Unzipping Taboos: Candid Conversations about Sex - Digital Intimidation: How Shame Becomes the Perfect Weapon

Episode Date: December 17, 2025

In this episode of Unzipping Taboos, we’re digging into the world of digital intimidation — sextortion, deepfakes, and the non-consensual sharing of intimate content — and the sexual shame that allows these threats to take hold. We each share our own encounters with sextortion attempts and unpack how these messages are crafted to provoke panic, silence, and self-blame. The tech may be newer, but the tactic is familiar: it leverages the shame we’ve been conditioned to fear.We talk about how sexual curiosity and watching porn are still treated as something illicit, and how that judgment becomes the leverage behind digital coercion. We explore why the term “revenge porn” misses the point, what the new Take It Down Act means, and how deepfakes are creating a new layer of harm and confusion around consent and credibility. Throughout our conversation, we rebuke the idea that victims are responsible for what was done to them and highlight the importance of digital literacy and open, shame-free dialogue.At its core, this episode is about understanding how digital threats work and rejecting the shame they depend on. If you’ve ever felt fear around your digital footprint or worried about intimate content online, this conversation offers clarity, compassion, and a reminder that your sexuality isn’t the problem — the stigma is.If you received a sextortion email you can report it to the Federal Trade CommissionIf you need help getting out of a controlling relationship, you can visit the National Domestic Violence Hotline. You’ll find information on their page for how to chat, text or call if you need help. If you have a story, thoughts and/or a topic or question for Dr. Sue and Charlie please share your ideas here:  ⁠Show suggestions

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Unzipping Taboos, candid conversations about sex with Dr. Sue and Charlie. We're here to explore the questions you've always been curious about, but don't always feel comfortable asking out loud. No judgment, no shame, just open, honest conversations. So zip down and let's get candid. And before we get started today, we have partnered with jackandjilladult.com, one of the top online adult stores. And because you're here with us, you get 20% off with code UNZIPPING20. So now that I got that business out of the way, today we're going to be unzipping the digital landscape and the, let's see, what'd you coin it, Dr. C? The downside of digital. The downside of digital. Yeah. Kind of specifically focusing

on certain ways sex and shame around sex is leveraged to intimidate people digitally. but before we unzip that i am here with dr sue hey dr sue how's it going hey charlie it's going uh i'm a little pissed because of the topic it's going well but i'm a little pissed yeah a little a little angry a little a little like excited we're talking about a little six seven and it was then that dr sue murdered charlie and there were no more episodes the last i ever heard of charlie and surprisingly the episode never aired i feel so hip that i worked that in as a teacher way too old to do that shit no as a teacher sorry for the teachers who are listening to this and i know at least two of you do religiously i'm sorry for charlie i

apologize so on that note would you like to give our listeners a little bit about your background so i'm a teacher so that pissed me no um so i um i have a phd in human sexuality education and i feel like i said this a while ago and so i'm just gonna stick with it and like so i do the professor thing like that's the majority of the work that i do i work in academia um i teach i write i publish i collect data on a pleasure survey oh maybe we should throw that into our description if we may though i have to make sure i can do that for irb anyway um i do yeah so i research i talk i present i write i do all the professory things which are important and i really do love my job but then on the side in my spare time when i'm not doing

unzipping taboos um i do sex education for essentially anyone who wants me to talk to them so i work with um people across the lifespan and um i also do hey dr sue so every sunday people submit anonymous text questions to me and every sunday i answer one of them and post the answer at 9 p.m eastern all over social media and all that fun stuff and when i was teaching at one of the schools in northeast mid-atlantic i don't know where the lines are anymore um i actually developed an undergraduate i had been teaching a graduate class with a friend of mine for um future educators and therapists called um it was focusing on sex ed in the digital world sex ed and technology was kind of what it was called and then um for an undergraduate class

i actually redesigned that i made it for like just undergrads on sex and technology and we talked about some of this quite a bit which is why i'm pissed off because i remember where some of those conversations went. Anyway, that may go in record as one of my longest introductions. So now I get to turn over to Charlie. For those of you who know Charlie and have yet to meet Charlie, Charlie is our curious co-host who is always ready to just kind of take a look at all those taboo topics that we so rarely talk about openly. Now it's your turn. That's me. I'm Charlie. I talk about things openly. I'm friends with Dr. Sue. so we're flipping now uh-huh uh-huh it's all about balance i almost did it again i knew you

