. It doesn’t just *happen*. It happens bc someone is trying to hack a computer. That person is the one responsible. Telling people not to store nude pics of themselves shifts the responsibility away from the only person who is responsible for that invasion: the hacker.
sparks:
Well you’re not blaming the person who did the hacking, that’s for sure.
You’re telling people that storing nude photos of yourself will automatically, through no fault of anyone else, lead to those photos being leaked. It’s just one of those things that will happen. Can’t get around it. There’s no way to fix computers so this doesn’t happen. There’s no conscious agent anywhere making the decision to hack your computer.
It. Just. Happens.
And will always happen. So don’t store nude photos on your computer (why stop at nude photos? If hacking is going to happen, perhaps we shouldn’t store g-rated photos. What about embarrassing photos we wouldn’t want exposed? Better not store those. What about any personal information? Better not store that? What other information will this Hacking Force of Nature seek out that we should know about?)
And yet, that’s not at all the case. Hacking is not a force of nature. It doesn’t just “happen”. There’s a someone (or multiple someones) responsible, and it’s not the victim.
@ Tony!
sparks also notes that anyone can take the money from your online banking transactions, so apparently we should also stop using banks. In fact, lets all go live in a damned cave, because apparently that’s easier than, you know, holding criminals accountable for crime, and holding corporations accountable for their security-hole-riddled services.
@sparks
I’d like to know what you think my responsibility is for my situation? And specifically what I ought to do in the future to prevent anything similar from happening again.
Yes, sparks, you ARE.
@All: I’m not saying I’m entitled. I’m saying “Hey, I’m obviously doing something wrong, but I’m too stupid to find out what”.
Worry not, this is something that plagued my younger years and have now accepted.
But hey, no one has ever taken me seriously, so maybe I AM a pathetic insane guy.
Thank you, Freethought Community.
I’ll bring my cries for help somewhere else, maybe a church maybe the PUAs, maybe the MRAs, I’m sure they will be eager to listen.
Yes, the above is sarcasm.
No, I don’t feel entitled to shoot anyone.
No, I’m not leaving Pharyngula, I’m still learning a lot out of it.
(In case you care, I do have friends, the majority of them women and the majority of them proud, opinionated feminists and no, I don’t give a shit about their looks.)
@ F.O.
Have you never been on a forum before? There is a topic of discussion we’re all involved in, and people reasonably feel you are derailing that discussion wanting dating tips. Considering the topic, it should not be too hard to imagine why some might find that insulting as well.
In other words, if you want to talk about that, choose the appropriate venue. Don’t because bitter at the people telling you how they feel about your off topic question.
oops: “become” not because
F.O. @ 183:
Instead of insisting on being off topic in this thread, you could have simply gotten a clue, and taken what you wanted to discuss to the Lounge or to Thunderdome, both long running open threads. People would have happily followed you for a good conversation, if you simply posted something like “okay, I really need to figure this out and could use some help, so I’ve taken it to [link to the lounge or tdome]. That is simple netiquette, and keeps you within the commenting rules, which, if you have not read them, I suggest you do so.
Been following and decided to post.
F.O. @ 121 and 183
Well here’s a start. We as a society at one point in history in the US men would claim women as property and they had no right to choose who they were married to, the laws, to vote, or how their life was managed around them. Obviously that is no longer accepted by the majority. The answer should be that simple, through people changing their actions and teaching the young how to properly behave it changes.
Given that this is not a behavior required for ones survival, it’s in no way reasonable to believe that this is an inherent behavior that cannot be changed.
Harryballs99 @159
Your advocating this as a victimless crime, and it’s not. Regardless of whether I leave my keys in my car or not, when it’s stolen it’s still a punishable crime and I would still be a victim.
-sigh-
Men have no fucking clue.
I see myself in the guy who feels entitled to see Lawrence’s nude pics.
Not because I want or feel entitled to see those pics (I don’t), not because I condone in any way what he wrote or his attitude, which I find disgusting.
But because that guy is desperate.
