Girls Sharing Sexy Selfies

Justin and Sonya were boyfriend and girlfriend. Justin asked Sonya to send him some photos of her taking her clothes off. He promised that he would never share the photos with anybody. So she did as he asked; she took the photos he requested, and sent them to him. A few weeks later, she dumped him. In revenge, he posted her photos online. Actually, he created a fake Instagram account in Sonya’s name, to make it look as though Sonya were sharing the photos herself. In a matter of days, the photos had received thousands of views and had been re-posted on other sites.

Revenge porn is illegal in 46 states, but successful prosecutions are rare. A boy can buy a cheap “burner phone," create a fake Instagram account from that phone, post the photos using that phone, then throw the phone in the nearest dumpster. For less than $100, he has inflicted lasting harm on a girl, and he will likely get away scot free. The girl may suspect him, but proving beyond a reasonable doubt that he is the guilty party is another matter. In one survey, 51% of victims of revenge porn reported considering suicide.

Actress Amber Heard — best known for her roles in Aquaman, Justice League, and The Playboy Club, among many other credits — knows all about having your private photos posted online. In 2014, she was one of the celebrities whose private photos were stolen in the famous “celebrity hack.” Her intimate photos were posted online, then copied and reposted on other web sites. She writes: “To this day, my private photos remain online and my tormentors remain unpunished.”

Heard believes that current state laws are insufficient and insists that a federal law is needed. The problem with many state laws, in her view, is that they focus on the intent of the person posting the photos. The prosecution must demonstrate that the person who posted the photos intended to harass the victim. “What matters [or should matter] is not why the perpetrator disclosed the images; it is that the victim did not consent to the disclosure,” she recently wrote in the New York Times. She endorses a federal law, now under consideration, which would criminalize any posting of personal photos or videos of a person without that person’s consent, regardless of the intent of the person posting.

If the law were to be applied retroactively, one of the first people who might be prosecuted is Heard herself. In 2016, she used her phone to record video her then-husband, actor Johnny Depp, when he was in a drunken rage. The video, made without his consent, was subsequently posted online and dissected on TMZ. Heard does not explain why Depp is not entitled to privacy, but she is.

The likely effect of such a law, if passed, would merely be to push the posting of the explicit photos and videos which Heard hopes to ban to hosts outside the United States. Many porn sites are already based on servers in Eastern Europe and Russia. Russian authorities have actively resisted extradition of Russian nationals to face prosecution related to Russian websites.

Heard never challenges the current cultural consensus, which is that girls will share photos of themselves, barely clothed or unclothed, with their boyfriends. She assumes that girls will continue to do this. I question that assumption.

Sara Thomas, a doctoral candidate at Northwestern University, has studied why girls share such photos. Only rarely, she found, do girls share such photos because they want to. Much more often, girls share such photos because boys coerce them to. The girl may not want to comply, but she doesn’t know how to say no. Girls feel “overwhelmed, confused, tired, bombarded” by the boys’ relentless requests. What is a girl supposed to say? “I will not send you such a photo, because to do so would offend my modesty”? Get real. The four most popular women on Instagram right now, each with more than 150 million followers, are Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, Kylie Jenner, and Kim Kardashian, each of whom regularly posts provocative photos of their own bodies online. Immersed in such a culture, how is a girl supposed to say no?

I have a better idea: Teach your daughter, and your son, not to take photos of themselves unclothed or barely clothed. If a romantic partner asks for such photos or videos, just say no. Explain that self-respect means not sharing photos of yourself which would embarrass you if viewed by an employer or coworker. Remind your teen that there is no such thing as privacy online: Any photo shared electronically can be hacked, or shared without your permission. Just ask General David Petraeus or Jeff Bezos.

Heard write, “Every person, from the most famous to the most obscure, from the privileged to the poor, deserves privacy.” True enough. But she misunderstands privacy. Privacy is not, as she appears to believe, primarily a gift which the government can grant by passing appropriate laws. Privacy must be protected and safeguarded by the individual. And the first step in safeguarding the privacy of your own body is not to allow it to be photographed unclothed by others, or to take such photographs yourself.

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Install a monitoring app on your kid’s phone. Choose an app that will send you every photo your teen takes, as soon as they take it. Warn them that if you see anything inappropriate, they will lose the device indefinitely. Then, when a boy asks them to send a provocative photo, your kid can answer, “I can’t do that, because my evil parents have installed this ridiculous app on my phone!” That’s doable. It may not be the whole solution, but it’s a start.

Or better yet: Don’t give your teen a smartphone. Give them a basic phone, a phone that can make a phone call and receive a phone call, and that’s all. It can’t take a photo, or send a photo. (That's what my wife and I have done with our own teenage daughter.) If she wants to take a photo and share a photo, tell her to use a camera; they're still being sold. Print the photo out on a piece of photo paper. Show the photo to her friend. Then shred it.

Now that’s privacy.

Leonard Sax, MD PhD, is the author of four books for parents, most recently The Collapse of Parenting.