the age of political revenge porn has arrived

Old media and old values have finally met our stunning lack of privacy in the modern world.

America is a country of old men, by old men. President Biden is 81 years old. His main opponent in the upcoming election, Trump, will be 78 by the times votes are cast. The average member of the House is 58 years old. The average senator is 65 and getting older. Two thirds of voters in the last nationwide election were 45 and older, and 30% were senior citizens. Older white voters and their priorities, views, and anger, remain extremely influential in American politics thanks to systemic gaming of voter eligibility, registration, and gerrymandering. This is in large part why political media coverage is stuck in the past. Their average viewer is between 61 and 66 years old.

And this is why it was interesting to see Politico, the stogy progenitor of horse race, old media political coverage, tackle the case of Susanna Gibson in Virginia. In a very, very tight competition to control the state’s general assembly, she could have won a critical seat but lost her campaign by a mere thousand votes. The assumed reason? GOP operatives got their hands on a dark web video of a livestream in which she had sex with her husband, then shopped it to various newspapers as a scandalous tale. If you think the editors took the bait, unfortunately, yes, they did, treating the story as if it was a classic case of sex and corruption when in reality it was revenge porn.

Thankfully, Politico took a different tack here, highlighting that a) voters didn’t seem to care very much about the sex tape, and b) with more and more Millennials going into politics, stories like this are going to keep repeating themselves because some 9 in 10 of us have sent nudes or were recorded doing something sexual because when we were old enough to really get our freak on, online dating and phones with cameras were ubiquitous. There are hundreds, if not thousands of Susanna Gibsons out there, and this is merely the first case that got serious attention. What will happen next year and the cycle after that? Is this going to be our new normal?

Obviously, the old media style coverage was traumatizing for Gibson because instead of treating it as the crime and invasion of privacy it was, they treated it as if this was a public interest story, similar to New York’s Mike Itkis’ choice to star in a porn video as a PR stunt. Their defense for this angle was the fact that Gibson used a cam website that was popular with sex workers for those livestreams, and could have theoretically cashed in from her viewers. Old media tradition says to frame it as the typical tabloid fodder suggesting that a person with such “loose morals” should not be allowed near positions of power. But, as Politico notes, this view is as fresh as trilobite fossils.

If anything, it represents a clear lack of understanding that our digital and meatspace lives have been fused in ways that make distinctions between the two more complex and nuanced than “just log off” or “just don’t post it.” With the sheer amount of nudes exchanged digitally by people who may have never thought of running for office until very recently, it’s too late to not post it. Likewise, not everything done on the web was meant to be public. Livestreams are just that, streams. They can be recorded, but it’s not the intention for their existence. And finally, even if there’s no nude, generative AI these days can easily make one and create a scandal out of thin air.

The bottom line here is that Gibson was with her husband and was not caught having an affair. She was caught by a third party - that was breaking the law - having fun as an exhibitionist to an audience moderated by her, while GOP operatives also broke a few laws by using that video to vex a political candidate. Millennials aren’t going to find this disqualifying in the least because many of us could end up in the same boat, and we, as a generation, are just way more comfortable with sex in general while Baby Boomers pretend they weren’t far more sex obsessed and feigning outrage at the idea that someone was experimenting and exploring, especially if they’re younger.

At some point very soon, it’s going to be so expected that a politician either has some nude pics or videos, or there are deepfakes of them flying around the web, no one is even going to bat an eye when a story similar to Gibson’s appears in the news, if it will even be deemed newsworthy enough to appear in the first place. Perhaps this is how our societies become much more laid back and less sexually repressed? By realizing that in an age when 4K cameras pointed at us around the clock, there will always be a pic or a video prudes among us consider scandalous, that all of us have our own fun, and that pretending this is somehow taboo is getting stupid and boring?