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: 

The B-52's -- "Dance This Mess Around" (1979)

Do the coo-ca-choo

Do the Aqua Velva

Do the dirty dog

Do the escalator 

There were a lot of records about fad dances released in the early sixties -- Chubby Checker's "The Twist," Dee Dee Sharp's "Mashed Potato Time," Freddie and the Dreamers' "Do the Freddie," the Orlons' "The Wah-Watusi," Little Eva's "The Loco-Motion," and many, many others. 

"Dance This Mess Around" is more reminiscent of a number of later singles that referred to several different dances, not just one.  For example, there was Chris Kenner's "Land of a Thousand Dances" (later covered by Cannibal & the Headhunters and Wilson Pickett):

You gotta know how to pony like Bony Maronie

Mashed potato, do the alligator

Put your hands on your hips, let your backbone slip

Do the Watusi, like my little Lucy 

Kenner's version of the song mentioned a total of sixteen dances: the pony, the mashed potato, the alligator, the Watusi, the chicken, the twist, the fly, the jerk, the tango, the yo-yo, the sweet pea, the hand jive, the slop, the bop, the fish, and the Popeye.

Here's Jenner's original 1962 single.  Note that his version does not include the "na na na na na" section, which was improvised by Frankie "Cannibal" Garcia of Cannibal & the Headhunters when he forgot the lyrics.

"California Sun" by the Rivieras (which was covered by the Ramones and the Dictators, among others) is another example of this genre:

Where they walk, and I'll walk

They twist, and I'll twist

They shimmy, and I'll shimmy

They fly, and I'll fly

Finally, there's "Nobody But Me" by the Human Beinz:

Nobody can do the shing-a-ling like I do

Nobody can do the skate like I do

Nobody can do the boogaloo like I do

Nobody can do the Philly like I do

"Dance This Mess Around" is different from the earlier songs in one important way -- the dances it lists are not real dances, but made-up ones.  

Here's another verse from "Dance This Mess Around":

They do the shu-ga-loo

Do the shy tuna

Do the camel walk

Do the hip-o-crit 

[Editor's note:  The lyrics to "Dance This Mess Around" are printed on the record sleeve of The B-52's album.  The B-52's capitalized the names of their fictional dances as if they were all proper nouns, but I decided not to do that.   Because waltz, tango, fox trot, and other older dances generally aren't capitalized, I decided not to capitalize the names of these dances -- except when the name was itself a proper noun, like "Watusi" or "Aqua Velva."  (I bet you didn't know that Aqua Velva was originally a mouthwash.)]

The B-52’s (who dropped the apostrophe in 2008) were almost as odd a band as Devo was.  (Not quite – I don’t think any band was an odd as Devo was.)

The B-52’s formed in 1976 after its founding members had shared a communal “Flaming Volcano” drink at a Chinese restaurant in Athens, Georgia.  (Three of the band’s members – siblings Cindy and Ricky Wilson and Keith Strickland – were born in Athens, home of the University of Georgia.  I’m not sure how New Jersey natives Fred Schneider and Kate Pierson ended up there.)  The band’s first public appearance was at a friend’s 1977 Valentine’s Day party. 

The group released their first single, “Rock Lobster,” in 1978, and the success of that record resulted in gigs at two legendary punk/new wave clubs in New York City (CBGB’s and Max’s Kansas City).  Their eponymous debut album was released in 1979, and it was a big favorite of mine and my good friend (and Federal Trade Commission officemate) Scott. 

Scott and I were just two of the twenty or so brand-new attorneys who started working at the Federal Trade Commission on September 21, 1977 – almost four months after we graduated from law school, and two months after the bar exam.  Why did the agency wait so long to put us to work?

If you had ever worked for the federal government, you’d know all about fiscal years.  For the feds, the year begins on October 1 – that’s the day when your new appropriation kicks in.  Any agency funds that aren’t spent by September 30 are lost forever, so there is often a mini-orgy of spending in September each year.  (Heaven help the agency that doesn’t spend all of its appropriated funds for salaries, travel, office furniture, or whatever by the end of the fiscal year – Congress might get the idea that the agency doesn’t need so much money and cut back on the next year’s appropriation.)

The other side of the coin is that if an agency is spending too much money, it has to tighten its belt and defer expenditures until the next fiscal year.  That’s why all the new hires at the FTC came on board on September 21.

The FTC's headquarters building

“Wait a minute,” you say.  “September 21 is in the old fiscal year.  Why didn’t they start you on October 1?” 

The FTC paid its employees every two weeks.  You got a check at the end of the pay period.  So if you started on Monday, September 21, you didn’t get paid until Friday, October 2 -- which fell in the subsequent fiscal year.  We could go to work in the old fiscal year, but our salaries didn’t count against the FY (fiscal year) 1977 budget because we didn’t get our checks until after FY 1978 had begun.  Comprenez-vous?

I was fortunate to be assigned to share an office with Scott.  He had been in my law school class, but we hadn’t known each other.  And while we didn’t have a lot in common on the surface -- I had grown up in Missouri and gone to college in Texas, while Scott was from Long Island and had gone to Princeton -- we were both huge Yankees fans and had similar tastes in music.  So we got along just fine.

We were fond of the old Georgetown University station, WGTB, and used to have its very outré music playing in our office eight hours a day.  The very left-wing students who had run the station in the sixties clashed regularly with the Jesuit administrators of the university.  By the time Scott and I came to the FTC, the university had managed to wrest control of the station back from the radicals.  They were still playing music that no commercial station in Washington would touch, but the politically extreme programming and public-service announcements for NORML and a local abortion clinic were gone.

Soviet-style sculpture outside FTC HQ

How were we able to work with Fugazi and the Cramps and Husker Dü and the B-52s blasting away in our office?  To be perfectly frank, we didn’t really do that much work our first couple of years at the FTC.  (I’d say the problem was 50% youthful high spirits, 50% lack of supervision.) 

WGTB wasn’t our only distraction.  Another young attorney we became friendly with used to bring around a photocopy of the New York Times crossword puzzle every day.  That puzzle was a bitch, boys and girls – it required a lot of time.  (Your tax dollars at work!)

But that time wasn't entirely wasted.  I still remember learning that there were certain words you saw often in the Times crossword, but nowhere else – “orts,” for example.  ("Orts" refers to the scraps of food left behind after you've finished a meal.  I've seen the words several times in crossword puzzles, but never anywhere else.  I guess it could come in handy in Scrabble as well.)

Here's "Dance This Mess Around":



The B-52's performed "Dance This Mess Around" live on Saturday Night Live on January 26, 1980.  (The host that night was Teri Garr, one of my all-time favorites.)  Click here to view that performance.

Use this link to buy the song from Amazon: