Unlike most feminists, it seems Jill of Feministe is regarded as attractive. But like most feminists, she’s not intelligent enough to understand the most obvious consequences of her actions:
Now, these pictures are all online in my Flickr account. Kate posted the two fashion show pictures on Facebook. It’s not that they’re any huge secret — but I didn’t post them (or let them be posted) so that they could be used to enroll me in a law school beauty contest without my permission. I have more than 4,000 photos on my Flickr account, more than half of which are travel pictures. I try and travel as much as I can, and until a month ago had an ancient laptop that was constantly on the verge of crashing. So I paid to store all of my pictures online so that I wouldn’t lose them, and I keep them there because I’d rather not eat up all the memory on my new computer. I also keep them up because of the blog. I blog under my real name, and I’ve been pretty open about who I am ever since I started posting here. The pictures are part of that — they emphasize the community aspect of this space by letting people know that I’m a real person, not just an internet personality. Zuzu and Piny do similar things when they give readers a peek into their lives by discussing their favorite TV shows, posting pet pictures, etc.
Not that I should have to explain why I, like the millions of people on Flickr and Facebook and MySpace and Friendster, post pictures of myself online. It’s certainly not unusual. Almost all of my friends have their pictures posted online in some venue or another. Several other feminist bloggers — Amanda, Jessica, Norbizness, Lauren, Hugo, and on and on — have Flickr accounts. And yet, in the Hot Law School Women contest, my pictures were posted with a caption reading, “For a self-proclaimed feminist, J.F. loves objectifying herself in front of cameras. I guess it’s empowerment when she does it, and exploitation when others do it, because she is in law school.”
Yes, it’s exploitation to take a picture with your friends on a beautiful beach in Greece. Way to understand feminist thought, dudes.
As Amynda recently found out, once you put something online, it isn’t yours anymore. This isn’t rocket science. You don’t get to choose what people will do with the bits of digital information once you sent them out into the wild electronic frontier, and if you can’t handle that, then you’d best stick to writing in a little pen-and-paper journal. With a lock so that no one can read it.
Naturally, being fascists, these upset female lawyers-in-training will soon be agitating for another law banning freedom of speech and expression… in order to defend their own right to behave as technologically clueless morons without consequence.
Jill should be grateful that she’s attractive enough to enjoy such attention even if her online admirers are unwanted. I rather doubt Amynda suffers from the same “problem”.
People say nasty things all the time. I get personally attacked every time I write a column and nearly every time I write a blog post. I don’t mind in the least, it comes with the territory, and the fact that people are so predictable that they invariably attack the red flags I wave in front of their faces affords me with no small amusement.
But if you want to play football with the big boys, understand that you’re going to get tackled hard every now and then.
You know, Jill and company really have no idea. If they’re upset about what some budding young lawyers can do with a few pictures, they’d probably keel over and die of horror if they understood what a game designer with a team of skilled 3D artists at his disposal is capable of doing with them.
Not, of course, that anything like that has ever happened… to the tune of 2 Live Crew….