Calico Rudasil is a feature columnist for Sssh.com, the award-winning porn site for women & couples. With over 18 years’ experience under her belt, writing about and for the adult entertainment industry, Calico qualifies as something of a Web Porn Dinosaur; similar to a tyrannosaurus, only with far more attractive arms and a less pronounced overbite.
If you’ve been following the nonsense involved in the ‘sex tape’ publicity stunt perpetrated by indie music duo YACHT, by now you’ve probably read the band’s public statement confirming that its original Facebook post about the video being leaked was pure fiction.
Honestly, were it not for the fact this story played out across my Google news alerts because of the ‘sex tape’ angle, I likely would have ignored the whole thing. I’d never heard of YACHT before this fake story broke, and reading the unbelievably pretentious text of their website made me cringe in a way I haven’t since rediscovering a tattered folder full of terrible short stories I wrote for a creative writing class back in the 90s.
The one thing I do find compelling about this situation is the way YACHT is handling the blowback from its stunt, which in many ways resembles how politicians often deal with controversies of their own creation.
You Can’t Just Un-Ring The (Fake) Victim Bell
In its post-hoax statement, YACHT takes umbrage with people who have criticized their stunt for making light of the plight of real victims of revenge porn.
“There is one dark note we want to address. We never make light of victims of any form of sexual abuse,” YACHT proclaims.
“Frankly, it’s disturbing to us that press outlets could make the incredibly irresponsible leap from ‘celebrity sex tape,’ which is the cultural trope this project explicitly references, to ‘revenge porn,’ which is unfunny, disgusting, morally repugnant, and completely unrelated. Even within the fictional narrative we created, there was no violence or exploitation. It was always about agency and proactive empowerment.”
That all sounds great – until you go back to the text of the Facebook post which started it all.
“Today, without our previous knowledge nor consent, a personal video was released,” the post said. “(D)ue to a series of technological missteps and one morally abject person, a video that we made privately has been released to the public. We have commenced legal proceedings against the aforementioned person, but now that it could potentially circulate, we feel like it’s important for you to know what happened and why.”
Now, I’m not opposed to a good hoax, nor am I averse to offensive humor – or for that matter nor am I averse to the occasional offensively funny hoax. All I ask is when the jig is up and the truth laid bare, the perpetrator takes his and/or her lumps as good as they dealt them.
When YACHT blames the media for making an “irresponsible leap” from celebrity sex tapes to revenge porn, they’re conveniently ignoring the fact they willfully drew the very dots they are now criticizing the media for connecting.
If you’re going to hold yourself out as a victim in the context of hoax, you had best understand the risk associated with doing so. It
doesn’t particularly matter whether YACHT meant for this aspect of their hoax to be understood in a Kim Kardashian sex tape context; by invoking the idea they’d been hacked and had their privacy violated, the more recent point of reference everyone naturally gravitated toward was ‘The Fappening.’
This Is More Than The Usual Internet Faux Outrage
For the most part, media-inspired outrage falls on deaf ears with me. 99% of the time, if I bother looking into what people are all upset about, whether it’s something stupid Kanye tweeted, or something dumb Sarah Palin said, or something even dumber Sarah Palin said, my reaction is to shrug and move on to something more interesting.
In this case, though, I find myself actually somewhat bothered by what YACHT did – although I’ll admit, this probably driven at least as much by making the mistake of reading their website and trying to watch one of their atrocious videos as it is by the publicity stunt itself. (Seriously: consider the lyrics to “I Walked Alone” and ask yourself if you could make it all the way through this insipid little number.)
It’s not even the tone-deafness of thinking there’s nothing about the way they structured this hoax which might serve to trivialize the experiences of revenge porn victims which bothers me; it’s trying to deflect blame to the media, as though it’s completely unreasonable for anybody to make the connection to revenge porn on their own.
I’ll let someone way more attuned to the realities of revenge porn than I am speak for why and how YACHT missed the point with their post-hoax statement.
“Make no mistake: your actions did in fact make light of the experience of sexual abuse victims,” writes Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the University of Miami School of Law and Legislative and Tech Policy Director for the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative.
“You made a parody and a spectacle out of what is a real-life, inescapable nightmare for thousands of people for your own personal gain,” Franks continues. “You cynically exploited the sympathy and support of people who believed your story. You trivialized an issue that the general public has only just begun to understand and take seriously.”
Franks is right – and YACHT blaming the media for the backlash they somehow failed to anticipate isn’t helping. That sort of thing only works if your band’s name is TRUMP.
Calico Rudasil is a Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen) columnist and Sssh will be on Peeperz for fun times again in the near future, meanwhile why not check us out:
The post When All Else Fails, Blame The Media appeared first on Peeperz.