Trading Nudes Like Hockey Cards: Exploring the Diversity of ‘Revenge Porn’ Cases Responded to in Law

Cases Within the Paradigm

While the above discussion complicated understandings of nonconsensual pornography victims and offenders/offender motivations, the majority of cases responded to in Canadian courts align with the typically imagined scenario to some extent. All but one case in my dataset (43/44 unique cases) involve a female victim, the vast majority of cases involve a male perpetrator (41/44), a majority of cases involve a male distributing images of their female partner or ex-partner (28/44), and at least half of the cases (22/44) clearly describe a scenario wherein a male offender has distributed intimate images with the intention to harass or abuse a female partner/ex-partner. The (upward of 22) cases fitting squarely within the nonconsensual pornography paradigm demonstrate how men often use this act as a tool of intimate partner violence against their female partners or ex-partners (Citron and Franks, 2014; Douglas et al., 2019). These dynamics were regularly recognized by Canadian judges, who frequently commented on the severity of harm experienced by victims and asserted, in keeping with definitions of intimate partner violence (Woodlock, 2017), that offenders acted with the intention to harass, humiliate, control, or abuse their female partners/ex-partners and often committed this act as part of a broader pattern of harassing behavior.

Demonstrating the role nonconsensual pornography can play in contexts of intimate partner violence, in the criminal harassment case of R v Fader (2009) Mr. Fader distributed explicit sexual images of his ex-wife to her new partner and threatened to distribute them to her neighbors and work colleagues if she didn’t agree to certain terms of their divorce regarding property (para 11). This act of nonconsensual pornography occurred as part of a broader campaign of controlling and threatening behavior against his ex-wife. In 2014 Mr. Fader was found guilty of criminal harassment a second time for acts that included sending sexually explicit photographs and videos to at least 10 of his [new] wife’s work colleagues and sending a sexually explicit video of the victim to her son with the caption ‘you think your mom’s such an angel in this?’ (R v Fader, 2014: para 7). In R v Wheaton (2017) the judge explicitly recognizes nonconsensual distribution as fitting within the parameters of intimate partner violence saying: ‘the 162 [non-consensual intimate image distribution] charge […] is also domestic violence. […] The [nude] picture [posted] on Facebook, that was simply an act of revenge, of violence against your intimate partner’ (n.p.). And in R v Greene (2018), wherein Mr. Greene threatened to kill his ex-partner on two occasions and sent a video of her having sexual intercourse to one of her friends, the judge asserts that Mr. Greene’s actions fit within the context of ‘revenge porn […an act that] provides men who are unable to accept the end of a relationship with a new and frightening manner of harming and humiliating their former female partners’ (para. 1). In such cases, images are intentionally weaponized to cause psychological, professional, or reputational harms (Bloom, 2016; Langlois and Slane, 2017). This set of cases can thus be well understood through the existing scholarly research on nonconsensual pornography as a form of intimate partner violence against women and, in many cases, through pre-existing research on intimate partner violence (Douglas et al., 2019; Dragiewicz, 2018; Woodlock, 2017).

Considering the diversity of nonconsensual pornography scenarios discussed above, the prevalence of legal cases fitting the paradigmatic scenario might indicate that the harm is more severe in these cases and thus more likely to be seen as worthy of reporting (by the victim) and of being carried through to a court process (by criminal justice personnel). It is also possible that case dynamics that do not align with the typically imaged case (e.g. those involving sexual minority victims or those with less explicitly malicious perpetrators) are less likely to be reported to authorities or carried through to the court level (or more likely to be dealt with through plea bargains that are published less often in legal databases). It is also necessary to consider that my inclusion of case law from before the creation of Canada’s specific nonconsensual intimate image distribution law has skewed my dataset toward including a larger portion of cases that occurred within the context of intimate partner violence (as these cases were able to be charged using criminal harassment laws that were in effect long before the 2015 creation of a specific offense for nonconsensual pornography); From this perspective, a more diverse set of case dynamics – including more cases that occur outside of a pattern of abuse – may start to emerge the longer Canada’s nonconsensual intimate image distribution law is in place. For the time being, however, it seems that the most common type of nonconsensual pornography cases being responded to in the courts are those that include female victims, male offenders, and a context of intimate partner violence.

