The camera captures your soul: What is this picture for?
posted by Silvana
Just now, I was looking at my personal Flickr account and noticed that I had a new "so-and-so has added you as a contact" message from a few weeks ago that I hadn't looked at. I didn't recognize the name, so I went to the person's profile page. Still no idea who it was, no contacts in common. Who the fuck was this guy? Then I noticed that the dude was a member of a lot of groups. Several hundred groups. Groups with names like "boobs boobs boobs", "little waist round ass", "hot fat chicks", and "JUST 4 ARAB GIRLS".
So I thought, do I have any "sexy" pictures on my Flickr? None that were intended to titillate, but a few that show some cleavage, sure, given that I have a lot of it and tend to sometimes wear low-cut shirts. Especially when in a Halloween costume. But really, the number of such pictures is maybe 5-6 at most. Most of my pictures are of other people, given that they're pictures I take.
The realization that someone was likely looking at my basically totally innocuous Flickr pictures because they were part of a larger attempt to find sexually arousing images on the internet was surprisingly disturbing. I know what a sexy picture looks like, and I've taken very mildly titillating ones before, mostly just for fun and sometimes to send to a boyfriend or something. But I've never put such pictures on the internet, nor would I, because the idea of random strangers getting off on images of my body really doesn't do it for me.
My sudden distress reminded me of a discussion I had several months ago with my boyfriend (who really needs a pseudonym--in keeping with his pseud from my other blog, I'll call him "The Bear") about the existence of very-softcore porny "blogs" that mine their content from Flickr. What the proprietors of these websites do is link to and/or embed pictures from Flickr users that are "sexy." The pictures usually aren't even really that pornographic--mostly clothed or scantily-clad women, and very little actual nudity (more like women in low-cut tops, bras, or bikinis). The blog's sole purpose, however, is to link to such pictures of women. Apparently, a lot of women whose pictures were featured would write the blog's owner to ask that the picture be taken down or de-linked. We were discussing whether or not linking to such pictures was problematic.
Let's assume that there was a picture posted on Flickr by the person featured in the picture. (If it were posted by someone not in the picture, then you'd have to ask a whole other set of questions about whether the featured person gave permission. And in a lot of these cases, the person posting (on Flickr, not on the porny blog) was the woman photographed.) One argument goes that hey, you put it on the internet, you're putting it out there for whoever to see, on that site, and wherever it's linked from. Some of those pictures were very obviously intended to be "sexy", like, for example, a woman holding her breasts up, nipples obscured, and looking alluringly into the camera. Linking to those pictures didn't seem to me to be so bad.
Some of them, however, were much less intentionally "sexy", like another of a woman standing in a low-cut shirt exposing cleavage, next to her less-becleavaged friend. With that kind of picture, it seems wrong that just because you posted a picture of yourself, being a person who happens to have breasts, that your photo should be featured on a website whose primary purpose is to help dudes get off.
At the time, my position was that pictures shouldn't be linked unless they were obviously intended to be "sexy" pictures. This was because of a convincing argument made by The Bear that some of the women were clearly using their Flickr accounts as a DIY sexy-modeling site, with photos just barely within the bounds of Flickr's content rules, but otherwise "porny."
Now, I realize the error of my thinking, after learning that someone could view my pictures as titillating or sexy, despite how totally non-sexy I view them to be.
The thing is, in a sex-obsessed, women-are-sex, body-as-public-property patriarchy such as the one we have, we can't rely on anyone to make a distinction between a picture that is intended to titillate and one that isn't. I'm sure that there have been a thousand public moments in my life where, if someone had snapped a picture of me, that picture could be easily interpreted as a "sexy" picture. What if I were bending over to pick something up in the street, or adjusting my shirt, or dancing in a club, or leaning on a bar to get a drink? And someone took a picture then?
In our society, any image of a woman is fair game for analysis of her sexual attractiveness. You see it all the time, where pictures of athletes, or newscasters, or actresses or anyone who dares be in the public eye are dissected on some blog or other with hundreds of comments about how much the male readers of the website would, in fact, Totally Hit That Shit. Or not, because ZOMG, her face is totally fugly!
The internet is totally pornified. There is no such thing as an objective distinction between images intending to be sexy and images intended to be neutral. As women, our purpose as physical beings, especially when captured on film, is to be either fodder for men's sexual gratification or the object of their scorn. Absent someone's express agreement that their picture be posted in a forum designed to provide masturbation fodder and/or explicit commentary on the desirability of Hitting That Shit, no such linking is appropriate.