were actually it helps when it's off camera um hi everyone i'm charlie um if you are new to our our podcast with this episode uh the thing that you should know about me is that i am just as Dr. Sue said while introducing me, curious. And I have that curiosity just about our humanity and how we are navigating this journey on this rock together and the impacts that we have on each other and some of the ways that we can challenge taboos, societal expectations. That's always been a core part of me from my earliest memories, never thinking, I never thought that I wasn't eligible to do something or feel something or act a certain way because I'm a girl, a woman in society. And so a lot of the things that I grew up being corrected for outside of my house

and my parents, although my parents had their little hangups too, but not as many as society tried to corral me into just never really made sense to me and so I that's I think where this this core principle of mine is to meet things with curiosity because like why are you telling me that I'm human I have two legs I have two arms I'm capable I want to I'm interested I'm curious so why can't I and that I think is really what drives my desire to peel back layers and challenge challenge things that just don't seem like it's benefiting the greater population we're at large um especially that's a certain part of the population but right right and that's where where i was about to head um where we have these marginalized um communities uh and so i like to

challenge the things that the ways that um we try to keep those marginalized peoples in um in defined boxes that they had no say in so with that dr charlie that downside of digital and using society's fascination with shaming people around sex and sexuality yeah so i think we were going to talk about where do we start unpeeling this onion yeah in one of in in this mini in this mini show of like 10 episodes now um we started talking about this with two real big things in mind um and that was revenge porn which we're actually not hearing about as much and we can talk a little bit about why um and then i called it you called it something better than i did um sextortion sextortion yes um which i have been a victim of so i don't usually share much about

myself back at the beginning of the heyday i got one of those so i feel like maybe we should start with that because i just said that same yeah we can give her i mean i i experienced something similar so maybe we should explain it because you always so the sex store the and there's a couple different ways but we were talking about something really specific which is where you get the you've been watching i don't even know if mine said porn in the video in the email it's been so long i mean this was a decade you were late to the scene my dear um i got mine a while ago it's just a baby it was basically like we know you've been watching porn and we've been recording you while you're doing it and i'm like and the funniest thing is that i got that way back in the day

before i had a webcam and i'm like are you in my house no you haven't and then it was if you don't send us money so this is how long ago now they ask for bitcoin um if you don't send us money then we're going to share all the images we have and like your search history with everyone who knows you and your cats and dogs um and when you first get that email it's a little like it's jarring yeah it's jarring um and and especially for me because it was long enough ago that I didn't have a webcam like built into my computer I was just kind of like am I being watched like for me there was more of a stalkery feel than anything else um yours was a little bit different it was it was so I don't want to share yours please share um so mine was

within the last year actually and I received the email and it was um it was telling me that I that they'd been that I'd been watching they know what I've been watching they've recorded the things that I was doing while I was watching it my guy with like a little judgment sentence after it and that they were going to um release that footage of me watching whatever i was watching that they had and then they included a um google map image of the street that they thought that i lived on and said does this which was hilarious because then they said does this look familiar and they included the shot that they got from google and and that's when i just kind of laughed I was like, no, it really doesn't.

And it's funny because I remember you showing me the picture and I'm like, wait, that's not your house. It's not even close. No. And so Dr. Sue and I had a good laugh about it. But the thing that when I was talking with sharing this with Dr. Sue, what caught me was their whole premise was me feeling ashamed that I watched porn. Yeah. And possibly masturbating to it. yeah on camera that was their whole premise and so that was the one of the things that i said to

dr sue was that like i have no shame about the porn that i watch absolutely none i have no shame and and i have no shame in how i enjoy it so go ahead i guess yeah and it was a bit and it was a bitcoin ransom yeah and so like first things first if you're getting images like that if you're getting that message i'm gonna say nine times out of ten it's it's crap and i want to say that just in case someone actually does and the stuff gets released it's always a chance yeah um you can actually report it i think you can which i did yeah so if you get one of those reported please don't pay the person especially if they're asking for bitcoin but even if they're asking for other things don't do it um it is basically designed to just fleece you of your money but but also let's