Cases Beyond the Paradigm

While the typically imagined ‘revenge porn’ paradigm is common in Canadian case law, several cases deviate from this scenario to various extents. The case of R v Wenc (2009) is only slightly outside of this framing, as it fits within the pattern of image dissemination for the purpose of harassing an ex-partner, however it troubles the commonly assumed gender makeup of this act as both offender and victim are men. Further outside the typically imagined dynamics, many cases in the dataset do not involve an intimate partner relationship: a considerable amount of cases were committed against a peer, acquaintance, or friend (13 cases) and 3 cases were committed against strangers that lived in the offender’s community. Additionally, while a majority of cases were seemingly committed in an attempt to harass, abuse, or embarrass the victim (28), in 16 cases the motives were either unclear/unstated or varied from the typically understood desire to harass or abuse.

Although my findings regarding case dynamics are somewhat limited by the amount of detail provided in the case law (e.g. offender/victim attributes aside from gender are rarely discussed) and the particular judicial framing of the facts, my dataset provides several examples of scenarios outside the paradigm. I have selected three of these scenarios for further analysis: cases in which boys/men share images of girls/women with each other to ‘show off’ or ‘joke’; cases in which girls/women nonconsensually share images of female romantic rivals out of jealousy; and a single case involving a male/sexual minority victim.

Showing Off & Joking

Ringrose and Harvey’s (2015) research on youth in the United Kingdom finds that boys sometimes nonconsensually share intimate images for ‘homosocial reward’ (i.e. to gain social benefits from other males) (206). Echoing these findings, and troubling the common assumption that nonconsensual pornography is always ‘explicitly purposed to shame, humiliate and destroy the lives and reputations of young women’ (Filipovic, 2013), several adult and youth offenders in the case law seem to be motivated by homosocial rewards rather than a specific desire to harm the women/girls pictured in the images they share (though this is, of course, often the result).

For example, in Milton v Savinkoff (1993), the judge finds that a topless photo of the plaintiff was not shared ‘out of spite’, but rather that the defendant showed the photo to a friend to ‘falsely convey the meaning that the defendant had vacationed with the plaintiff and that he and she were romantically involved’ (para 2). In R v BH (2016) the offender claims to have posted sexual videos of the victim on amateur porn websites and shared the link with online friends ‘as a type of bragging that he was having sexual relations with a beautiful woman’ (para 11), and the judge asserts that B.H. ‘essentially used someone who loved him for the purpose of advancing his own sexual interest and status among an online group of acquaintances’ (para 26). Similarly, in R v Zhou (2016) the judge finds that, while the perpetrator ‘should have known his actions were an affront to [the victim’s] dignity’, Mr. Zhou’s ‘subjective intention’ in secretly posting nude images of his girlfriend to an online forum was to ‘brag about how attractive his girlfriend was […] rather than humiliate or degrade’ (para 5). In each of these cases, judges accept motivations beyond ‘revenge’ or an attempt to harm the victim, and recognize that images can be distributed for the purpose of bragging to other men. These dynamics are important to consider when criminal justice actors are determining the level of malice and intent to attribute to offenders in charging or sentencing decisions (Crofts and Kirchengast, 2019), as levels seem to vary considerably. For example, in the case of R v Agoston (2017), Mr. Agoston showed two of his coworkers nude images of a woman, that seemingly did not identify the victim, before deleting the images. This act demonstrates how images might be very briefly shown to others (with no further dissemination and seemingly no identification of the victim) in what appears to be a momentary lapse in judgment based on a desire to show off or joke rather than to abuse (the victim seems to have only learned the images were shown because Mr. Agoston’s boss reported the act to police).

