Sex Column: Should I Make A Sex Tape?

When news of the celebrity hackergate scandal broke, the reaction was depressing. Google searches for Jennifer Lawrence and the other relevant stars spiked, while commentators fell into two camps — those who saw this as a shocking breach of privacy and those who argued that if you didn’t want your DIY porn to be seen and shared, you shouldn’t make any in the first place.

Should you make a sex tape? My gut feeling is no, leave it to the experts. But then I’m not you, and what’s right for your sex life may not be right for mine. There are two things I do know however: (1) that anyone censoriously arguing that you shouldn’t make home movies or share naked images is fighting a losing battle; and (2) that doing it can be a risky business.
We are living at a time when technology, culture and the law intersect in a number of confusing ways. If it is a race, technology is winning hands down. In the developed world, most of us have access to the internet and multiple digital devices and this has made it possible for porn to be created and shared in ways that were unthinkable just a few years ago. But cultural attitudes have yet to catch up, and the law is in a distant
third place.
The law moves a lot slower than culture, and culture has always been interested in recording sexual experiences. From cave paintings to Google Glass, human beings have always used whatever was at hand to document sexuality, because sexuality and sexual expression is intrinsically linked with what it means to be human. But our culture — broadly speaking, the Judeo-Christian, neoliberal, Anglophone world — has yet to shed the vestiges of a morality that equates sex with sin and shame, and is uneasy with, if not downright disgusted by, female sexuality.
You could probably accurately argue that, if anything, online life has seen the re-emergence of vitriolic misogyny; that 'slut-shaming' of women who breach one of the many shifting rules of appropriate behaviour is all too common. From “men’s rights” subreddits, to rape threats on Twitter, to hateful comments under YouTube videos, women’s lives, bodies and sexuality are dissected and, for the most part, treated abominably. For all the good it does, the internet has also allowed a frightening number of people – both men and women it must be said – to give an outlet to their vilest, more disgusting thoughts and to bully and threaten strangers.
For examples close to home, remember the “Slane Girl” scandal of last year and “Magaluf Girl” of earlier this summer. Whatever your feelings on their behaviour, they did not agree to have their actions captured on camera and shared around the world. Nor did they agree to have a moment of madness or drunken foolishness or sexual bravado – or whatever it was – dissected by a mob of smartphone-wielding armchair moralists.
It is mostly young women that are the subject of salacious condemnation with their names often becoming public. Far fewer people concern themselves with the morality of the “Slane Boys” or “Magaluf Men” because people expect young men to misbehave. You could argue that women shouldn’t give public blowjobs to strangers; but surely the reverse is equally true — that young men shouldn’t allow strangers to give them public blowjobs?
In the early 21st century we have access to huge amounts of porn, yet we live in a culture where women are supposed to be sexy, but not too sexy; and sexual, but not too sexual either. Porn stars, whether willing such as Belle Knox, or unwitting such as Kim Kardashian, are both reviled and revered — but mostly reviled. People jerk off with one hand, and condemn with the other.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that teenage girls are in a particularly precarious position — castigated as “sluts” if they share intimate images, or derided as “prudes” if they don’t. If you fail to negotiate this tricky balancing act, you could find yourself, like Amanda Todd, subjected to an unrelenting campaign of bullying.
When I was doing online dating, I was constantly amazed at the number of people who asked for naked images in the first or second message, before I’d even agreed to meet them; and even more surprised at the aggressive reaction and sense of entitlement when I refused. Tinder is even worse in this regard. But I am grown up, and well able to say no; a teenage girl or boy whose social status and self-esteem is inextricably linked to the opinions of others in the close-knit community of a school might not find it so easy.
Even if you don’t willingly make and share DIY porn, you could find that intimate images have been circulated anyway. This September, 30-year-old Carlo Dellaverson, a producer for NBC News in New York, was arrested for harassment and disseminating unlawful surveillance. On Valentine’s Day, Dellaverson set up a hidden camera in his home and taped himself and his live-in girlfriend having sex. He then uploaded the images to XPorn, again without his girlfriend’s knowledge. When his now-ex became aware of the home movie, she mananged to get Dellaverson to admit his actions in an email, and he was subsequently arrested.
The law is not always so swift. There are no laws specifically banning revenge porn in Ireland or the UK, and only twelve American states have them. Victims may be able to get justice if the perpetrator can be charged with another crime, like Dellaverson; or they may be able to have their images removed if they can prove breach of copyright. But until the law catches up with technology it is an uphill battle.
Hunter Moore, revenge porn king of the site “Is Anybody Up?”, operated with impunity for years and made a fortune hosting explicit photos without the subjects’ consent. Some of these images were submitted by former partners, others had been fabricated with photo-editing software, and some were hacked from phones and computers. Moore was arrested earlier this year on charges of conspiracy, unauthorised access to a protected computer, and aggravated identity theft. His trial starts this September.
If that weren’t bad enough, in July this year it was reported that workers at America’s National Security Agency (NSA) were downloading and sharing naked images they found during the course of their snooping. The NSA intercepts the phone and online communications of over a billion people worldwide, so if you’ve ever shared an image on your phone or via email, there is an excellent chance some computer spook somewhere has seen it and shared it with his or her buddies.
Dellaverson may be one of the first people to be charged with unlawfully sharing illegally obtained sexual content, but he certainly isn’t the first person to tape a sexual encounter without a partner’s knowledge or consent. It is almost impossible to protect yourself from a partner taking a video of a sexual experience or a naked image of you in your sleep. If they want to, they probably can — unless you never have sex other than in your own home, sweep for recording devices regularly and lock your partner’s phone and tablet in a safe during his or her visits.
In such a world, it is not good enough to clutch your pearls and tsk tsk because somebody has a naked photo or sex tape leaked online. Instead of saying that people shouldn’t make DIY porn, we should be asking questions. Why do so many people do it? What does it say about our culture that so many of us wish to be porn stars? Why are many people willing to illegally obtain intimate images? Why is revenge porn so popular? And most importantly of all — why do we blame the victims and not the perpetrators?