Remember the good old days when the demand to criminalize revenge porn was all about the terrible harm being done to women?  It wasn’t just a matter of embarrassment, when private naked images went public, but an attack on gender?  Sure you do. But what happens when reality doesn’t match the narrative?

Revenge porn is widely portrayed as an act committed by men against women. But in a new twist, women are no longer just the victims of those who post explicit photos of someone online without that person’s consent.

They are also the perpetrators of revenge porn.

As one of the foremost legal advocates of the victims of revenge porn, Marc Randazza, responded:

I hate the whole revenge porn thing. Not just that people do it, but I hate talking about it. Why? Because the whole subject just attracts bullshit like tourists with fanny packs attract gypsies.

One of the biggest sources of bullshit it attracts is the MacKinnonite-Dworkinite “legal scholars.(1) That’s the wing of feminist “thought” that sees everything in terms of “its the girls against the boys, and the boys suck.” They all banded together to make revenge porn a “civil rights” issue, and a gender issue, most inconveniently failing to investigate the facts.

They tend to see this as “a thing men do to women.” Guess what. It ain’t.

And how did the anti-revenge porn advocates react to the news that the first person arrested under their law was a woman? Crickets?  Not exactly.

The CBS News story in the twit is a curious one to promote, as it’s about a Pew Survey.  Franks is in there, as a “legal expert” notwithstanding the fact that she isn’t a lawyer, itself a curiosity:

According to Pew, just 5 percent of those who were harassed reported the incident to law enforcement. Even when incidents are reported, legal experts say the police are often ill equipped to deal with them. “Anecdotal evidence is that the overwhelming number of victims who report online threats are met with indifference or a lack of understanding about how these technologies work,” Mary Anne Franks, an associate professor at the University of Miami’s School of Law, told CBS News.

But the Pew Survey results reveals the emptiness of Franks’ anecdotal claims:

Among other key findings from Pew:

– Two-thirds of those who were harassed said the most recent incident took place on a social networking site or app, while 22 percent saw it happen in the comments section of a website. Sixteen percent, meanwhile, said it happened in online gaming.

– Men were more likely to be called offensive names than women. Of all Internet users (89 percent of the U.S. population), 32 percent of men and 22 percent of women were called names. Men were also more likely to be physically threatened.

– Not everyone said they were hurt by online harassment. While 14 percent of people found their most recent incident “extremely upsetting,” 22 percent said it was “not at all upsetting.” The rest of the people surveyed had reactions in between.

This isn’t the narrative that’s been sold across the internet and to desperate politicians looking for feminist criminal dragons to slay.  According to the story being sold by Franks and Cyber Civil Rights activist Danielle Citron, this is all about women victims.  Women, dammit.  These mean men are bullying women, depriving them of their free speech by hurting their feelings, and the only way to protect the rights of women is to deny free speech to men.

But the evidence fails to support this narrative. This isn’t new to those who are either knowledgeable on the issue, or aren’t blinded by their self-serving agenda.

That was stupid then, and it is stupid now — the notion that online harassment is in any way more focused on anyone by virtue of their race or genitalia. That might have been the case back when there were no women on the Internet. But, even then. Monica Lewinsky claims to be “patient zero” with this shit, and who was her key tormentor? Linda fucking Tripp. And case after case after case shows that harassers are often women, and frankly, more of the serious cases are involving women doing the harassing.

Marco, because he’s not blinded by any gender agenda, makes a critical point:

That is in no way intended to mean that I believe that it is 180 degrees from what the “Cyber Civil Rights” idiots think. They’re 90 degrees off, not 180. If we kicked all men off the Internet for a year, I would not imagine that things would improve, at all. Trying to make this a gender issue might serve a publication agenda — because academia loves that shit — but that’s the only thing it serves. It sure as hell does not serve any quest for truth.

And, I won’t accept the opposite either. Any commenters who say “yeah, it’s all the bitches” can go fuck themselves in advance.

So in the interest of intellectual honesty, no doubt the claims, the heart-rending stories, the hand-wringing, the sad feminist tears, were set aside for some deep self-reflection, a correction of the hyperbole and misinformation, and a rejection of the utterly false premises upon which the claims of the CCR folks relied? Thus far . . .