This week we read six articles, watched one video, and browsed one website. I had my group’s book presentation on Frenemies by Jaime Settle. I believe we did okay, but what I really liked was learning Settles’s different viewpoints. In the article Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing To Hide’, we read that those who claim they have nothing to hide usually do. We all do honestly, no one wants someone looking at everything in their life meaning bills, trash, private photos, and their phones to name a few. On the surface, the nothing-to-hide claim seems easy to dismiss. Possibly everyone has something to hide from others. Everyone is guilty of something or has something to hide, as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, “All one has to do is try hard enough to figure out what it is.” The nothing-to-hide claim, in a less drastic form, applies not to all personal information, but rather to the type of data that the government is likely to obtain. Retorts to the nothing-to-hide point about revealing the naked bodies of individuals or their darkest secrets are only valid if this kind of knowledge is likely to be gathered by the government. In certain cases, the data will hardly be used by anybody, and it will not be revealed to the public. The interest in privacy is therefore marginal, some would say, and the security interest in preventing terrorism is far more significant. The nothing-to-hide claim in this less severe form is a formidable one. It seems, however, from some defective assumptions regarding privacy and its meaning.

In our other article, The Humiliation of Katie Hill Offers a Warning, we read that a politician, Katie Hill, was exposed to revenge porn. Hill engaged in a deep violation of accountability by engaging in a romantic relationship with someone who worked for her from her own account, and by doing so while running for public office. She stated “For the rest of my life, the mistakes I made which brought me to this moment will haunt me” Congressional participants are no strangers to bad behavior. But it would be intentionally cynical to shove aside the awkward complexities of Hill’s relationship with a staffer who was her junior for nearly a decade, and a recent college graduate, at a time when Americans are reshaping the complicated landscape of sex and power in the workplace. All together we have to ask the question was this ok to do, and I believe all of our answers are no. This is not an okay thing to do to another person, ever.

In another article, 6 Reasons Why Revenge Porn Is Really Fucked Up, we learn that 90% of revenge porn victims are women. Social media has portrayed women’s bodies as objects and things to be owned instead of treated as human beings. By its very meaning, revenge porn is non-consensual. It is a form of harassment to post graphic material without someone’s permission, even if they consent to take photographs or videos. We should have full power over our bodies and our sexuality as human beings. It is undeniably a form of violence to violate our bodily autonomy and to cause our bodies to be subject to degradation and unwanted sexual abuse. Revenge porn is a product of rape culture and should be treated as such. I believe we should have a federal law pertaining to this and more so crack down on those doing this.

Do you have anything you don’t want others seeing? What about videos that you pray will never come to light? Do you know a victim of revenge porn?

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