In addition to these cases where motivations akin to bragging or joking are recognized by judges, other cases in the dataset could potentially be understood as motived by the desire for homosocial rewards as well. For instance, although little information on motivations is provided in R v SB et al. (2014), Crown counsel in this case asserts that the three 14-year-old offenders traded images of 13–15 year-old girls in a way ‘similar to the trading of hockey cards’ (para 6), a characterization that seems more related to a desire to gain social rewards than to harass/harm the girls involved. Similarly, in a case from Nova Scotia in which six teen boys exchanged intimate photos of their female peers in a private Dropbox account, the Crown argues that the offenders ‘treated the victims’ sexual integrity as bartering chips or baseball cards that could then be traded and circulated amongst friends’ (Auld, 2017). The use of the hockey/baseball card analogy in both of these cases speaks to the way that nonconsensual distribution committed by boys might fit within the broader context of boys’ attempts to impress one another through the expression of normative masculinity, be it through proving one’s knowledge of sports or one’s access to girls’ bodies (Ringrose and Harvey, 2015). In such cases, nonconsensual pornography, like other forms of sexual violence, becomes normalized as a form of ‘everyday sexism’ (Dodge, 2016). Thus, the potential impacts on female victims are sidelined by men and boys focused on proving their masculinity to peers/online communities or gaining homosocial rewards through getting a laugh or likes. Ringrose et al. (2013) describe how nudes can act as ‘proof’ of boys’ ‘desirability and access to girls’ bodies’ and can contribute to ‘their popularity or “ratings”‘ (p. 15); Thus, while intimate image distribution is often used to harass, shame, or seek revenge against girls/women, it is important to consider how motivations may be less explicitly sexist/misogynistic or intended to harm (with victims sometimes being kept entirely unaware their image has been shown to others) and may, rather, represent the victimization of girls as a consequence of boys’ attempts to gain homosocial rewards.

In some cases, nonconsensual pornography may be less about a desire to impress other males and more about meeting social pressures to prove heterosexual masculinity. For instance, Johnson (2015) describes how some youth ‘may have difficulty in opting out of the ‘sexual banter, gossip, discussion’ that happens online’ which can push ‘boys in particular to share sexts they receive with their peers to win social approval – or to avoid the social risks that can come from refusing to do so’ (p. 345). Because boys are often bullied for a lack of sexual experience or for not meeting normative standards of heterosexual masculinity (Mishna et al., 2018), boys might sometimes share images to avoid harassment/bullying. Youth report that much bullying at their schools is based in homophobia as well as sexism and that, while girls are bullied for ‘hooking up too much’, boys are bullied for not hooking up enough or for appearing gay (Bailey, 2015: 33). Kimmel (2005) posits that ‘the fear of being seen as a sissy, of being gay-baited, taunted, and bullied because one is not a real man is certainly what lies behind so much adolescent masculine risk-taking and violence’ (p. 146). Thus, some cases of nonconsensual pornography could be motivated by a ‘deeply rooted fear’ of being seen ‘as weak, feminine, not manly’ by other men (Kimmel, 2005: 145). From this perspective – paraphrasing Ringrose et al. (2012) – attempts by boys to avoid being labeled as ‘fags’, can result in girls being constructed as ‘sluts’. Thus, from a postmodern feminist perspective, a full understanding of the power dynamics in these case contexts requires recognition of the ways gender and sexual norms are experienced by boys/men, in addition to the more common discussion of how they are experienced by girls/women.

The above cases demonstrate dynamics wherein, although motivations are less explicitly malicious, acts of nonconsensual pornography nevertheless thrive due to sexist male bonding practices or attempts to avoid gender/sexual-norm enforcing harassment within the highly restrictive boarders of ‘acceptable’ masculine expression. Thus, especially in the youth context, legal and extralegal responses should be assessed for their ability to both address the issues of homophobic/gender-norm enforcing bullying amongst boys/men and the need for boys/men to better understand the potential impacts that sexual privacy violations can have on girls/women due to sexism and sex negative understandings of female sexuality (Shariff and DeMartini, 2015).

Jealous Teen Girls

Also laying outside of the paradigmatic case are three cases in my dataset wherein both the victim and offender are teen girls. In R v KF (2015) a 17-year-old girl is convicted of distribution of child pornography for posting an image on Facebook of a 15-year-old girl performing fellatio (she also sent the image directly to the victim’s mother). The judge in this case asserts that ‘the reason for committing such an act was driven by jealousy’ as a result of a ‘love triangle’ between the victim, offender, and a mutually known male (R v KF, 2015: para 1–3). In a similar scenario (with much more limited image distribution), M.B. is found guilty of child pornography offenses (currently on appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada) for sending a nude image of her boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend to her friend and to the ex-girlfriend herself (as part of an ongoing exchange of bullying/threatening messages between the two teen girls). In the facts of this case, it is explained that M.B. was motivated by jealousy upon finding out the ex-girlfriend still had feelings for M.B.’s boyfriend (R v MB, 2016). In another similar case, an 18-year-old girl shared an intimate image of a 14-year-old girl; the two teenagers were reportedly friends until they became involved with a 17-year-old boy ‘who became a love interest for both of them’ and images were ultimately shared as part of this ‘fight over a boy’ (R v TCD, 2012: para 7). The offender in this case, ‘with the co-operation and participation of the male’ that originally received the intimate image of the victim, sent nude photographs to peers at the victim’s school (resulting in a successful charge of criminal harassment and an unsuccessful charge of child pornography) (R v TCD 2012: para 2). This dynamic has also been seen in cases involving adults, for instance in a case occurring after the completion of my data analysis, a 23-year-old Newfoundland woman received a 90-day jail sentence for distributing intimate images of her ex-boyfriend’s new partner (R v Borden, 2019). These cases trouble popular understandings of women and girls as only the victims of nonconsensual pornography, showing how gender and sexual norms are also (though certainly less often) enforced and used as a shaming/harassment tactic by girls/women themselves. The use of sexual exposure as a tool of harassment, regularly documented in cases with male perpetrators, is here used by women and girls – reaffirming the sex negative belief that female sexuality is shameful and can be weaponized to ruin one’s reputation (Chun and Friedland, 2015).

Although there is a dearth of research on female perpetration of nonconsensual pornography, Miller’s (2016) research does find that girls often use boys’ acts of nonconsensual pornography ‘to slut-shame other girls’ (p. 733). In such cases, ‘a boy’s offense offers an opportunity for girls to shame other girls, both for being sexual and for trusting boys’ (Miller, 2016: 733). Exemplifying this dynamic, in the internationally-reported Rehtaeh Parsons case ⁹ the male perpetrators’ act of nonconsensual pornography was reportedly used mostly by girls to call Parsons a whore, slut, and ‘prostitot’ (No Place to Hide, 2015). Miller (2016) asserts that this kind of sexual rumor spreading can flourish when teen girls are not ‘supported to talk about their own sexual experiences or curiosities’ in a positive way and may, instead, use sexual rumors to ‘collectively negotiate and make meaning about gendered sexuality’ in ways that reflect existing racial, classed, and gendered hierarchies (p. 738). Thus, she suggests that inclusive sex education in schools, that includes discussions of queer identities and female pleasure, would allow youth to explore their sexuality in a more informed and less judgmental context.

Moving forward, the crafting of legal and extralegal responses will need to address how violations of sexual privacy are committed by both boys/men and (less often) girls/women. Despite the reality that both males and females perpetrate this act, educational responses to image distribution in schools have been found to sometimes split youth into groups along gendered lines, providing only boys with warnings concerning offending and only girls with warnings concerning victimization (Ricciardelli and Adorjan, 2019). While there are certainly important distinctions regarding the impacts of gendered power relations in cases where men share images of women (Aikenhead, 2018), especially in those cases that occur within a broader context of intimate partner violence, male and female offenders should not be treated as two radically separate and homogenous groups as their motivations both vary and overlap (Hall and Hearn, 2018).

In their postmodern feminist analysis of intimate partner violence, McHugh et al. (2005) explain that a reluctance to acknowledge women’s acts of violence can be related to a fear of undoing the ‘considerable time and energy’ that has gone into politicizing men’s violence against women (p. 324); A similar dynamic could also be present in mainstream understandings of nonconsensual pornography, as a complication of the construction of victim and offender in these cases might be seen to detract from the considerable feminist advocacy (Franks, 2017) that has gone into creating recognition of the (often extensive) harms girls/women have experienced at the hands of boys/men. Despite such concerns, McHugh et al. (2005) argue, in regard to domestic violence, that ‘there are compelling reasons why, as feminists, we should acknowledge, investigate, and try to understand women’s use of violence […]’ (p. 324). For instance, they argue that a ‘reluctance to acknowledge women’s aggression results in limited theoretical models and ineffective interventions’ (p. 324). Following postmodern feminism’s call to recognize the complexity of power relations and to understand women as both individuals being acted on by power and as wielders of power (Moore, 2008), it is necessary to recognize and address those cases that lay outside of the typically imagined gender dynamics of this issue and the paradigmatic case of the vengeful man (McGlynn et al., 2017).

Analyzing (the Lack of) Victims Outside of the Paradigm

While the extent of diversity (e.g. race, class) amongst nonconsensual pornography victims cannot be fully determined from my case law dataset (as cases rarely mentioned identity indicators beyond gender), it seems that those who do not fit into the ‘normal’ idea of what a victim of nonconsensual pornography looks like (e.g. heterosexual women and girls) are less likely to either report their victimization or have their case continue to the court level. With emerging quantitative research finding that sexual minorities disproportionately experience nonconsensual pornography and that men potentially experience this act at similar rates to women, it is notable that only one case in my dataset (R v Wenc, 2009) includes a male or sexual minority victim.

In regard to the lack of male victims in the case law, ¹⁰ while existing feminist legal research has sometimes taken the lack of cases involving men to mean that these victims are a rare anomaly, quantitative research findings to the contrary beg questions regarding why it is that men’s cases seem to be underreported and litigated. Are victims who do not align with the typically imaged ‘revenge porn’ victim experiencing less harm and, therefore, choosing not to report these cases to authorities? Or are these victims less likely to report or have their cases move forward due to social norms/stigmas regarding male victimization? In terms of the former question, it seems likely that male victims of nonconsensual pornography often experience less harm than their female counterparts. It is well established in the existing literature that, due to sexist and sex negative beliefs regarding female sexuality, women and girls frequently experience considerable harm when their intimate images are nonconsensually shared (Powell and Henry, 2017; Shariff and DeMartini, 2015). While some women have reported relatively low levels of harm or have refused to be embarrassed by having their intimate images nonconsensually distributed (Fitzpatrick, 2018; Powell and Henry, 2017), many women and girls report severe psychological impacts (including depression and PTSD), career impacts (including job loss), and in a few tragic cases teenage girls have died by suicide after nonconsensually shared images were used by their peers to bully and harass them ¹¹ (Bates, 2017; Langlois and Slane, 2017; Powell and Henry, 2017).