Therefore, I hereby reverse my position on the softcore-porny Flickr-mining blogs to Against.
So I thought, do I have any "sexy" pictures on my Flickr? None that were intended to titillate, but a few that show some cleavage, sure, given that I have a lot of it and tend to sometimes wear low-cut shirts. Especially when in a Halloween costume. But really, the number of such pictures is maybe 5-6 at most. Most of my pictures are of other people, given that they're pictures I take.
The realization that someone was likely looking at my basically totally innocuous Flickr pictures because they were part of a larger attempt to find sexually arousing images on the internet was surprisingly disturbing. I know what a sexy picture looks like, and I've taken very mildly titillating ones before, mostly just for fun and sometimes to send to a boyfriend or something. But I've never put such pictures on the internet, nor would I, because the idea of random strangers getting off on images of my body really doesn't do it for me.
My sudden distress reminded me of a discussion I had several months ago with my boyfriend (who really needs a pseudonym--in keeping with his pseud from my other blog, I'll call him "The Bear") about the existence of very-softcore porny "blogs" that mine their content from Flickr. What the proprietors of these websites do is link to and/or embed pictures from Flickr users that are "sexy." The pictures usually aren't even really that pornographic--mostly clothed or scantily-clad women, and very little actual nudity (more like women in low-cut tops, bras, or bikinis). The blog's sole purpose, however, is to link to such pictures of women. Apparently, a lot of women whose pictures were featured would write the blog's owner to ask that the picture be taken down or de-linked. We were discussing whether or not linking to such pictures was problematic.
Let's assume that there was a picture posted on Flickr by the person featured in the picture. (If it were posted by someone not in the picture, then you'd have to ask a whole other set of questions about whether the featured person gave permission. And in a lot of these cases, the person posting (on Flickr, not on the porny blog) was the woman photographed.) One argument goes that hey, you put it on the internet, you're putting it out there for whoever to see, on that site, and wherever it's linked from. Some of those pictures were very obviously intended to be "sexy", like, for example, a woman holding her breasts up, nipples obscured, and looking alluringly into the camera. Linking to those pictures didn't seem to me to be so bad.
Some of them, however, were much less intentionally "sexy", like another of a woman standing in a low-cut shirt exposing cleavage, next to her less-becleavaged friend. With that kind of picture, it seems wrong that just because you posted a picture of yourself, being a person who happens to have breasts, that your photo should be featured on a website whose primary purpose is to help dudes get off.
At the time, my position was that pictures shouldn't be linked unless they were obviously intended to be "sexy" pictures. This was because of a convincing argument made by The Bear that some of the women were clearly using their Flickr accounts as a DIY sexy-modeling site, with photos just barely within the bounds of Flickr's content rules, but otherwise "porny."
Now, I realize the error of my thinking, after learning that someone could view my pictures as titillating or sexy, despite how totally non-sexy I view them to be.
The thing is, in a sex-obsessed, women-are-sex, body-as-public-property patriarchy such as the one we have, we can't rely on anyone to make a distinction between a picture that is intended to titillate and one that isn't. I'm sure that there have been a thousand public moments in my life where, if someone had snapped a picture of me, that picture could be easily interpreted as a "sexy" picture. What if I were bending over to pick something up in the street, or adjusting my shirt, or dancing in a club, or leaning on a bar to get a drink? And someone took a picture then?
In our society, any image of a woman is fair game for analysis of her sexual attractiveness. You see it all the time, where pictures of athletes, or newscasters, or actresses or anyone who dares be in the public eye are dissected on some blog or other with hundreds of comments about how much the male readers of the website would, in fact, Totally Hit That Shit. Or not, because ZOMG, her face is totally fugly!
The internet is totally pornified. There is no such thing as an objective distinction between images intending to be sexy and images intended to be neutral. As women, our purpose as physical beings, especially when captured on film, is to be either fodder for men's sexual gratification or the object of their scorn. Absent someone's express agreement that their picture be posted in a forum designed to provide masturbation fodder and/or explicit commentary on the desirability of Hitting That Shit, no such linking is appropriate.
Therefore, I hereby reverse my position on the softcore-porny Flickr-mining blogs to Against.
Labels: civility, feminism, m. leblanc, privacy, sexual harassment, teh internet
Posted at 10:07 PM
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