Aram Zucker-Scharff

The Emma Watson Naked Photo Countdown Was The Work Of Serial Internet Hoaxers:

The media blames a viral marketing company for the stunt, but the truth is far more disturbing.

Here’s the thing, if you’re threatening to leak nudes of someone, and you don’t have any actual intent to, but you don’t *tell* anyone that. Isn’t it still a threat? Isn’t the intended chilling effect on someone’s speech and actions still there for the duration of the hoax? And isn’t the fundamental point of such an act, to make others think twice about speaking out, still the case?

What I’m saying is… does it really *matter* if 4chan was threatening with intent or some pranksters were threatening without intent? Isn’t it still fundamentally abusing others for power? Is it any less wrong because there were no photos to release?

“”This is a system of trafficking in women. It is, of course, consensual, and a far cry from anything like sexual slavery. But, in an anthropological sense, it is not so different from the tribal kinship systems studied by Claude Lévi-Strauss, in which men exchanged women in order to forge alliances with other men, while women were cut out from the value that their own circulation generated.””

– Who Runs the Girls?

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“The legacy of the Great Recession of 2008 has yet to be fully processed. But one of its most lasting impacts will no doubt stem from the fact that many college students and recent graduates—people who were just starting to build the careers and financial autonomy that would have allowed us “adult” lives—were suddenly faced with an economy in which getting a steady job was unlikely. Even if you were privileged or lucky enough to be able to afford a college education, companies’ increasing reliance on unpaid internships meant that building a career was a matter of being able to work for free after you graduated: Increasingly, only the children of the very wealthy were able to make the choices and secure the entry-level jobs that might lead to “adult” autonomy down the line. As a result, we saved money by living with our parents far longer than previous generations. The financial expense of a wedding—or the responsibility of asking another person to rely on you for the rest of their life—was not something one could reasonably embrace, if one were uncertain about making rent or having a job in six months’ time. Similarly, providing for a child was laughable if you couldn’t even reliably provide for yourself. And buying a house? In today’s market? Forget it.

“My generation didn’t choose childhood. Childhood chose us, or rather, it refused to let us go. We stayed adolescent because post-adolescent responsibilities were never granted to us. We were trapped in Neverland, and sooner or later, we resigned ourselves to just having fun.”

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– Who Killed Adulthood?

“Those three problems – women being threatened, women being pressured to change their own behavior to avoid sexual assault, and women being told that they don’t deserve protection unless they stay pure and ladylike – are all individually terrible. But together, they add up to something even worse: a vicious cycle that pressures women out of public life. When we tell women that the threats and attacks they experience are their own fault, for failing to be sufficiently chaste or failing to take “responsible” precautions, we are telling them that they are on their own: that they cannot rely on society’s protection against those crimes. How many women hear that message and decide that they have no choice but to give up that activist campaign or to turn down that higher-profile job or to hold off on writing that article? How hard will it be for UN Women to recruit its next Goodwill Ambassador?”

– The sexual threats against Emma Watson are an attack on every woman.