Although there is scant research on male victims’ experiences, social acceptance of men/boys as sexual beings (Miller, 2016) may allow the image exposure of some men/boys (e.g. straight, normatively attractive, gender-conforming, cis men) to be experienced as lacking reputational harm, as a joke, or even as positive social capital. For instance, teenage interviewees in Albury’s (2015) study suggest that social norms allow males more of a chance to ‘convert the meaning’ of a nonconsensually shared image into a joke or expression of self-confidence (p. 1741). This differential impact on male youths aligns with findings that sexual rumors about heterosexual couples are often used to slut-shame young women while the actions of the young men in such stories are invisibilized (Miller, 2016) or used only as fodder for (arguably) light-hearted jokes (Handyside and Ringrose, 2017; Ricciardelli and Adorjan, 2019).

However, although it might be assumed based on these cultural norms that men/boys’ image exposure is generally harmless, Henry et al. (2017) find that women (40%) are only somewhat more likely than men (36%) to report feeling afraid for their safety as a result of having images nonconsensually disseminated. This finding suggests that men may also have images shared in contexts of intimate partner violence or in other aggravating contexts. Thus, although it has often been assumed that male victims are ‘uniformly indifferent’ to having their image distributed, these assumptions may be based in ‘traditional, largely stereotypical, understandings of males as emotionally indifferent and aggressively sexualized individuals’ (Ricciardelli and Adorjan, 2019: 572). While women are regularly ‘seen as immoral sluts for engaging in sexual activity, whereas men’s sexual activity is generally a point of pride’ (Citron and Franks, 2014: 353), this may be more or less true based on factors such as: a man/boy’s sexual orientation; race; attractiveness (including in relation to penis size and aesthetics ¹² ); class and cultural capital; gender presentation; and whether they come from a more traditional or religious community. Although much more research on the experiences of male victims is needed to make any concrete conclusions, it seems that a relative lack of harm does not entirely account for the low rates of male victims in police reported and legally prosecuted cases of nonconsensual pornography.

While continuing to recognize the important ways that sexism and gender inequality amplify women’s experiences of harm in cases of nonconsensual pornography (Aikenhead, 2018), it is necessary to recognize that some men/boys have experienced considerable impacts as a result of nonconsensual pornography (Valenti, 2014). For instance, in a recent Canadian case, a teenage boy was the victim of a combination of sexual assault and image distribution in which three teen boys sexually assaulted him with a broom handle while another boy recorded the attack and shared the video with another student (leading to its further distribution on social media) (Casey, 2019). The sole case in my dataset involving a male victim, that of R v Wenc (2009), describes the victim enduring a 2-year campaign of harassment perpetrated by his male ex-partner. This harassment included, among other acts, posting nude photos of the victim with his phone number on public websites and faxing nude photos to one of the victim’s friends (para 4); The court finds that the totality of harassment experienced ‘caused the victim to fear for his safety and even for his life’ (para 10). Considering such cases, responses to nonconsensual pornography should be careful not to imply that boys/men have not, at times, also experienced severe acts of image distribution associated with intimate partner or sexual violence. Little is known about the experiences of male victims, but it is clear that the typically imaged case does not provide the whole story of who is victimized by nonconsensual pornography.

Although Aikenhead (2018) argues that the victimization of women in particular must be more overtly recognized in legal responses to nonconsensual pornography, it is necessary to grapple with how to recognize the sexism and slut-shaming experienced by women and girls without reaffirming the assumption that gender is always the primary indicator of whether or not an act of nonconsensual pornography causes harm. Exemplifying the impact of other forms of discrimination, the case of Tyler Clementi, an American university student who died by suicide after his roommate nonconsensually recorded his sexual encounter with another man (McGlynn et al., 2017), demonstrates the importance of understanding the experiences of sexual minority victims. Although the role of homophobia was not discussed in the case law, the case of R v Wenc (2009) might also be read as aggravated by the victims sexual orientation. Mr. Wenc’s act of faxing intimate images to the victim’s friend (as well as spreading false rumors that the victim was HIV positive) could take on harms related to homophobia if, for instance, the victim’s friend was unaware of his sexual orientation or otherwise expressed homophobic beliefs. Although more research is needed regarding the particular dynamics of nonconsensual pornography for male victims and victims with various and intersecting marginalized identities, it is probable that many critiques of the treatment of (heterosexual, cis, white) female victims will need to be revised to address the needs of the diversity of individuals found to be victimized by this act. For instance, future research should consider whether the seeming derth of victim diversity in the case law might be somewhat accounted for by findings from domestic violence literature that Black and LGBTQ+ victims are less likely to report abuse if the services available for reporting are feared to be racist, homophobic, or transphobic (Crenshaw, 1991; Sokoloff and DuPont, 2005).