talk about that shame piece because that is the inherent piece of it um so there's two things there's one well three things well if i if i think hard enough are we gonna do a spanish inquisition thing here again it's been a minute it has sorry now my brain's running through that okay so there's several things three things three things thing one is that you were watching porn and should feel ashamed now if you're under age i legally should tell you that you should not be watching porn um i will say and i don't usually draw a line on porn but you absolutely should not be watching child porn that is illegal that is not freedom of expression it is not covered by the first amendment um child porn is illegal yeah full stop um so i i want to make sure i'm saying

that because that's going to leave me in the next piece so but so yeah the first is that um you should be ashamed of the fact that you're watching porn most humans watch porn most humans watch yeah so oh sorry i didn't warn you about that i know i just blew everyone's mind um most people watch porn at some point some people are daily watchers maybe hourly watchers um some people watch it only when they're in specific moods some people watch it when they want to do some things and their partners won't so they watch porn about it to kind of get off that way some people watch it with their partners some people watch it without their partner so like i can't even there's a multitude of reasons yeah i can't even think of this is

probably why we've never done an episode on why people on people watching porn because it's just like all the people for so many reasons we did do a porn episode where we covered a lot of that okay go go check that out so the first thing that they i'm now doing the spanish inquisition thing the first thing is that you shouldn't be watching porn if you do you feel you should feel guilty and then depending on how it's phrased it may be the type of porn that you're watching and this can really cue into some people because there are some people who live out their interests or their curiosities um or those things that might be taboo i'm so bad at working the name the show and i finally got one um but if you're straight and you're watching two women having sex

two men having sex like that could really and you're already struggling with it like if you're just like yeah this is what i watch woohoo for me but yeah for people who may be embarrassed by it because that doesn't match what people know about them um for some people who may be interested in fetishes and so they watch it and they don't think they might ever want to do it or they don't have a partner who'd be interested but they get off on it like that might feel a little more invasive than just you watch porn it's when we and they're not going to name it if someone says i know you were watching x type of porn at this time on this day and you were you've got a stalker issue and you should absolutely call the police yeah um so they're going to say the type of stuff you're

watching. But if you already are feeling guilty about that, or shamed about what you're watching, because it's different, or it's not normal. And for those of you not watching, there are so many air quotes right now. That can really tie into that. So those are Yeah, well, yeah, I just want to tag on to how vague they the, the purposeful vagueness of the language that they use in these emails because it's meant to tap into your panic your fear your shame and um and the fear of being potentially discovered so the language is super super super super vague yes and again if it's not and it's accurately not yeah that's that's different that is not that is not what we're talking about that is that is much more of a threat yeah um so it was two so one is just

watching porn in general and two might be the type of porn that you're watching which is always really interesting for me because when people say hey i'm really interested in a fetish i don't know if that's something i want to pursue or not and i don't really know anything about it my answer is go watch some porn about it like see what it looks like and if it might be slightly dangerous like if there's um if there's any kind of pain involved or i'm getting so many questions again about ball busting i was getting them for a while and then i stopped and now i'm getting a ton of questions about ball busting again um i don't know um we may have to do an episode on that and there's no shame around it being seasonal i'm just no shame around it being seasonal no

shame around it in general but my feeling is if you've never done it you should probably watch a video on how to do it safely or do some i don't feel like reading is very fun with that like if you're gonna if you want to know about ball busting man watch some videos get turned on by it yeah I feel like many of us are visual yes uh learners now so especially with things like like if someone is telling you how to tie a knot I would never be able to learn that by directions like I will actually hold up this was supposed to be the beginning of an origami piece I was trying to it was supposed to be handcuffs this is where I got stuck um because it was all it was all like from a book that had no narration or anything and I'm like I don't understand

yeah so for me if someone wants to show me how to do this step by step let's get on a video um oh sorry for the people i was on the phone but i was on a video call doing that no one knew what i was doing sorry if you're watching this and just found out what i was origami-ing in the background i just realized that on the call with a no they knew i was doing something and they had no idea why and i just got i was like oh i can't do this and i put it down and sorry anyway yeah thing number three thing number three oh wait let me finish that one um so yeah so watching the videos on things like if you're into fire play or needle play or any kind of kink like that where someone has the potential to get hurt i absolutely recommend watching videos about it because you

want to do it safely like that's a great thing to do and a great way to learn so don't if you're shamed by what you're watching you're also probably not ready to do the behavior three is that you may or may not have been masturbating to the thing so and for some people they may masturbate on camera for their partners which is going to tie us i should have done that last so we could segue better there's the segue for when it comes up later um sometimes they'll do it live in front of their partner um as a way of getting off especially if they're separated by distance sometimes they'll record it and send it to their partner um but the idea is that there's a lot of reasons why people may masturbate with their camera on i am a big believer that if you're