Desperate people don’t care about anything, you can (rightly) call him out on his sense of entitlement but fact is, he just won’t listen.
But see, he isn’t desperate. He’s entitled.
He feels, honestly, that he deserves the attention of a beautiful woman, and that he doesn’t need to do anything – this is his birthright as a man.
And when the beautiful women fail to come running, he feels entitled to steal the time and images of women.
F.O., desperate for what? I understand that there are rather a lot of nude pictures of men and women that are on the internet (I just typed “internewt”. Fear the internewt!) because the subjects of those pictures wanted said pictures on the internet. There are places you can go, I’m told, to see nude pictures and videos of people doing all kinds of things. So I don’t think your hypothetical man can possibly be desperate to look at nude pictures. If you mean desperate for a relationship, well, I don’t understand how looking at somebody’s stolen pictures helps with that.
Now excuse me; there’s a couple of nude portraits of me out there that I have to track down and burn, because otherwise if they get stolen and show up on the internet it’s obviously my fault for not making sure they were locked up in Fort Knox.
Entitlement is definitely a problem, I think I made it clear in my posts.
But it’s entitlement and desperation together that build up to resentment.
If men had better means to take responsibility of their failures in their romantic relationships, how long do you think the PUAs and MRas would last?
As a society, we’re failing badly at educating men not to rape and not to feel entitled to a woman’s body, but we’re failing also to tell them what to actually do or expect.
Have you seen the average movie where the lame guy shows his virtue and eventually gets the female prize?
This is what we teach: entitlement, bad ideas on what is attractive and what is not and false expectations.
Teaching to be respectful and compassionate is important, but how does a man (or a woman) learn how to bring out their best self?
It’s fine to search for help in any areas of life but this (unless you want to count the PUAs… I hope you don’t).
Why?
@ledasmom
Can’t you see how resentful is that guy?
The pics themselves are irrelevant.
He just wants revenge.
No, what happens is that some men can’t think of women as anything other than toys for their pleasure. It’s not training, as everybody won’t go with the basic concept women are people too, and your equal.
What are you really trying to do, other than muddy very clear waters?
F.O. @191:
I think the teaching of so-called ‘proper’ gender roles for men and women has something to do with it.
F.O. @ 192
You cannot possibly know that based on 2 tweets, so how about you just stfu trying armchair psychoanalyze the guy?
This is sheer bullshit. Do men in general have difficulty interacting with other men? No? Well guess what? Interacting with women IS EXACTLY THE SAME. Wanna know why? Because women are people JUST LIKE MEN. Men don’t fucking need to be taught an extra goddamn thing in order to know what to expect from women. Get rid of the entitlement and dealing with women becomes no different whatsoever from dealing with men.
This is why people had the reaction they did to your initial question. If you really, honestly get that you’re not entitled to women’s bodies and time and attention, then the business of how to deal with women would not seem like such an impenetrable fucking mystery.
Do you really think everybody wants to take responsibility for their failures? A lot of people just want someone else to blame. That’s part of entitlement. If I’m entitled to something and someone else is refusing to hand it over, I don’t have to evaluate my own behavior. I can just blame them and be done with it. Desperation is a thing, but desperation alone doesn’t lead to violence. Entitlement does.
Part of the problem is that a lot of guys are looking for advice along the lines of “She rejected me. How do I get her to have sex with me?” Because of that approach, these guys aren’t very receptive to being told “suck it up and leave her alone”, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with that answer.
@ F.O.
And right there, you just lost my patience, as well as my respect. So let me break this down for you: You “see yourself” in the guy who feels “entitled.” You claim you don’t condone him, and find him disgusting, but you have a big BUT about desperation, that apparently excuses him. Then you go on to make a bizarre attempt to assert a get-out-of-evil-free-card, which the holder can use to excuse all terrible behavior, because “desperate people don’t care about anything…” and “just won’t listen.”
