Photo: Cecilie Bødker
One morning in October 2011, Emma Holten discovered she was a victim of revenge porn. She opened her e-mail to find disgusting, disturbing messages from men who had seen images of her online—photos of her at age 17 in her ex-boyfriend’s room, looking, as she describes “a little awkward,” making “a harmless attempt at sexiness,” and at age 19, in her own room, “a little more confident, but not a whole lot”—all nude and never intended for the Internet.
“[The men looking at the photos] knew it was against my will, that I didn’t want to be on those sites,” Holten writes, three years later, for the feminist site,Hysteria. “The realization that my humiliation turned them on felt like a noose around my neck. The absence of consent was erotic, they relished my suffering. It’s one thing to be sexualised by people who are attracted to you, but it’s quite another thing when the lack of a ‘you,’ when dehumanization, is the main factor.” And it was this feeling that she had been dehumanized that inspired Holten to fight back with a photo project of her own highlighting the importance of consent. The photos, captured by Cecilie Bødker, are powerful and a way for Holten to become comfortable with her own body again. She explains the project on Hysteria:
[Bødker] told me that photographing unclothed women without catering to the male gaze and sexualising them was almost impossible. Would it be possible for her to take pictures of me without my clothes on, where it was obvious that I was, in fact, a human being deserving of respect? We gave it a try. This isn’t just about me getting better. It’s also about problematising and experimenting with the roles we most see naked women portraying. We seldom smile, are in control, live. We never look, we’re always looked at.
The pictures are an attempt at making me a sexual subject instead of an object. I am not ashamed of my body, but it is mine. Consent is key. Just as rape and sex have nothing to do with each other, pictures shared with and without consent are completely different things.
In an e-mail, Holten stresses to me that though sharing these pictures is the route she took, she isn’t telling other victims to do the same. “This is an act of activism, to raise awareness, to underscore how many people do not even see the difference between a picture shared with or without consent.” Below, Holten talks more about her project, what the reaction has been so far, and what steps need to be taken to combat revenge porn.
Photo: Cecilie Bødker
What was the experience like after you first discovered the images were online? How did you move past that?
The experience is horrifying, but the fact is that you have no idea how things are going to pan out. I didn’t know how long it would last, I didn’t know the ways in which this was going to affect my life for the next four years. I am a very privileged victim of this. I am white, skinny, I have access to free education in my home country, I have a boss who isn’t judgmental. This has been paramount to my moving past my abuse, because I had a support system that kept me in place. This is why I try very hard to avoid talking about my own personal experience. The possibilities that are available to me are not to all, and thus what I have done is not a fix for all, and can easily become condescending to victims who have it much harder than I.
What inspired you to go ahead with this project?
A big way for me to cope was to immerse myself in feminist spaces and literature, in order to understand why I felt so bad when I had done nothing wrong. The shame and pain you internalize is so massive that I struggle with it every day. I realized along the way that in a lot of ways, I had the privilege to do something that would expose me as a victim, which is often the problem. You don’t want to bring attention to the non-consensual pictures, so you say nothing. I thought, with all the possibilities that I have despite this, I should be the one attempting to speak.
What do you hope to achieve with this project?
I think activism a lot of times tries to act where affecting the personal and the political intersect. I’m trying to communicate with victims, with legislators, with people who might be unaware that in effect we have no online right to privacy, but also heavily with the people who passively consume these images. Why don’t they care about consent? Why don’t they care about the agency of the subject of a picture?
I found this line—”The realisation that my humiliation turned them on felt like a noose around my neck. The absence of consent was erotic, they relished my suffering”—and the idea that lack of consent was a turn on so disturbing. You also ask “If the men who contacted me thought about my humiliation, about my humanity, would they still write me?” what do you think the answer is to that?
There is no doubt that non-consensual porn is a sexual fetish. Loads of people seek out material like this because they know it is non-consensual. I find that dehumanising the person in the picture is the crux of how you can enjoy that fetish. Which kind of answers your next question: if you harass a victim of non-consensual porn, you are not viewing that person as a full human being. And apparently that is very common. Terrifyingly common. Like I say in my article, I think the “sexiness of looking at a naked woman through a key-hole”-thinking is pretty well accepted in our culture, you see it in movies all the time, and that, in its essence, shows that we do not care about consent. Same goes for people who say they don’t get why I would release new nude pictures. I say: If you don’t see a fundamental difference between a picture shared with or without consent, you are part of the problem.
In the U.S., some states are fighting to make revenge porn illegal. What steps need to be taken to make laws like this more widespread?
