What Does it Say (About Us) When Revenge Porn Can be Used as a Political Weapon?

How Patriarchy Lays the Foundations of Fascism, or The Rule of Chaste Women and Violent Men

Like me, this weekend, you might have been startled by news of revenge porn masquerading as politics. A Congresswoman — I won’t name her — had intimate photos of herself with someone other than her husband published. And then she resigned.

Now, I shouldn’t have to write any of the following. But I will, because we seem to have become fools. And I won’t name the woman involved either, because I think that feed the frenzy.

Revenge porn masquerading as politics is grotesque. (It’s “revenge porn”, by the way, because the photos have probably been released by her husband.) It is horrific. It is profoundly misogynistic. But it is also anti-democratic. It is a kind of fascism by any other name. It is a form of bullying, of intimidation, of forcing conformity to an ideal of purity, which only exists to subjugate people in the first place. It is a form of violence. Not just against this woman, nor even against all women. But against the ideas of personhood, dignity, equality, and freedom in the first place.

What does the fact that revenge porn can be used as a political weapon in our society…