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When Making Fun of a Creep on Tinder Gets Your Photos on a Revenge Porn Site

An artist who draws crass dudes from online dating sites learned about revenge porn the hard way.
"Well, I'd just like to say that by boobs are fab. I'm glad to have them on the internet, but they are MINE to post on the internet, no one else's to use against me to shame or blackmail so check 'em out courtesy of me, no one else," Gensler wrote.

For more than a year, artist Anna Gensler has been retaliating against men who send crude and objectifying messages on online dating services through art. As a result, this week she found herself posted on a revenge porn website by an angry subject of her work.

Gensler's Instagram, instagranniepants, has gained a following of more than 46,000 with her illustrations of aggressive, explicit messages from men she meets on the internet. Her method is described in her account bio: "Objectifying men who objectify women in 3 easy steps: Man sends crude line via internet. Draw him naked. Send portrait to lucky man, enjoy results."

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On Sunday, Gensler uploaded a drawing of a particularly rude exchange she had with a man she met on Tinder. After she sent him the portrait, he became enraged and threatened to sue her for slander. He apparently settled instead on posting their exchange on myex.com, a website devoted to posting non-consensual nude photos of women along with identifying information like first and last names, Facebook profiles, and places of employment. He posted the same exchange she had already instagrammed, along with some non-pornographic photos of her he took from her Tinder profile.

Gensler said she considers herself lucky. They were not "bad" pictures, her personal information, like her last name and address, were not posted, and she was able to get the photos down quickly. But outraged by the premise of the website, which she says charges women $400 to have their images taken down, she protested by posting a topless selfie to her Instagram account with nipples obscured by emoji (Instagram doesn't allow full nudity on the site).

"Empowered women online is extremely threatening to some men."

"If people are going to try to put pictures online they think I should be embarrassed about online, I will just put a picture of myself on the internet," she told Motherboard. "You guys can see my boobs, that's not the problem, the problem is other people taking images and using them to make them feel bad."

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She said this incident was relatively benign compared to her experiences in the past, including one where a man was sending her specific and frequent death threats. Gensler reported the threats to the police, who took more than three months to respond. They ultimately told Gensler they didn't think the man posed a serious threat.

"It's crazy the police can basically say 'We are going to gamble with your life and assume its an empty threat,' because for some people it's not," she said. The threats since stopped.

Gensler said men's reactions to her portraits are usually predictably negative, but generally less intense.

"They really do just throw tantrums," she said. "I think they're just used to having no ramifications of any kind when they behave like this. It doesnt matter if it's a cartoon, or any other way you respond in defiance, they aren't used it, and they don't like getting a taste of their own medicine."

Carrie A. Goldberg, an attorney who litigates online sexual privacy and revenge porn, said she has worked with dozens of women who have had intimate images of themselves distributed on sites like the one Gensler discovered.

She said sometimes the posts are made by a jilted ex-lover, but often it's by somebody else—a hacker, a hostile ex-friend, or someone who has stolen images from their device. She said women like Gensler who use their platforms to call out sexism are especially vulnerable targets online.

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"Empowered women online is extremely threatening to some men," she said. "When victims expose men for online indecency, there's a snowballing community of cyber-sheep at the ready to take her down—as if they're the watchdogs for keeping the internet a safe place to abuse."

She said if the site demands money to have photos taken down, like myex.com, it is extortion and is illegal. Kevin Bollaert, a San Diego man behind a similar website called YouGotPosted.com was recently sentenced to 18 years in prison for identity theft and extortion charges surrounding the site.

However, simply posting the photos is perfectly legal in many states.

"This situation highlights why criminal revenge porn laws are essential for deterring the conduct," Goldberg said.

Gensler said in the end, she wasn't angry that her information was posted to the website, but became more angry after researching it.

"It is just insane to me that it is not revenge porn that's illegal, they have to get caught on some sort of technicality because I guess the laws haven't caught up with it yet," she said. "I guess most people are embarrassed to speak out about it, but I have no shame."