Hello, precious Meteor readers. I hope you’re taking care of yourselves—don’t be like me and immediately decide to doomscroll when you can’t sleep at 4 a.m. (Do NOT do it!) Events both domestically and abroad are grim, and many of us are feeling helpless and stressed, but we all need to keep our heads up in order to keep going. Instead, try sending some cold hard cash to the Trans Justice Funding Project, or this GoFundMe for Black people fleeing Ukraine, or the Missouri Abortion Fund. An objectively better thing to do than open Twitter before dawn!

In today’s newsletter, Tracy Clark-Flory looks at the misogynist legacy of the celebrity sex tape through the lens of Hulu’s Pam and Tommy—and how the violation of a woman’s privacy is almost always the point. After that, Shannon Melero speaks to attorney Carrie Goldberg about how the law protects—and doesn’t protect—victims of revenge porn today.

But first! The news!

—Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT’S GOING ON

• Civilian deaths are mounting in Ukraine; the Kyiv Independent reports that a maternity and children’s hospital was destroyed by Russian bombs Wednesday morning, and that agreed-upon humanitarian corridors are continually being violated by Russian forces, preventing civilians from fleeing to safety. The International Court of Justice is “fast-tracking” its decision on whether to demand an immediate ceasefire, which is basically unenforceable but would further damage Russia’s diplomatic status.

• The U.S. State Department has been working behind the scenes for weeks to free WNBA superstar Brittney Griner, who was detained in Russia for allegedly transporting vape cartridges containing hashish oil. Of course, if the WNBA didn’t skimp on revenue sharing with its players, she might never have been there to begin with.

• Meanwhile: Russian restaurants in New York City are being vandalized despite several of them being owned by Ukrainians; salad dressing, poutine and Moscow Mules are being renamed; and Russian cats have been banned from competing in the Fédération Internationale Féline, an international cat federation. Folks… let’s not Freedom Fries this situation, please. We can oppose the genocidal machinations of Moscow without demonizing individual Russians, particularly those who are desperate to escape Putin’s regime.

• SCOTUS has rejected an attempt to put Bill Cosby back behind bars for drugging and sexually assaulting Andrea Constand, a conviction which was overturned last year on a technicality. “I really felt they were setting a predator loose and that made me sick,” Constand told the Times upon Cosby’s release.

• The Washington Post reported this week that Nadima Noor, a Canadian-Afghan women’s rights activist who runs a humanitarian organization in Kabul, was arrested at gunpoint by the Taliban in February. (Read our interview with journalists reporting on similar Taliban violence here.)

• Florida passed the “Don’t Say Gay or Trans” law, which prohibits teachers from discussing the existence of LGBTQ+ people in classrooms (at the detriment of… LGBTQ+ kids in classrooms). Idaho passed a bill criminalizing gender-affirming care for trans youth. The largest children’s hospital in Texas—and the country—has stopped offering gender-affirming care for trans kids, supposedly to protect providers and families from Governor Greg Abbott’s decree that demands parents of trans kids be reported for “child abuse.” As ACLU attorney Chase Strangio told Democracy Now!, this is a “national, well-funded effort to attack and eradicate trans youth and trans lives.”

• A Republican representative in Missouri has proposed a law that would deputize citizens to sue any Missouri resident who leaves the state to obtain an abortion, based in part on the vigilanteism allowed in Texas’s anti-abortion laws. It’s likely unconstitutional for now, but as Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom alluded—so was what they did to Dred Scott.

AND: 

• Apayauq Reitan, a dog musher from Alaska’s Inupiat tribe, will be the first trans woman to compete in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race. “No matter what your interests are, you can transition and keep doing the things that you want to do,” she told Indian Country Today. “You don’t have to change your whole, entire life if you don’t want to.”

• How skateboarding is empowering young Palestinians

• The writer Huda Hassan has published an excellent interview with the Combahee River Collective’s Barbara Smith, centered on the way the group brought awareness to several unsolved murders of Black women in Boston in the late ’70s and “provided a bridge during a time of incredible crisis.”

• I, too, am trying to “embrace my inner hag!”

• There’s a new scripted comedy called Minx, about the first erotic magazine for women—not a true story, but based on history, and apparently about to join Euphoria in its liberal use of full-frontal male nudity. Cheers to righting a true disparity.

REVENGE PORN AND OTHER CRIMES

Sex Tapes Really Aren’t About Sex

Hulu’s Pam & Tommy is a reminder of the many ways we treat women’s pain as entertainment

BY TRACY CLARK-FLORY

PAMELA ANDERSON AND TOMMY LEE, 1995 (PHOTO BY S. GRANITZ/WIREIMAGE)

This week brought the finale of Hulu’s Pam & Tommy, a limited-series dramedy about the leak of a private sex tape that none of us should know anything about. We’re talking eight whole episodes reenacting the ’90s-era theft and viral spread of an explicit home movie starring celebrities Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee. That’s more than five hours of television devoted to replaying a privacy violation.

The tape’s leak in 1995 was paradigm-shifting and emblematic of a cultural moment, so it’s possible to imagine a worthwhile critical retrospective. Instead, Pam & Tommy is less a reconsideration of the leak than a nostalgic reliving of it. It’s less about the tape than of the tape, which ushered in an ongoing era of stolen moments treated as entertainment.

Anderson and Lee’s video was historic as the first celebrity sex tape, spawning dozens of direct imitations, but also setting the stage for whole new privacy violations, like the 2014 hack targeting famous women’s nudes (a.k.a “The Fappening”). The tape’s leak teed up an explosion of nonconsensual entertainment online—and not just starring celebrities. Soon, everyday women had to reckon with the public humiliation of everything from “upskirting” videos to “revenge porn.” Fast forward over two decades and the majority of states have had to legally address nonconsensual pornography (or nonconsensual image abuse, as some experts now call it). The next challenging legal frontier: “deepfake porn,” where a person’s face is seamlessly swapped onto pornographic material.

We’re living in a cultural moment of re-evaluation around the sexism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, which no doubt helped greenlight Pam & Tommy

But let’s be clear: leaked sex tapes aren’t really about sex. The most famous ones—as with Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian—are defined by entitlement, trespass, violation, and embarrassment, vis-à-vis a woman. This is a fundamental part of the attraction: these videos provide forbidden access. Kevin Blatt, a self-described celebrity sex tape broker, says the appeal is seeing something you “weren’t supposed to see.” Even when there are questions about a sex tape being leaked for fame and publicity, there’s still the suspension of disbelief that allows viewers the fantasy of crossing boundaries, of getting what is not freely given. The entire meaning of the tape changes if a woman intentionally and openly participates in its creation and release.

Pam & Tommy itself adds another layer of non-consent to the original violation of the tape’s leak: Anderson wanted nothing to do with the series. (While Lee has voiced support for Pam & Tommy, Anderson reportedly finds its release “very painful.”) The show was made anyway—and then promoted as “feminist” for being sympathetic to her experience.

In reality, the show identifies at the start with Rand Gauthier (Seth Rogen), the contractor who stole the tape after remodeling the couple’s mansion. We’re given a comedic, rollicking justification for the theft: Tommy Lee (Sebastian Stan) is an over-the-top asshole clad in a banana hammock who barks unreasonable orders at Rand. These early episodes are driven by laughs—take the scene where Tommy has a conversation with his own penis, which talks back via cringey animation.

We’re living in a cultural moment of re-evaluation around the sexism of the ’90s and ’00s, which no doubt helped greenlight Pam & Tommy, but the show’s true impulse is to laugh and wax nostalgic.

Let’s be clear: leaked sex tapes aren’t really about sex

The series does eventually get around to inviting identification with Pam (Lily James), instead of literal and figurative dicks. It depicts Pam’s struggle to be taken seriously as an actor as her Baywatch lines are cut to prioritize zoomed-in shots of her butt. After the sex tape is leaked, Pam & Tommy spotlights her pain, portraying Pam as having a devastating miscarriage amid the stress of the violation. The series feels like an unintentional meta-commentary on the many ways we are entitled to, and entertained by, women’s pain—not just with leaked sex tapes but also with limited-run TV series dramatizing leaked sex tapes.

Eventually, Anderson is shown in a brutal and shaming deposition for her lawsuit against Penthouse’s Bob Guccione, as she tries to stop the magazine from publishing stills from the tape. She is cross-examined about her sex life and even forced to watch parts of the tape in a room packed with men. We’re meant to feel outraged, but that outrage arrives after Pam & Tommy has already had its giddy fun.

