I'm interested in how you mitigated the damage once the post was published. A good strategy might have been to simply discredit it as being fake/photoshopped along with a small tutorial showing how easy it is to create (most aren't tech savvy enough to understand this already).
True you'd be lying, but this is certainly not below the level of someone who's falsely accusing you.
If they slipped and someone caught them lying, it would become exponentially worse. Bad idea.
But they should be proud of their sexuality. Whether it's BDSM or hotwifing or whatever strange kink, who cares? It's the same as shaming someone for being gay.
I dislike that we have to be so Victorian about sex. It's the social climate we live in, but... Why?
There are also broader implications: Whenever we discredit the truth, we're contributing to how easy it is to manufacture fake news. There's a certain piece of potentially fake news I've been dying to bring up. It had a big impact on me, and then I realized it might be fake. But in an era when the truth is so easy to distort, what should you believe?
It's religion. It teaches roughly 4 bn† people that sex is dirty, that nakedness is shameful, and that talking about it's acts and/or requisite body parts is taboo.
† According to Wikipedia 2.4 billion Christians, and 1.6 billion Muslims.
There is a whole book in the Bible that is all about sex (Old Testament: [Song of Solomon](https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Song+of+Solomon...). The only difference is that sexuality is supposed to be shared and enjoyed in a marriage.
Then of course we get (big R) Religion, where humans use it as a means of power over other people. This is where we get the things we associate with religion today.
That does not seem to hold. Looks like religions just tend to echo some sort of natural chastity. And that is hardly surprising given how recent things religions are and how old thins STDs are.
"Oh you have tingling feeling in your weewee, it's wrath of God!" and you just explained one thing away while giving more credibility to the god thing your trying to promote.
You do! I'm guessing (apologies if wrong) that your thinking modern mainstream religions like Christian / Islam / Judaism. Much of these are from the same roots and and naturally similar.
Look at religion over longer history in distinctly separate branches of the tree e.g Buddhism is more relaxed than afore mentioned. The Greeks, Romans and Norse (same tree) were very liberal. Shinto / Confucianism looks as sex as healthy. Among the plains indians sex could be part of a spiritual ceremony to pass power. Australian aboriginals used to share women.
And I'm not saying religion is the cause of these views. A better way to look at that would be to see how sexual views change as religion does. It does seem Christianity brought a lot of judgement around sex and other matters that were not there before during colonisation period. I dont know much about this so someone can likely add to this much better.
Not following you. The Decalogue exists in Judaism, Christianity and in Islam. The Decalogue, and marriage, are indeed extremely recent social constructs.
I'm not promoting religion - I despise any form of it. I merely posit religion as being the source of humanity's prudishness (something the rest of nature does not share).
Nature as a whole may not, but there are species even more monogamous than we are out there. I've sort of played a game of "construct an even remotely sensible sexual strategy no species uses" and so far I've come up empty; everything you can think of, including the closest equivalent to "prudishness", is used out there.
On that note, the "missing link" for you is probably that sex and reproduction are inextricably linked for all non-humans, and for all humans up until very recently. Hangups about sex are not hangups about sex; to put it in quite atheistic terms, they are hangups about whose selfish genes get to win out over whose. Start looking at it that way and it makes a lot more sense than your current model, probably.
Our current reproductive strategies are currently in total chaos because of the extremely recent introduction of effective birth control and I see little reason to believe that we have found the best response to that in what is still effectively just one generation, nor that our current responses will be stable over the generations, because the shock is simply too recent in generational terms. (Not to mention all the near-in-generational-term shocks that may be yet to come, including but not limited to: Effective male-directed birth control, effective sex robots for males, technology to permit cloning without loss, technology to edit genes in eggs or sperm, technology to permit taking children to term out of a biological womb, and in the craziest case, technology to completely digitize people and make biology essentially irrelevant.) In particular, it does not seem particularly clear to me that the idea that "sex is 100% just sex and nobody should be ashamed about anything as long as it is consensual" is going to win out, because that crowd tends to use birth control of one form or another, and therefore, in the next several generations can be expected to be bred out. By some definitions of morality it may well be moral, but it won't be stable.
