Sexy Shirley Eaton image via peter-noster.
That’s the topic of this week’s Chronicle/SF Gate column, My erotica is not your child porn: When a sex blogger’s content is used for spam evil, Violet Blue has advice. It’s about pay-per-post, geek erotica, and child porn splogs — a true story I found myself helping someone navigate last week. In it we get great advice about dealing with RSS content theft from Metblogs, and I tell exactly what to do when you come across illegal (and horrifying) porn. I researched the topic earlier this year when a reader emailed me in disgust, shock and panicked trauma when she (a porn-lovin’ gal) had accidentally found something awful. I don’t know what she found, and I couldn’t help with her certain PTSD, but I could tell her who to report to. (Right now over half the links in my column are missing; hopefully they’ll be fixed when you wake up and read this in the morning — seems like a glitch, as they’re *not* links to sex sites.) Here’s a snip from the piece:
When sex-positive feminist blogger Adorkable Grrl wrote an explicit erotic piece about geek girls needing love too, she chose to publish it under a pseudonym and try out a different blogging platform, just for kicks. She signed up to be paid $2 by the pay-per-post service Thisisby.us, and off went her sweet story of nerdy Eros into the world for others to enjoy.
Or so she hoped.
But the last place she thought it would end up was as child porn search engine linkbait on a splog (spam blog). A few days after her piece went live, she discovered, to her utter horror, via a friend’s Google search of her pseudonym, that her content had been republished in full on a splog under the vile post title, “12 year old girls get f-d: LemmeFind.us US Meta Search Engine.”
Adorkable immediately issued a blog post statement saying, “I am horrified. Just horrified. I am literally shaking and about to throw-up. I feel HORRIBLY violated. Like I’ve been raped, even.” Adorkable e-mailed me, saying she felt violated one step further, as her sexual expression through writing gives her feminine empowerment, telling me:
“Reading you and Audacia Ray (wakingvixen.com) and Amber Rhea has really made me more confident in feeling like … there is a time and place for most things — and the erotica I’ve been attracted to since I was a young woman (reading Anais Nin and Diane di Prima) wasn’t wrong or bad … and, that wanting to WRITE in that manner was artful. The thing that hurt me the most about the whole situation was the idea of having something I considered to be coy, sexy and artful associated with something clearly delineated in my head as actually being wrong and potentially harmful … both to me and to any child … by proxy of that site even existing and allowing child pornography to be posted.”
Adorkable Grrl didn’t just write a blog post and send e-mails; she also sent a cease and desist to the offending Web site, and asked for my advice. Being no stranger to having my content reposted without permission, or having my RSS feeds pilfered, I did a quick public records (whois) lookup for the URL offering her content as child porn bait, and discovered that the site was registered in India, but hosted by American company GoDaddy. I sent Adorkable Grrl the information, telling her to take extreme measures (…)
Link.
Update: SF Gate fixed my links, phew. It just sux that’s the version that went out in the RSS. And, GoDaddy sent me a *great* panicked email in the afternoon, saying they were just the registrar, not the host (which was amended)… They were polite but also not; their rep told me they *never* heard from Adorkable Grrl. (“In keeping with our interest in self-policing, we asked our 24/7 Abuse Department to review this thoroughly. We found no complaints tied to LemmeFInd.us, adorkable grrl or [redacted] (the blogger).”) I politely pointed them to her October 12 post about contacting GoDaddy and not getting a response.