First of all, speak for yourself, not desperate people. I’ve been desperate many times in my life. In some situations, I have been desperate for outright survival. At no point, during those times, did I stop caring about anything but my own selfish needs. At no point did I refuse to listen to people who were genuinely trying to help me. And, above all, at NO POINT did I lose my conscience, and become incapable of recognizing right from wrong.
So I guess you’re going to need to illuminate me on how the “desperation” to fucking date someone means you have an understandable and excusable need to abuse others.
@ F. O.
You entitlement, desperation, and resentment are your own problem. You shouldn’t be seeking a relationship, since, clearly, you’re so full of resentment and desperation that you need to address that long before you inflict yourself on another person in the form of an intimate relationship.
F.O.
You know how they say that there’s some truth to every joke?
Well, that counts double for sarcasm.
What you made here was a not very subtle threat. If you and pathetic weasels like yourself aren’t treated with due respect, then you won’t support feminism any more but will go to the opposite camp.
Of course you are generous enough to let people know you were just
jokingsarcastic, but the option is there. That’s clear. So you better be treated nice, right?Boohoo.
Desperate people can care about a whole lot of things, not just themselves. “Desperate” is a good excuse for being an asshole about as much as “socially inept” and “autistic” are. That is, none.
I felt desperate yesterday. I feel desperate a lot of the time, but yesterday the whole thing hit me all at once. And it’s the desperation of loneliness, you know, the one used by every lonely dudely asshole who can’t get a date or a friend.
And yet, I’m keeping myself in check. Truth is, feeling of desperation wants to make me lash out at the people that do care about me. I restrain myself.
Sometimes, I’m an asshole. A lot of people can be assholes.
But don’t think you can just go out and do your assholy thing just because you are lonely or desperate. That is no excuse. People make sure not to hurt others all the time. Depressed people. Desperate people. We do that because we care about others.
If you’re an unapologetic asshole, that’s a whole ‘nother problem you have.
@ Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought
Thank you! Your whole post, dead right. I love how this guy keeps threatening to go hang out with MRAs if he doesn’t get coddled juuuuust right. Since rational, decent people would find such company reprehensible, I can only assume he’s 90 percent there anyway. I predict it will somehow be all our faults when he “unexpectedly” becomes a full-time bigot and misogynist.
F.O.
So apparently this is desperation…?
Not just desperate to see pictures of naked women, which are available by the fucktabyte at no cost and no inconvenience, but desperate to see pictures of this one particular woman?
I call bullshit. Any desperation you see is faked in order to add a thin veneer of excusability to a massive sense of entitlement.
@ Daz
As far as I can tell, it’s turning into the fault of the womenz, for failing to teach him how to date. Or possibly the librulz. Either way, not his fault. He’s desperate.
+1
F.O. @188:
Others have-rightfully-ripped this apart, but I wanted to point out that you’re generalizing here. You can only speak for yourself. You can view yourself as desperate all you want, but don’t characterize men in general in that way. I’ve been desperate before, but that hasn’t resulted in me empathizing with the desire of others to violate the privacy of others. As Beatrice pointed out, it’s entirely possible to be desperate and still respect the rights of others. You can be desperate and still care about others. Hell, I was pretty desperate this entire summer to get a job. Being jobless for 3 months is incredibly stressful. Somehow during that time, I still managed to care about other people.
??
what the fuck does this even mean?
ask yourself if the same thing would make sense if you substitute “job” for “relationship”.
Hadn’t you heard? God sacrificed himself to himself, so no one is responsible for their own failings.
Still an’ all, if divine scapegoats aren’t your thing, how hard is “Yep, I fucked up”?
I’m with comments 199 and 201.
F.O.:
Bullfuckingshit. I won’t even bother to tell you to speak for yourself, you’re stuffed full of bullfuckingshit. Desperate? Lots of people have been desperate, for an incredibly wide amount of reasons. I well remember my first bout with desperation and despair. I was 8 years old. I had been raped at least once weekly for 5 years at that point. That night, I was wrestling with the religious fact that I had committed a mortal sin and was going to be damned for eternity. Suicide seemed a credible option, because I’d already committed the one mortal sin, so…that was my first attempt. Obviously, it wasn’t successful.
