Blood on the Dance Floor – "Revenge Porn" (2012)

Cheated on me and broke my heart

Gonna show the world your private parts

Many years ago, I worked at the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection – we Washington insiders call it "BCP" for short – whose staff attorneys spend most of their time going after marketers who are guilty of deceptive advertising or sales practices.

Apparently someone has introduced LSD into the drinking fountains at FTC headquarters.  That's the only explanation I can think of for the agency's recent decision to go after a "revenge porn" website operator named Craig Brittain. 

In case you lead a sheltered life and are not familiar with revenge porn, it’s a type of online harassment that involves the posting of sexually-explicit photos of people without their consent.  It’s called “revenge porn” because many or most of the people who provide the naked pictures to revenge-porn websites are jilted lovers or have some other kind of personal beef with the people in the pictures.

You would think that something named the "Bureau of Consumer Protection" would focus its efforts on protecting consumers.  But the victims of Brittain's operation were not consumers – at least, they weren't his consumers.  

BCP usually steps in when a marketer exaggerates the benefits of its products, or sells something that is unsafe or unhealthy.  In cases like those, the marketer's victims were consumers of its products.  

But BCP wouldn't get involved if someone sneaks into your house in the middle of the night and steals the family silver, or crashes into your car while driving drunk.  There are other law enforcement agencies who deal with non-consumer problems like those.

Here's something else odd about BCP's action against Brittain: the guy was strictly small potatoes.  His website generated only $12,000 in revenues, which made him a tiny fish in the very large pond of Internet sleaze.  Federal agencies usually reserve their fire for much larger targets, leaving the states and local agencies to clean up smaller fry like Brittain.

(She shouldn't have sent her
boyfriend that naked selfie!)

One other thing: state revenge-porn laws usually provide for tough criminal sanctions.  But the FTC's bark is worse than its a bite when it comes to punishing revenge pornsters.  The FTC's action against Brittain merely enjoins him from posting explicit photos without the subject's consent in the future -- what we legal types call a "go-and-sin-no-more" order.

Brittain was lucky that the FTC came after him instead of a state attorney general.  For example, about the same time the FTC issued its order against Brittain, a California revenge-pornster who operated a website that was very similar to Brittain's was found guilty of committing 27 felonies.  He faces up to 23 years in prison.

And last year, another California man was sentenced to a year in the poke for posting a single topless photo of his ex-girlfriend on Facebook.  

Brittain, who had photos of about 1000 people on his website, won't spend a day behind bars, and doesn't have to pay the government or his victims a penny under the terms of his settlement with the FTC. 

Most people view revenge porn as basically misogynistic, a form of male "cyber-rape" of females.

So it's tempting to explain the FTC's crusade against revenge porn by pointing out that the current FTC is essentially a matriarchy.  Personally, I don't buy that.  I don't believe that the fact that four of the five Commissioners (including the Chairwoman), the director of BCP, and the staff attorney who handled this investigation are all women had anything to do with their decision to pursue Craig Brittain.  No siree!

(It may surprise you to learn that revenge porn may not be predominantly male-on-female crime.  Click here to read a recent article from the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, which suggests that slightly more men than women are the victims of acts of online revenge.)

An FTC staffer wrote this about Brittain's website: "Brittain encouraged people (usually men) to send naked pictures of others (usually women)."  If that statement had been made by an advertiser, the FTC might well have accused it of deceptive advertising.  

The FTC staffer's use of "usually" may be literally true, but it's misleading.  Craig Brittain claimed that 48% of the people whose pictures were posted on his website were men – so it's true that most of the photos on his website were of women . . . but just barely.  (As far as I know, the FTC has not challenged Brittain's numbers, which indicate that he was an equal-opportunity offender.)

By the way, Brittain claims that about 55% of the photos on his website were "selfies" that had been posted on other public sites – Tumblr, Craigslist, etc. – and then reposted to Brittain's site.  (An anti-revenge porn advocacy group has said that 83% of all the photos posted on revenge porn websites were selfies that had been shared with someone.)  

Another 30% were posted by porn-site operators who had model releases from the subjects.  The remaining 10% were posted by the people in the photos, most of whom were hoping to get a modeling contract.

That means only about 5% of the pictures posted to Brittain's website were examples of actual revenge porn.

Ironically, the first person convicted under Virginia's new revenge porn law was a woman who posted a naked picture of her ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend on Facebook.

Click here to check out the "She's A Homewrecker!" website, which invites wives to post pictures of their husbands' mistresses.  It's operated by a suburban housewife.  (So much for sisterhood!)

I'm going to let the FTC know about that website.  I'm sure the folks who took on Craig Brittain will move toot sweet to shut "She's A Homewrecker" down.  (To quote Florence Jean "Flo" Castleberry: "When donkeys fly!")

One final note.  If the FTC was really concerned about the humiliation and shame caused by the posting of photos to revenge-porn websites without the subjects' permission, they should have gone after this website.  

I think it's awesome that there's an actual song about revenge porn that I can feature in this post.

Blood on the Dance Floor is an American electronica duo who released "Revenge Porn" on a 2012 album titled Evolution.  They get revenge porn:  

Revenge is best served cold and sweet

So face the music and accept defeat

Payback when I click submit . . . 

We'll upload your sh*t

And we'll take you down

You always said you would die to be famous

But you never thought it would be because of your an*s!

Here's "Revenge Porn":

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: