LOS ANGELES—It only took one Facebook post to get the thing going, but the as-yet-unidentified woman who instigated this week’s latest example of the sheer power of social networking now says that the experience has taught her just how sheer that power really is. The object of her Facebook post is the as-yet-unidentified alleged cheater whose two-hour boast session with friends on a commuter train about their many affairs (and the stupidity of their wives) prompted the woman’s ire and instant online retribution. I’m just wondering if what she did is not also revenge porn.
The modern use of the word “porn” no longer has to relate to actual sex, of course. “Disaster porn” and “war porn” are but two of the ways that “porn” is now combined with another activity to denote a pejorative obsession with the subject. In that sense, “porn” also now means “fetish.” Traditional revenge porn, which mines nude and other sexual images, actually commingles two meanings of the word “porn” to complete its goal of obsessive humiliation. But if one is to look just at the fetishization of humiliation that all instant publicity affords, sex is decidedly not necessary to create generic “revenge porn.” All you really need is the justification.
“If this is your husband,” the abovementioned Facebook user wrote on Wednesday, explaining her justification, “I have endured a 2 hour train ride from Philadelphia listening to this loser and his friends brag about their multiple affairs and how their wives are too stupid to catch on. Oh please repost …”
According to Salon, in the first of two articles on the train episode, by Friday the post had acquired over 27,000 shares, with most comments (“Get him girl” a representative one) in complete support of the outing. That support, reported the site, was a complete turnaround another similar goon-outer was subjected to after she “tweeted a picture of men she said were making inappropriate jokes (about ‘big dongles,’ specifically) at a tech conference,” and “was deluged with threats and eventually fired from her job.”
Salon suggests the differing reactions is in part because “…everybody hates a train loudmouth — even more so, apparently, if he’s an adulterer,” but it’s hard to see how an identification with the circumstances makes public shaming any less an instance of revenge porn. After all, the posts made to the real revenge porn sites are supposedly made by boyfriends and husbands who have been slighted in some way by their former paramours, and it is well documented that women as well as men send in supposedly embarrassing photos of exes in order to serve up a cold dish of revenge.
By Saturday, the angry train-rider, now with the name Stephanie—but that’s it—had surfaced, eager to explain the chaos of the previous few days, including the hundreds of emails she had received in the aftermath of her Facebook post, “all of them extraordinarily positive.”
With no regrets, she is quoted by Salon as saying, because despite the hundreds of emails in support she still needed to justify her unilateral action: “I just thought he was such a pig.”
Salon picked up, “She said she didn’t worry at the time about what effect her posting might have on him, since she was so disgusted by what he was saying. ‘I was just so fed up with the two-hour train ride and listening to this person be so vulgar,’ she said.”
With a final bullet aimed straight into the unnamed lout’s head, she later rationalized, “A friend of mine said, ‘Have you thought about this might hurt his wife’s feelings?’
“I would be thinking if I were in her shoes, knowledge is power.”
So in this instance “revenge porn” becomes “knowledge porn,” a psychological state in which we become obsessed with imparting otherwise personal knowledge of others that we are sure will be of benefit to still others whom we do not know…formerly known as “gossip.” Whether that sort of knowledge truly is power is up for debate.
