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Violet Blue On The "Craigslist Experiment"

mini-imonurcregzlstpostinurn00dz.jpg 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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Comments [rss]

  • BB

    Well all this talk of privacy makes me wonder about the irony of me hitting a link to this site to find a known spyware attempting to download on my harddrive... wtf

  • sexy American

    ALL you people who are laying blame on Jason are sick, hiding, and lying. Jason exposed the TRUTH. --SA

    And that's why he pulled all of his personal info from his site after the story broke? I'd say that's more "hiding" than "TRUTH".

  • Sick Americans

    The responses I see about this whole topic make me so sad for the state of people in the US. The news media is spinning this a "sexy" ad.

    ALL you people who are laying blame on Jason are

    sick, hiding, and lying. Jason exposed the TRUTH. How can you compare PHYSICALLY ABUSING women with the emotional discomfort of having the TRUTH revealed?

    Did you rad the post? Go read the replies. These people who replied are sick and twisted. Saying it's "consenting adults" does not apply when the real tenor of the desired interaction is simply sexual abuse. Jason is a prankster who wanted to see sick people exposed for what they are. He's not an angel by any means - but put the discussion on where it really belongs: WHY ARE 178 SEATTLE Men TRYING TO BEAT UP a 27yo WOMAN???

    Answer: Sex relations in the US are seriously fucked up.

    GROW UP AMERICANS - TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR ACTIONS.

    If you are doing things you don't want exposed, stop doing them.

  • penguin

    I think it's clear what happened. A lonely young man, curious about how it would feel to be a weak, defenseless woman dominated by strong and assertive males, posts an anonymous ad and initiates correspondence where he can explore this fantasy. Lot of men show him an interest, but although he enjoys their attention he knows they are only interested in the person he pretends to be, and would like to be, but not in him as he really is. So he starts to feel rejected and angry, and with the vindictiveness of a false woman scorned, he takes his revenge by stripping these unfortunate men of their privacy, naively thinking that by humiliating them and gloating over his betrayal, his true feelings will be hidden behind a posture of self-righteous moralism. His greatest fear is to be exposed and ridiculed, so as a defense strategy he himself exposes and ridicules those whose affection is denied to him by the cruelty of being born not a weak woman, but a weak male.

  • DB

    I would rather have a few perverts running around than a low-life snitch like Jason Fortuny. Society does not get helped by destroying peoples lives.

  • Startoony
  • Dan
    It seems rather suspicious that one of the victims of his prank happens to be the spouse of person who banned him from lj seattle.

    That does seem oddly fortuitous, doesn't it? Maybe they knew what kind of ad he generally responded to and were fishing for him specifically?

  • Pelt

    I hear there's a pool to see when this guys is gonna get shot in the face. It seems rather suspicious that one of the victims of his prank happens to be the spouse of person who banned him from lj seattle. It would be pretty easy to add a fake response to implicate an enemy or enemy's husband.

  • dead nancy

    DC: i'd say he'd be lucky if he ONLY gets a couple broken kneecaps considering his hypocritical post-prank attempts to scrub his own personal data from the web have been largely unsuccessful. everyone and their mothers are publishing same data in the spirit of turnabout being fair play, and it takes about five minutes of searching to get this loser's photos, phone number, address, job history and so on. if one in ten of his 'perverts' decides to look for a little payback, there'll be an angry mob of people who use violence as recreation looking for him.

    heck, i think he deserves a few broken fingers based on his ridiculously smug MySpace account alone...

  • DC

    No.. not in that way that the responders to the ad wanted. I think that Jason Fortuny is a tool and I'm pretty sure he's going to get what is coming to him. He violated privacy laws because the people responding to the ads had a clear expectation of privacy. They thought they were legitimately responding to a woman looking for sex - nothing new there. Since the identities of the responders is of no viable interest to the public (they weren't breaking the law), anything personally identifying them in relation to the "experiment" is pointless - other than to humiliate them (or worse) for Fortuny's personal amusement. This guy is a sociopath and will be lucky if he doesn't end up with a few broken knee caps from people who's life he ruins. I'm not advocating that, but hey, I would understand.

  • It's nice to see Seattlest's little corner of the world wide interweb getting mentioned on the much wider-read Boing Boing. Congrats!

  • jason

    "narcissistic sociopath" has it just about nailed. the day he was banned from the lj seattle community was a good one. if he does end up getting sued, he only brought it on himself for trying to be clever.

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