The reason laws like this are not commonplace is because dealing with law and the internet is still such a new phenomenon. The most important thing is that we do not back down from laws like these because they will be “difficult to enforce” or “the victim could have acted differently”. That is not what laws are. Laws should show us who is in the wrong, should support the privacy of citizens, their right not to be ostracized. Also, but this is my personal view point, I am not a law professional, we should look into enforcing that sites are legally termed more as responsible publishers. The majority of my exposure is on sites where the material is uploaded by a third party, by American law making the site that profits financially off of my abuse guiltless. That’s absurd.
You told me in an e-mail that you’re not telling other women to go out there to do the same thing—do you have any advice for other victims of revenge porn?
Victims should do what they feel is right, what I have done is not something everyone has the possibility to do. A lot of advice is often “you’re not alone”. But the thing is: you are. At least that’s how it feels at school, at work, when you contact the site etc. These are young girls, moms with kids, all types of people that this happens to. So I say to victims: You are right, even if you’re alone! You live in a patriarchal culture that seeks to target you for being you, and THEY’RE wrong, and you’re right! You had the right to take pictures or video, the men who contact you are misogynistic idiots who just seek to tear you down to build themselves up. Good people believe that you are right, we are fighting for you. However, let us not forget that these statements are nothing but words to person who has been fired, suspended, harassed or bullied because their consent has been violated. We as a society must intensely protect the importance of consent. No compromises.
What can the rest of the world do to help stop this? To help victims?
Be very aware of the sites you visit. Do not visit porn sites that have “Facebook Exposed” categories, do not visit porn sites that rely on third party uploading. Actually, in general, be at all times aware that the porn you consume was made in a responsible environment where the talent is well cared for. Abuse and exploitation happen at many levels of the porn industry, and making a clear statement that you are a person who values the lives of performers will reduce demand for the darker levels where people are not treated well. Last of all: rein in your curiosity! I want to see a person naked too, but value consent. Do not seek out stolen photos of celebrities for example. Report questionable material if you stumble upon it. Quite simply, start thinking about people you see on the net as people.
Is there anything you want to say to perpetrators of revenge porn?
To the people who do this to, as you all say, “ruin the lives of sluts”, who run the sites, hack women, disseminate material: There are more of us than there are of you. To passive consumers of the material: Please stop. Please stop seeking out stolen or leaked pictures, please stop contacting the women you see in them, please stop commenting about how disgusting we are, how much we deserved it. I don’t think you’re an evil person, but you are being evil to me. Value the consent and personhood of people on the internet. Radically protect it. We want a free internet where we can share, and learn and be open instead of paranoid, where we can toggle structures of power, talk freely and subjectively without fear, and you’re ruining it by participating in dehumanisation.
Photo: Cecilie Bødker
From sexual assault cases on U.S. college campuses to the celebrity nude photo leaks this summer—the topic of consent and sexual assault seems to be especially relevant right now. Why do you think that is?
I think there is definitely a wave of feminism sweeping some places right now. I think the sloppy legislation on the topic has allowed for a lot of completely inexcusable things to happen in terms of consent, especially the consent of young women. But also because there are so many of us now. When this happened to me there were very few articles, very few lawyers pursuing these cases, very few people who knew stuff like this happened. We need awareness. In terms of non-consensual porn too, this opens a big topic on what we can expect from privacy on the internet. Apparently, the people who advise me to never have taken the pictures in the first place have already accepted that the right to privacy has ceased to exist. I am not ready to concede privacy, which has been instrumental in gaining rights for minority groups and living a fulfilling life in a society that is sometimes not all to accepting of different people and what they do.
Right now, this project is gaining a lot of attention. What has the reaction been? How have you been handling the attention?
It’s crazy right now. I’m very overwhelmed. I’m saying no to a lot of things, everything that I sense could be a fetishation of my suffering, anything that typecasts me. In general people are reacting well, I think. A lot of people note the counterintuitive move of publishing new pictures, so maybe I should clear that up, because they serve different purposes. One, non-consensual porn is used to blackmail victims into sex, sending more pictures, or performing other acts. It was vital if I was to be a public person to show that I did not care who saw me naked, and using my own body as a bargaining chip against me would be futile. Secondly, it was to experiment with how many people couldn’t see the difference between consent and non-consent, saying that “I did the exact same thing to myself that another person had done to me”. This is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: that I did it DOES matter! It matters most of all, actually. There is no sexual, visual, acceptable picture without my consent. Without my consent there is only violation.
Some of the responses that I have welcomed the most (except the ones from other victims), were men who had suddenly been made aware of how they objectify when they see a naked woman in a picture. Juxtaposing a political article with nude pictures is not all that common, and the point was to force people to see both sides of me at the same time. To unite the two. And, I think, if you have difficulty uniting political reasoning, agency, self-worth, and self-respect with a nude picture, we have problem with how people see young, female naked bodies. We are not either or; we are everything at once.