A significant amount of people with power to negatively affect your career.
Relevant to the mention of bdsm and tech, Larry Garfield a fairly prominent person within the Drupal industry, got banished after his fetlife (or similar website maybe) account got exposed and spread around.
My ex's new boyfriend shared a bunch of our FB messages with a group of friends because he was jealous.
No amount of security could have prevented that. It's a social hack.
But I've heard of many many cases where Facebook message history has been used to defame someone. They should have incognito channels like snapchat so things just go poof.
You can trust someone now but no guarantee for future trust.
If such a tape existed for anyone else and was in the hands of a foreign government, that person would not be able to get the lowest level of security clearance in the US because the opportunity for blackmail places them at great risk.
In an ideal world Americans would be more like the French and not care about people’s personal consensual sex lives at all, in which case the tape would lose all its blackmailing power, but since the American public does care, the possibility of blackmail is real.
It's unclear to me whether that even counts as a kink: if it's true, I'm not sure Trump was getting a sexual thrill out of it. My guess is that it's more of an unchecked mental illness, with Trump as Captain Ahab chasing after his great white whale.
But that's a problem because it's exactly this kind of conversational shift that makes derailment a good tactic for mitigating the impact of political scandals.
AFAIK, there's no more or less reason to believe it now than there was when it first came out.
He is also dumb, but that has nothing to do with being a racist or our discussion.
I speculate you are right, though, that less people these days would give a flip about whether one modeled for a underground fetish publication in the late 1960s, even if true.
Unfortunately, there are still a significant amount of people who would have an issue with this. But to me (and probably others), the claims made say nothing about Ann Dunham (even if they were true). But they say a heck of a lot of negative about the authors of what seems to be the primary source of this muckraking [2].
[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/11135/are-these... (link warning, possibly NSFW) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_from_My_Real_Father
What makes you think that in some time before it was easier to find the truth?
Take something as simple a speed limit sign. That sign is not literally 'true', it simply refers to what the calculation for penalties will be based if you exceed the unstated actual speed limit. Reporting is at best a game of telephone, social media ends up so many hops from what actually happens to be nearly completely separated from reality.
Sure there may have been more signal to noise ratio, but robber barons had much more influence. Like Bezos and WaPo but EVERY paper.
That being said, I find if laughable that the op considers himself "infosec" savvy but when it came to his sex life made such a glaringly obvious mistake. I'm not saying the woman who extorted him was in the right, but touting yourself as an infosec guy but opening yourself to the oldest trick in the blackmail book is pretty funny
I'm not naive. Dirty shit happens. But the current trend seems to be: guilty til proven...oh no need for proof.
Same goes for "other side" who puts antifa in every shooting or crime out there, but I suspect they do it more for the lulz because media baits the Russian propaganda or not narrative, which makes these people do it even more as we all kniw if you're familiar with Chan culture.
He might have done that. I know if this happened to me and I denied it, I'd still be scarred for life.
I can see why the police/fbi can't really do anything. It doesn't seem like there was anything criminal technically. They might be able to go after the person with a civil suit for slander? I don't know though, not a lawyer.
In particular this part of your post bothers me: “The experience haunts me to this day..”
No - This shouldn’t be the case. You did nothing wrong. While there is no magic wand to “fix” how you feel - and esp low probability that an online post from a stranger would do anything but please consider the following strategies:
1. Try to understand shame. What is it and Why it is there? (evolutionary reasons) It might be liberating.
2. Know quite simply that the past doesn’t exist. Except In our heads.
3. Take inspiration: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-37735368
4. Try to research into revenge porn - what happened to you is very common; in some parts of the world with serious consequences for women - understanding that you are not alone (or special) might be oddly liberating.