Don’t you dare fucking pretend to sob over some asshole’s supposed desperation. A whole lot of people know desperation, up close and personal. They still manage to care about people and things outside themselves, they still manage to recognize when others reach out to them, they still manage to know right from wrong, they still manage to refrain from doing truly shitty things to other people. They still manage to be a decent human being.
F.O.:
You have no clue. Plenty of men do have a clue. Plenty of men are decent human beings, aware of what’s going on with other human beings, and here’s a big one: those men view women as human beings. Why, it’s almost magic!
sparks @153:
reminds me of the last scene in the movie “The Mission”..
empathy; how does it work?
;)
Ichthyic:
Like magnets and tides, man, magnets and tides. Utterly mysterious.
Oh, oh, oh, empathy, it’s magic, you know, never believe it’s not so.
Sorry, but this has been buzzing round my head ever since I read the above. And since it’s drivin’ me up the wall, well, I just have to share.
Let me guess, it’s pity fucks or he’ll get violent, amirite? Because not getting to fuck or fap to a particular picture makes him so deeeeeesperate.
Boners don’t kill you, y’know.
Daz:
Oh, *perfect*. I love The Cramps. Creature from the Black Leather Lagoon…
Jeez, according to F.O. my boyfriend apparently should have been a raging asshat because I’m his first girlfriend and we got to together when he was in his late 20s.
But amazingly, he treated me like a *person*, and so we’re able to talk with each other and relate to each other and here we are. Shocking.
(I apologize for bringing this up again, but whenever men start talking about “desperate” in relation to sex, it gets me fucking pissed off, and this is why.)
Hey F.O.! I’m 27 years old, and I’m a virgin. I’m not a virgin by choice. I don’t want to be a virgin. I want to lose it. I want to have sex.
But I’m also not desperate. And I sure as fuck don’t feel entitled to it. I have my standards, but so do women. And if a woman I’m attracted to is not attracted to me, then so fucking be it. I get over it and move on. And who knows… I might have made a new awesome friend in the process! My penis and it’s lack of experience don’t fucking affect my life. I’m not trolling the interwebs desperate for nude pics of hot women who didn’t either give me those pics or put them up for pubic consumption (and even with the latter, I’m not looking for it, either). I live my life perfectly fine (minus anxiety and social and depression issues caused by the bullying I was subjected to as a kid), and while some might argue that it does effect me, I don’t allow it to. I don’t allow it to define me.
I still see women as human beings, and I consider enthusiastic consent to be of the utmost importance.
So when you say shit like “I see myself in the guy who feels entitled to see Lawrence’s nude pics.”, you betray that you in fact think exactly like him. And if he’s actually serious and not snarking (I still think a variation of Poe’s Law is in full effect, here), then he’s a fucking asshole. Whether or not he can “get laid” by the women he finds attractive has fuck all to do it with. That reasoning is the same one behind Elliot Rodgers and Government Gets Girlfriends (now known as “That Incel Blogger”) or pretty much the entire Men’s Rights Movement. It does not define me because it’s gross and bullshit.
I don’t care if you haven’t had sex in a long time or ever. You are not fucking entitled to it, and if you are actually “desperate”, then you should probably seek therapy. What you should NOT do is search out stolen pics of people who did NOT take those pics for YOUR consumption (nor should you harass or rape). Because that is fucked up.
F.O.
Men don’t need to be taught that by society. It can be arrived at by very simple thought; so simple that you don’t even realize you’re doing it. Did you have to be taught by society that stabbing people is wrong? It just seems axiomatically right, doesn’t it? EXACTLY the same reasoning is behind why rape is wrong.
Walking up to someone and stabbing their body with a knife commits the same violations in principle as walking up to someone and stabbing them with your genitalia: you’ve done something to them that they did not want done.
I come from a society and subculture that will make MRA look like Anita Sarkeesian. Nobody taught me the upbringing I had received was wrong. I just thought about it.