Online abuse, leaked nudes and revenge porn: this is nothing less than terrorism against women

[seabeyond]

The abuse of women on the internet, like the hacking of female celebrities' naked photos, is not just intended to hurt the individuals involved. These are deliberately outrageous acts designed to create a spectacle and to instil fear in a target population - in other words, terrorism.

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These codes provide cover for a pastime as old as patriarchy: punishing women who step out of line. The nude photos of female celebrities, including the actress Jennifer Lawrence, were presumably hacked for the lulz – as well as for bitcoins, which a 4channer initially requested in exchange for them. Now it seems that half of Reddit’s users have decided it is their chivalrous duty to find the identity of the 4chan user who hacked the pictures. The other half are busy uploading the photos to the internet every time an image-hosting service removes them. Somewhere out there, I hope, a psychology student is gathering material for an excellent thesis. In the meantime, something strikes me about both the celebrity photo hack and the harassment of Anita Sarkeesian and Z. This is a form of terrorism. (Sarkeesian agrees: “There is just no other word for it,” she tweeted on 31 August.)

What we are witnessing are deliberately outrageous acts designed to create a spectacle and to instil fear in a target population. Where Osama Bin Laden watched in approval as every news network endlessly replayed the footage of a plane hitting a tower, the hackers and harassers must feel thrilled by all the carefully search-engine-optimised headlines above articles decrying the latest leaked pictures. It is a function of successful terrorism that the media becomes unavoidably complicit in spreading the terror. There is no way to report the story without increasing its potency. We cannot stop looking.

As for the target population, tell me that young women aren’t supposed to look at the harassment of Sarkeesian for being a public figure and get the message: “This could happen to you, you uppity bitch. Watch your mouth.” The leaking of the celebrity nude photos has the same impetus as revenge porn. As the internet heaves under the weight of freely exposed nipples, violation has become a form of titillation. (If you must see an actress’s breasts, may I recommend watching pretty much any 18-rated movie made this year?) Any expression of women’s sexuality moves them into Camp Slut, where they are fair game for punishment and humiliation.

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http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/09/online-abuse-leaked-nudes-and-revenge-porn-nothing-less-terrorism-against-women