Violet Blue On The "Craigslist Experiment"
Speaking of Violet Blue, she weighed in on the "Craigslist Experiment" over the weekend on her blog:
When researching my sex books, I've placed CL ads just to get a random sampling or to get ideas; I post as female. Every time, I've received an overwhelming amount of troll responses with unsolicited photos. I have always wanted to do something with those responses and photos, as they are often offensive and sometimes even kind of evil. But I never get past the thought process involved in the prank, even though thinking about doing something makes me feel somehow better -- as I would by outing the same kind of creepy guys that stalk me and harass my female friends online. I think about it, and joke about it with friends. Sometimes I'll even chat with other chick sex educators, laughing over beers and comparing the unsolicited photos we've gotten recently, just via our web presence. ("You got a *face* pic? You rate!") Then again, I'm not pretending to be something I'm not. In the case of The Craigslist Experiment, everyone was pretending to be something they're not. But not anymore.
She also questions the legitimacy of the bait advertisement:
It wasn't just any kind of ad, but a hardcore BDSM posting where a female submissive was looking for a rough male dominant to beat her up and fuck her. The ad's language suggests (to me) that the original poster actually had no idea what the language they were using meant -- clearly what the person was asking for was well beyond the included "safe sane" S/M community definitions. (This, and a few other details, suggest to me that the original ad may not have even been for real in the first place, as often happens on CL.) But the point is, Jason and his cohort took the ad at face value, as an average, and got a face-value response to what the ad's message sends out to the world.
So was the original ad real or not and if it wasn't does that have any bearing on the responses it drew? The full text of the ad is here (remember that a lot of this stuff is NSFW). Not being familiar enough with the vocabulary of BDSM, we'll leave it to Violet to speculate on the ad's original authenticity.
Wired Magazine comments on a blog here and they're pissed. They also suggest that the stunt's perpetrator Jason Fortuny could face prosecution under this Washington State law:
Any person who, directly or by means of a detective agency or any other agent, violates the provisions of this chapter shall be subject to legal action for damages, to be brought by any other person claiming that a violation of this statute has injured his business, his person, or his reputation. A person so injured shall be entitled to actual damages, including mental pain and suffering endured by him on account of violation of the provisions of this chapter, or liquidated damages computed at the rate of one hundred dollars a day for each day of violation, not to exceed one thousand dollars, and a reasonable attorney's fee and other costs of litigation.
A lot of people commented in support of Fortuny on that post and here is Wired's response to their response:
The point of the whole 'prank' was to shame and humiliate other people and to let Fortuny and his LiveJournal hangers-on feel intellectually and morally superior -- e.g. the victims are 'perverts' who aren't smart enough to know how use the internet anonymously.
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