Shame porn

I have been watching a lot of Internet TV lately, you know down load an episode of a television program that you can't normally see because it is over ten years gone.  The are a lot of advertisements scattered around the edges.  Telling you that someone in your area, insert your internet provider location, has just gotten rich by doing nothing and you can too, just click here!  There are other ads telling you that Clinton is considered a genius, who else is a genius too!  There are ads that tell you all sorts of things that you don't want to know or don't care to know.  Some ads want to show you the most recent scandalous photos of celebrities. 

After watching a few episodes of Buffy or Gotham, you get curious, so you click on one or two.  You see pictures of what ever you click on and a lot more ads and a next button hidden somewhere deep in the ad haze.  It is the captions that are most amusing.  Many of the ad groups are about sexy women in poses, nothing x rated, nothing even close to what you can find in thirty seconds of unconscious barely looking, but pretty women.  The captions are horrible.  They call the women as shameful and sluts and worse.  The thing is that the captions should read: "Hey viewer, you are disgusting getting joy out of looking at this young woman taking a picture of herself in her underwear.  Is this what you think is fun?". The truth is that they want you to look at the images, but then they want to dehumanize the people in them.  

I don't care about what these people think, but it is all hypocritical and that does bug me.  It speaks of the place where these ads are coming from, the United States.  Morality is a hot button issue there, the overwhelming group think on what is immoral and what is moral and what falls into the grey area.  For me there is consent and there is lack of consent and the grey area is assumed consent.  There is all of that stuff out there.  A pornographic site mostly has consent.  The models all are agreeing to do what they are doing and they are presumably getting paid to do it.  There are porn site that offer no consent to the models, like hidden camera sites.  Change room cams, washroom cams, toilet cams, hotel room cams.  These are all illegal and amoral.  I won't watch these and they are despicable—there are probably some that feature paid models who know what is happening, but you can't tell.  

Then there are the grey areas.  Like people who sign waivers but are lied to as to how the images are going to be used, this includes sexting.  Someone who takes a photograph and sends it to a significant other and they betray their trust.  That is immoral but it is in a grey area, just as someone who records a video that is behind a pay wall and distributes it around.  Some people might look at those grey area examples and say that they are not grey; I feel the same, but they are still grey.  Imagine a woman at a beach who has a wardrobe malfunction.  Imagine a celebrity who walks up the red carpet in a very revealing dress.  Imagine a sports celebrity who is photographed while competing.  They are all grey regions.  Two lions mating in the savanna.  People on a topless beach, nudist beach.

The grey regions can be portrayed as less grey when people begin to moralize them with captions.  It becomes a whole different form of porn, moral porn, shame porn; the porn part is not the pictures but the intention.  Trying to tell me that they are worse people than me because they have pictures that they would be embarrassed about if they knew where on the internet viewed by millions of people.  I think about it for a second and I know that there are three people in this picture: The subject, who may have taken the picture for their own purposes.  The moralizer, who is placing a value on their actions, divorced from the subjects intention, who is making money that the subject will never see and is setting up the third person to feel superior.  The third person is the viewer, me or you, the intention is to shame the individual, but in my case I feel shame for myself and anger at the Second person.  I know that most people never know the person who is in the frame, but the odds say that someone will know the person.  

I feel cheapened a little bit now.  But I offer up my humility, to allow others to feel superior over me, that's okay because I am consenting to it and I don't expect profit.