5. Talk to someone. Maybe even a pro.
Just some strategies that are available to you - hope you heal soon. (I am sure you are already trying to recover - Your message just stuck a cord and I wanted to offer advice)
Every time one of these celebrities denies a true accusation it causes a whole new wave of damage not only to the victim but, to every person who will ever have to fend off a wrongful accusation, because it muddies the waters and creates FUD.
Yes, the data suggests the percentage of false accusations is small. However it burns me when people suggest bringing it up at all diminishes the bigger issue of assaults on women. In fact I think they enhance each other because they’re both about seeking clarity and justice.
I’ve seriously heard people debate the death penalty by arguing, that the possibility of executing an innocent person is not one of the big issues because, that probably happens small percentage of the time. Scared the crap out of me to hear it articulated by a real person.
Some media outlets have chosen to be critical of Louis CK’s response to the accusations against him. They think they are advocating for women, when actually they’re doing all of us a huge disservice.
Focusing on the quality of apologies is a red herring. Only two things matter, the crime and the truth getting out about crime. Judge his apology/non apology anyway you like, at least he ended it decisively, instead of propagating it for enternity by sowing doubt.
This scares me. With this huge stream of information (disregarding signal to noise ration) stories lose "longevity" - lifetimes of stories are getting shorter and shorter and there is less and less time to react. Collecting facts for good rebuttal takes time and for trickier cases may take so long that publishing a good rebuttal backed with facts is like beating a dead horse. People tend to react to public outcry. Everyday we see a new mass hysteria, which is just perfect place to spread fake news and propaganda.
What are you talking about? It was "ended" by the NYT publishing, in this current Weinstein/Spacey climate, an article about his offences[1] and leaving him absolutely no other choice but to finally come clean.
He was publicly painting his victims as liars (which you quite rightly condemn in your second paragraph) as recently as a couple of months ago[2]:
NYT: So [the accusations are] not real?
CK: “No. They’re rumors, that’s all that is.”
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/09/arts/television/louis-ck-...
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/movies/louis-ck-rumors-wo...
The huge problem is, that even when it’s damning enough that 99% of people call bullshit, their denial will continue to cause great pain and make it difficult for other people to get justice in the future.
In a perfect world they wouldn’t have committed the crimes in the first place, but it’s a relative scale, and having an uncontested documented case is a bigger win over a denial, than having a good apology is over a bad/non apology.
I agree. The mistake is crediting that to CK ("at least he...") when in the wake of an article as damning as the one in the NYT, in the current climate where the story was not going to go away, as before, he had absolutely no other option than admit it.
> That’s the whole point, they don’t have to ever admit it, regardless of the publicity, short of hidden camera footage.
I think that was true before (pre-Weinstein), and will unfortunately probably become true again, but right now there is too much attention being paid to showbiz abuse/harrassment for someone to get away with ignoring/denying truthful allegations against them.
I understand the rationale behind thinking "oh they should just have just gotten up and walked away" but it makes me sick to my stomach to justify sexual harassment at all PERIOD.
It just screams limited hangout where the big wigs make the new money pervert take the fall in order to take the heat off them.
You assume discussions are driven by who to focus on, when they are driven by understanding and figuring out the best way forward for healing and justice weighing all variables.
It’s natual to be angry, there’s nothing wrong with it, please carry on with doing it. However I’m asking we separate that anger from discussions of any lessons, priories, strategies, conclusions we can learn from any of this if it has a chance of improving perspective in the long run.
Critical analysis is different from grieving and empathy, and very hard to mix. I’m sure I probably couldn’t separate them if I were a victim or someone close to me was.
(lots of heavy sighing/sarcasm should be inferred)
It isn't manly to be a victim.
The people whispering and snickering are likely either horrible people who don't get victimized because they make sure they are taking advantage of other people and leaving no openings, or they have more terrible things to hide. Snickering is a form of denial of their own guilty behaviors.
