Many of the pictures that are circulated or published on the Internet as involuntary pornography are probably of women wearing Victoria's Secret products.
Women who are abused by involuntary pornography are harassed, bullied and stalked online and offline. They lose their jobs, relationships and friends. They are embarrassed in front of their families. They often have emotional problems, including suicide.
Victoria's Secret has never supported the victims of those abuses. Victoria's Secret has promoted both voyeurism and involuntary pornography as ways for women to bully other women.
Many of the Victoria's Secret models also have personal websites, where they publish pictures and videos of themselves that are even more revealing than what they're paid to do for their employer. There are no captions at either the Victoria's Secret website or the personal websites of its models, to warn girls and naive women that for regular people to take these types of pictures of themselves exposes them to risks that Victoria's Secret models are protected from by their money. There's a big difference between being paid to have pictures of you taken nude or in your underwear and having the type of job where the quality of your intelligence and character are considered primary requirements.
I don't really have a problem with people taking intimate pictures of themselves or the people whom they're dating or to whom they are married; consenting adults have the right to do what they want in private. Unfortunately, people who pose for those pictures are at a high risk of their partners posting the pictures online if they break up or if their partners are abusive or insensitive; there ought to be protections for those people that aren't contingent on whether or not they can pay lawyers have the pictures removed from the Internet and to warn the ex-partners not to be abusive.
I don't even really care that much if people who know the risks of self-publishing revealing pictures want to show off their bodies, other than that they are not good role models for people who don't know the risks. It doesn't seem to me that most of the people who use social media to display what they look like 24 hours a day have realistic ambitions for their lives beyond being included on lists of Who's Hot.
What they don't have the right to do is act as if my consent about what happens to me is not only a negligible concern but is a concept to be viciously ridiculed. I couldn't care less what they think of me; I do care that I've been treated as if I have no rights for years.
Copyright L. Kochman, June 8, 2017 @ 8:46 a.m.