Y’all, I am pissed!
As a native New Yorker I don’t often find myself using the contraction of you + all, but blinded by rage, that’s the best I could do.
Oh, you want to know why I’m so mad?
Some asshole stole my work!
Mine!
Mine, mine, mine!
Those fuckers!
Before I tell you of the circumstances in which I found my stolen work, let me ask you a question:
How would you feel if your hard work was stolen?
Wait, let me quantify that.
How would you feel if your PAYWALLED creative work was stolen, and then given away for free?!
[GASP!]
I know, you’d be pissed too.
American pissed, not British pissed.
Although, after what transpired, I may want to get drunk.
So, there I was, minding my own fucking business, running the photos of a potential Bumble match through some facial recognition software I found online, (which I’m sure is totally legit even if they only take payment in crypto), when I got the stupid idea in my head to run my own photo.
Where might my photo show up on the Internet?
This type of software is not supposed to be able to “crawl” social media, so I didn’t think it would come up with much, but what the fuck do I know? Apparently, not much.
Let me backup a second.
I’m not great with math so I didn’t realize that twenty dollars worth of Bitcoin bought me 140 credits on this website, and that each search only cost three credits, and since I bought the cheapest package, my credits would expire in two weeks.
Before you get too excited, we’re not talking about Homeland Security level facial recognition software, although that’s really only good for differentiating white faces anyway.
However, the software I found was significantly better than Google Image, which can’t tell a cucumber from an eggplant, if you know what I mean, lol.
Wait, let me backup my backup.
You may be wondering what all this has to do with stolen work. Hold your horses, I’m getting to that now.
So, I run my photo and I get like twenty-five hits, and I think OMG, until I realize they are all from my Instagram account (so much for security).
I’m perusing my photos, thinking, “Damn, I look cute,” when I came across one photo I knew wasn’t on IG.
Uh-oh.
I knew I had to click on the photo – I really didn’t want to, but I still had 138 credits and only two weeks to use them….
Dear reader, I’m not going to describe the photo or give you the link to the website.
I will tell you there were eighteen photos posted on September 9, 2024 which the website claimed were LEAKED from my OnlyFans account (which was deleted November 1, 2023).
[PEARLS CLUTCHED]
Within ten minutes I had gone through the Five Stages of Grief (altered slightly):
Denial: Wait, what? That can’t be right….
Anger: Motherfuckers stole my work!
Rage-filled revenge: I’m going to sue the fuck out of those motherfuckers!
Shame: There are revealing photos of me on the Internet.
Acceptance: Oh well, I guess I always knew this could happen. I’ll look into a way to get them taken down, but….
Damn, I do look good.
You might think that’s the end of my story, dear reader, but it is not.
I decided to do a Google search of my IG handle just to see what would come up, and low and behold, I found myself on ten other websites.
You might think I circled back to shame, but I did not.
I was angry, really angry.
Not only had someone stolen my work, but my cultural programming led me to feel ashamed. I knew that if it had been my writing which had been stolen I wouldn’t have felt that way, and that made me more angry.
I imagined that your reaction, dear reader, would also change once you learned what had been stolen. Did your feelings change from anger to … what? Embarrassment on my behalf? Pity?
After all, we are all products of our cultural upbringing, aren’t we?
I think most of us were brought up with some degree of purity culture, where a woman’s value is linked to her modesty, her virginity, her “body count”.
Nudity is something to be ashamed of, to be hidden and only shared with our partners. To disobey is to lose standing and value within the community.
Have I lost value?
I refuse to go down that path.
As Gisèle Pelicot said, “I've decided not to be ashamed, I've done nothing wrong."
I felt it was important to share my story and draw attention to the way society stigmatizes and criminalizes women’s bodies.
We should never be made to feel shame or responsibility for the crimes committed against us, yet it’s so implicit in our culture we often do.
We can all do better. We can question old narratives and use our critical thinking skills to question the lies made up to control women and the truths which liberate us.
My hope is that we are all brave enough to question the origin of our belief systems. We may not like what we find, but we can’t change our behavior if we are not willing to look.
Share this post