LILY JAMES AS PAMELA ANDERSON DURING HER DEPOSITION. (SCREENSHOT VIA HULU/ANNAPURNA)

The tone-deafness of the first half of the series is only matched by the inappropriateness of its handling of partner violence. Though it’s not depicted in the series, Lee was sentenced in 1998 to six months in jail for felony spousal abuse following an incident in which Anderson accused him of kicking her while she held her 7-week-old son; she had “a broken fingernail and red marks on her back,” according to police.

The series portrays several early red flags in the relationship—like Tommy calling Pam non-stop and following her uninvited on a trip to Mexico—but treats them as fun material. Pam & Tommy leaves Lee’s arrest, and their divorce, as a literal postscript at the end of the series. It’s a sanitized version of events, referring only to “a physical fight in the couple’s kitchen.” Hulu has cheekily promoted the show as “the greatest love story ever sold.”

All these years later, it’s tempting to believe that we have enough perspective to critically revisit this long-ago sex tape leak and other misogynies of yore. Instead, the last two decades have created a convenient new cover for exploitation: Pam & Tommy delights in replaying the violation, only to abruptly pivot toward superficial wokeness. It makes claims of a redemptive narrative while risking retraumatizing one of its subjects. Ultimately, the show is an accidental testament to the many ways women’s suffering is consumed as entertainment.

You can call it “reflection,” but we’re not nearly as far away from these events as we might like to think.

ASK A LAWYER

Does the Law Do Enough to Protect Victims of Revenge Porn?

BY SHANNON MELERO

CARRIE GOLDBERG (PHOTO BY CRAIG BARRITT VIA GETTY IMAGES FOR GLAMOUR)

Decades after Pamela Anderson unwillingly introduced the broader public to the concept of revenge porn, has the law gotten any better at protecting victims? I asked lawyer and author Carrie Goldberg—owner of victims’ rights law firm C.A.Goldberg, PLLC.

What are some of the barriers to trying revenge porn cases? Is it particularly difficult to prove guilt/intent?

Carrie Goldberg: All states have criminal laws that make it illegal to film or record somebody without their consent in places—the bedroom, bathroom, changing room—where the person has the expectation of privacy. These laws are usually called video voyeurism or unlawful surveillance….And 48 states now have laws that criminalize the nonconsensual publishing of intimate images and videos.

The problem is that it’s up to law enforcement to decide when to prosecute. Unfortunately, crimes that predominantly impact women and girls—like sexual assault, revenge porn, and intimate partner violence—are notoriously under-prosecuted. One reason that law enforcers don’t prosecute is that many criminal laws require proof of the offender’s motive and, specifically, a showing that the motive was to harass or abuse the victim. But we know from working with victims that [predators can have] a range of other motives such as money, clout, boredom, or entertainment.

About a dozen states also have civil remedies for victims. In other words, a victim can sue their offender…[But] suing never resolves what is often a victim’s main priority—getting that material the hell off the internet.

The internet, as they say, is forever. So what happens to victims who [do pursue criminal charges] over materials uploaded online? Does the law offer any assurances that those images will be removed, and if so, whose responsibility is it to remove them?

There is no legal fix for getting pictures off the internet. Criminal cases have the goal of punishing the offender, while civil cases have the goal of “making the victim whole” through financial recovery. But, there is federal law, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which has been interpreted by our courts to shield platforms (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube) from any responsibility for material that users post.

It really falls on the victim to try to use things like copyright law and appeal to the goodwill of websites and social media companies and to be persistently searching the internet for material.

What needs to change to better protect victims?

The current laws are not adequate….While we’ve made so much progress in the last decade with getting new laws, we still need federal law. In honor of International Women’s Day, several lawmakers reintroduced the Stopping Harmful Image Exploitation and Limiting Distribution Act (the “Shield Act”). This is bicameral and bipartisan legislation that makes the nonconsensual dissemination of intimate images a federal crime.

Another gulf in our laws involves celebrity victims. We’re now seeing defendants try to claim that sharing nude images of celebrities is protected speech. With Pamela Anderson, we saw a court hideously claim that she had no legal rights because her body belonged to the public. We need the right of privacy to extend to everybody—whether you are a teacher, student, nurse, congress member, cashier, or supermodel.

You have our enthusiastic consent to share this newsletter with all of your friends. 

FOLLOW THE METEOR

Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Sign up for your own copy, sent Wednesdays and Saturdays.

[email protected]