I wonder how many people who get sent that stuff really change their opinions about their friends, family, etc?
That's not to take anything from your experience, it sounds terrible.
It's just sex, and people into kink tend to have better sense of consent and mutuality.
Mores and interpretation change over time. In other words, yesterdays actions are viewed through today's lenses.
If only the "I have nothing to hide" crowd would understand this.
No one on my LinkedIn is on my Facebook. Only 1 person on my LinkedIn is on my twitter and only 2 people on my facebook are on my twitter.
Facebook & Linkedin are not open to public.
Lawsuits are incredibly expensive. Figure $10k before going to trial, and $50k for a relatively simple case. Few or no lawyers will take such a case on contingency (plaintiff is not sufficiently flush).
I'm not saying don't do this, but you're going to want to think through the process very carefully, and be very much aware of what the process might, or might not, produce. There are downside costs that might emerge as well, including the prospect of paying the plaintiff's legal fees, and undergoing discovery yourself.
Talk to a lawyer, or several, if you like. Be aware that they also have their own incentives, and might be quite happy to run up billable hours, so long as you're good for them.
You hear people say everybody likes sex, but it’s not true. Actually everyone mostly hates sex. What they really mean is, out of one million possible sexual acts, there are 3, 6, or maybe a dozen they love, and 99.9% that they think are disgusting. The only difference between any of us is whether or not we insist that our 6 are better than everyone else’s.
Since she knew your real identity, did you know hers? Did the possibility exist that you could sue her in civil court? I don't feel like I'm the litigious type but that case seems to be begging for a legal response.
I wish there were more justice in the world. I wish fighting the good fight were more rewarding. But that is often not a pragmatic approach.
Oh, and he didn't even share it publically. He shared it with an internal group discussing these issues. It was then "leaked", and everybody piled on. And you now took part in exactly that, repeating the slander.
Complete with more abuse, victim blaming, that poor little alt-right guy who actually wanted this. He totally planned it!
HE didn't leak it. People opposed to it leaked it. He didn't go public before losing his job, did he?
So, my point still stands, and you added to it. Abusive intellectually dishonest people cheer this kind of stuff on.
Well the hard truth is you are trying to dishonestly maintain your sexual market value. You know they type of girl that high value men like and you don't want to limit your options. However you are not that person.
(and SJW oblivion shall commence)
Also who says "my entourage" when referring to their friends?
Feel free to put your money where your mouth is.
Last year I was "sex-torted" on Facebook but not by a ring of French criminals. Instead, it was by someone I had chatted with on the internet years ago (while we were both still teenagers)
She had recently gotten divorced and contacted me after many years away. We spoke about intimate things (I never shared intimate images, though she did) and were getting closer and closer to each other.
She eventually asked me for money to cover an expense for her daughter, but I didn't send it fearing I was being scammed. In exchange, she took screengrabs of the most intimate parts of our conversations and shared them to all of my professional contacts via LinkedIn as well as friends , colleagues and family on Facebook.
The experience haunts me to this day, I discussed consensual kinky stuff with her and she used this to paint me as a freak and deviant. The only people who understood it were those who had been in a similar situation or those who were in the "lifestyle" as well. Strangely, most of the support I received after the fact were women who have been similarly extorted. Men in my entourage just whispered and snickered.
To this day, I still feel shame in certain circles because of what is unsaid. The police have done absolutely nothing even in the face of evidence (reports filed with local police and FBI) but it's simply not a priority. Facebook won't even pull the posts because no intimate images were actually shared and it doesn't technically violate their "guidelines"
Net result: I've deleted my social profiles. Every last one of them (and feel better as a result). However, the damage is done and I'm totally still feeling PTSD as a result of the ordeal.
I consider myself very tech savvy (engineer, infosec background, on the internet since the early 90's) and able to smell a scam. However, it's really really easy to fall victim to something like this. Be careful.