Concerns with victim blaming that have focused primarily on girls and women may also need to extend their purview to consider the ways these ‘risk management strategies to avoid revenge porn’ (Bates, 2017: 25) are differently deployed against various groups. While, to date, the critique of victim blaming has often sought to undermine the belief that victims of nonconsensual pornography are careless women and girls that ‘send nude photos to anyone without considering the potential risks’ (Bates, 2017: 24; Salter and Crofts, 2015), this could eventually change in light of findings from Henry et al. that ‘males (54%) were more likely than females (47%) to have ever sent another person a sexual self-image’ and that males were ‘more likely than women to send a sexual self-image to someone they only knew online (37% of men compared to 21% of women)’ or to ‘someone they had just met (31% of men compared to 17% of women)’ (Henry et al., 2017: 6). While Henry et al. (2017) use this statistic to make the important point that women and men seem to be equally likely to be victimized despite women being ‘more cautious about who they share a sexual image with’ (p. 6), ¹³ these findings also point to the ways that men and boys might be at risk of having their victimization ignored or downplayed as a result of acting in a less risk-averse manner. While Bates (2017) attempts to question typical victim blaming rhetoric toward women by citing research showing that ‘women generally do not send nude photos to men they do not know’ and that ‘a level of trust is likely necessary before women feel comfortable sending a nude photo’, this approach to countering the ‘“she should have known better” argument […] prominent in revenge porn cases’ (p. 24) also works to reaffirm the standard of the ideal neoliberal, security-conscious victim and thus does not undermine the responsibilization of those victims who are seen as less prudent photo sharers. Evidencing the potential impact of this, representatives of a New Zealand support center for victims of internet-based sexual violence explain that men who contact them about being extorted using their nude images ‘seem to reluctantly seek support’, potentially due to ‘the shame associated with engaging quickly in sexual activity online with strangers’ (Pacheco et al., 2019). Reaffirmations of the need for cautious photo sharing may be especially problematic for queer men, as a more permissive view of sex and the normalization of sexting in some queer communities may result in more commonplace/casual photo sharing as a way to ‘entice potential partners’ (Corner, 2017) or to express a ‘sexualized selfhood’ online (Lee and Crofts, 2015: 470). As Henry et al.’s (2017) research finds, gay and bisexual males are ‘the most likely of any group to report consensually taking and sending sexual self images, with 79% reporting doing so, compared with 64% of lesbian and bisexual females, 48% of heterosexual males, and 41% of heterosexual females’ (p. 7). These dynamics may result in queer men being less likely to seek support for their victimization and/or being taken less seriously/victim-blamed if they do report. Thus, while important work has been done to recognize how responsibilization narratives can be used against women and girls (Bates, 2017), it is also necessary to consider the ‘racialized, classed and heteronormative dimensions of responsibilization’ (Karaian, 2014: 288) and the ways that all those who step outside of typical norms of sexual privacy or modesty may be seen as less worthy of protection based on the victim’s perceived sexual virtue (Chun and Friedland, 2015).

While the presumed nonconsensual pornography victim has often been a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman or girl (Chun and Friedland, 2015; Karaian, 2014), intersectional and postmodern feminist analysis is needed to understand the experiences of victims whose identities do not fit within this category. This nuanced analysis can better assess the particular power dynamics and discriminatory beliefs that may come into play in those cases of nonconsensual pornography that are less likely to make it into a headline or a courtroom.