This is a difficult post to write. It’s about extortion, suicide, and grief. I’m compelled to write it, however, because it’s also about nudity, nude photos, and a perhaps unexpected way for us naturists, nudists and our allies to bring about positive change.

Last month, national headlines here in the US declared that a South Carolina state representative sponsored a bill to crack down on criminals who blackmail people online, especially teenagers. The representative’s 17-year-old son had been a victim, and had committed suicide because of the criminals’ threat.

What was the threat? Pay us, or we release your nudes all over the Internet.

How did they get his photos? They pretended to be a young woman sending him her nudes and asking for his in return.

He sent them the $25 in his Venmo account, begged for time… and then shot himself. After his death, his family members started receiving hateful messages from these criminals, and blinked through the tears of their anguish to gradually piece together what had happened. There are several articles online about the incident – a thorough one from CNN can be found here.

The legislation passed unanimously, and the South Carolina governor signed it, and that’s great and as it should be. My heart goes out to the family of this young man. They did not let their grief keep them from action. I admire the representative’s bravery in letting his son’s case be known, and for using his position to do something about it. What the criminals did is heinous, despicable, unspeakably cruel, and they should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Unfortunately, such cases appear to be on the rise, particularly regarding victimization of young men. From the CNN article:

In 2022, law enforcement agencies received over 7,000 reports related to the online sextortion of minors, federal officials say. Nearly half of those resulted in victims, a majority of them boys. Over a dozen of the sextortion victims died by suicide, the FBI says.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/13/us/brandon-guffey-gavin-sextortion-law-cec/index.html

Right here in my city, a friend’s coworker’s son, of the same age, recently committed suicide, and I’m left wondering if something similar happened to him.

Here’s where this gets a little blurry, from a naturist perspective: I don’t know, nor do I care to know, whether the young man’s photos were merely nudes, or if they were in some way sexually explicit. Let’s also acknowledge that the victim in South Carolina may well have felt shame not just because of the nudes, but also for having fallen for the scam and for implicating his family and friends. To be sure, it would be a complicated range of emotions that only the victim would have been able to attempt to articulate precisely. What I would like to argue, in any case, is that normalizing nudity has an immense power here – the potential to take away, or to greatly reduce, the shame felt by this young person and by many others like him. We’ve all heard that line about ‘I’d rather die than anybody see me naked.’ It’s really not very funny at all. It was terribly, horrifically true in this case.

Five years ago, there was an internationally recognized organization dedicated to helping victims of revenge porn called the BADASS Army – BADASS as an acronym for Battling Against Demeaning and Abusive Selfie Sharing. It was founded by Katelyn Bowden and BeLinda Berry, who had both experienced having their nudes uploaded to a pornographic site without their consent. The group helped many victims seek legal counsel and psychological help. Often, those who became active in the group no longer saw themselves as victims but rather as activists and badasses.

“Another former-victim-turned-activist was invited to represent BADASS at Facebook headquarters because they became an international expert on digital exploitation and digital self-advocacy as a result of their experience.”

Kalish, Rachel. Young Adult Sexuality in the Digital Age. p. 45. Online quote source.

There are quite a few articles online, from 2018 and 2019, about the group and its mission (two good examples here and here). At the time of this writing, however, their website no longer exists, and the Twitter account has been inactive since a September 2020 posting about a leadership shake-up. Those seeking help are redirected to the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative and March Against Revenge Porn (no site found).

I support the new anti-sextortion law in South Carolina and similar legal measures, and I support the BADASS mission in whatever form it has taken. What I want to add to the conversation is that a way of getting at the root of the problem, and gnawing away at its power to exist in the first place, is to continue to normalize nudity. I’m reminded of a very popular magazine among European teens, Bravo, that profiles young Germans, with their names and interests and hobbies and etc. alongside a full nude photo.

“We take this very seriously,” said Bravo’s deputy editor-in-chief, Alex Gernandt. “It is not pornography. It deals with naked people, but in a very sensitive way. We try to portray young people to tell readers, ‘You are not too fat, not too thin. You are OK the way you are.’ “

[…]

Each weekly issue of Bravo now features photos of two nude teenagers — male and female, generally between the ages of 16 and 20. The feature is called “That’s Me,” and the pictured teenagers talk about their bodies and their experiences with love and sex.

They are paid a little more than $500 to pose, and many report a self-esteem boost from the experience, von Arx said.

https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/teen-magazine-with-nude-pics-yes-in-germany/

What a stark contrast! In fact it seems like the opposite scenario from the sextortion cases. [Note: The article quoted above is from 2006. According to the Wikipedia article on Bravo, the age for the people in the nude feature has changed to 18-25 since the 2010s.] Might there be sextortion victims in Germany? Sure, but probably a lot fewer in proportion. Is there criticism of Bravo magazine’s nude feature? Yes, there has been, and it led to the older age limits, among other changes that directly address the models’ consent (such as allowing the models to take the photos themselves by using a remote clicker for the camera). Is it realistic to think the United States could adopt this kind of open attitude as a part of its mainstream culture anytime in the near future? Well, no. No, it is not realistic, certainly not as things stand right now.

And yet there does seem to be movement, acceptance, and some change in understanding about nudity. But we have to work a lot harder to help the change happen, and it’s something that we naturists are uniquely positioned to do! We have to work harder to show that being comfortable with your own nudity is a way of owning it, a way of making it much more difficult for someone else to appropriate it or extort it, even without specific consent.

What if we lived in a world where a nude is just another kind of selfie, where wearing nothing is simply another wardrobe choice? A world where we encourage people to spend time naked outdoors, just as we encourage them to eat their vegetables and exercise… Normalizing nudity can, in fact, reduce not only shame but also crime – and not just sextortion crime, because eventually normalizing nudity can lead to eliminating the so-called “crime” of public nudity. Naturism is no panacea, but we need to be mindful about promoting all the good it can do. Our bodies and our societies will be so much healthier.