not using your camera it should be off or closed or disconnected um but the idea is that you were masturbating and that's bad and you should feel ashamed for that so we've got three layers of shame right three layers of shame right now and then i called it and then the fourth um is that people that you know and love would be so embarrassed by your behavior which is hysterical because if it was someone i knew and someone was like someone you knew did this i'd be like huh interesting technique but uh yeah good for you like maybe rate it and send it back to them um but this idea that if people knew that you are watching porn and masturbating like everyone will shame you were doing so there's so many levels there and then depending on how you

feel and your age and what you're watching and how you're behaving like that could really trigger some things for you yeah and I just want to add like in my story my for me it was it was very much I have no shame and and I have the luxury of not feeling um shame shameful about the porn that I enjoy and how I enjoy it but I can absolutely understand how these emails because really when I first read that email I had that visceral reaction of like fuck yep and then took a minute took a beat reread it realized there was intentional vague language but sometimes if you are if you are married with you know like or you have a certain position in your community or a certain job in your community that that email is really fucking scary yeah if you are not out to

your parents and you get that and you've been watching gay porn like yeah that's terrifying yeah so the moral of the story is if you get it and it's super vague ignore it if you want to forward it on to us oh that might be a new thing for us I mean absolutely if you were if it hits in a way and you and you try to take a beat and you still are like I've got something's happening I'm certain of it you can send it to us and we can read it and we can let you know you know this is we don't think this is that we see vague language here um report it here's the links to report it um because we are we are here um for for you all but again yes and if it is super specific and super accurate so here's a picture of your house

and here's a picture of you going into your house and here's what i know you're watching at 1202 a.m That is different. That is stalking. And please don't send it to us. Don't take the time to send it to us. Go straight to the cops for that. Yeah. Every moment is valuable in that situation.

And also be aware that the cops may not take that as seriously as you want them to. Because of the shame we're talking about. Yep. So just kind of keep that in mind. All right. So you didn't pay the Bitcoin. I did not. No.

I texted you. Yes. And then you showed me that. And then we called. And then we laughed about it. And then I said, and also, I'm still going to watch it. I feel so like literally mine was a decade ago. It was, I feel like I should have watched it.

It just shows how little their techniques have changed. I know. Well, it wasn't Bitcoin because Bitcoin wasn't a thing back then. And then did they have the Google Street view? I don't think Google existed. No. It did. But now I kind of feel like I want to, no, I probably don't have that email anymore. If only I'd known I would be doing a show about it 10 years later.

How dare you not anticipate that? I know. Damn it. So that's that. So that's one way that we do shame. And then the other is shaming for behaviors that you may have engaged in. And I say may because we're going to talk about a couple different layers of this. And that's the revenge porn. Yes. do you want to do an intro on revenge porn if you have a sex tape with your partner don't be

an asshole and that's the end of the show no um so what revenge porn is i was kind of going for the dude yes don't be an asshole is definitely part don't be an asshole and release it um but yeah what is revenge porn um revenge porn uh revenge porn is when you have uh any kind of recording sexually explicit recording photo right anything like that um that you release without the other person's consent or knowledge and so then you're putting their image out there as sexually explicit image out there of them that again they did not consent to and they have no knowledge of and and i want to be really careful they may have consented to the image being taken

right but not being published right and so when we say published sometimes i mean there were no no there there were definitely places where like that were hosting it and we don't really see those as much anymore because there's new laws about that which we'll get to in a minute um but there are definitely places it's like oh your partner pissed you off send the porn here and we'll post it um that's one type of revenge porn but also sometimes it's as simple as like sending it to a buddy or sending it to a group chat or sending it that way so i don't i don't want people thinking well i didn't publish it online i just sent it to my best friend or like yeah all that sharing it even within your known circle is considered revenge porn yeah and so the

idea here is it is the distribution of that image or that video yeah and i really don't like the term revenge porn because well one the word porn has so much of a connotation right like we hear porn and we have this a lot of people not we have a very different reaction than most people the word porn yeah um but for a lot of people it's this idea of like i'm gonna post this thing that someone did and it was wrong and it's porn like they were behaving in a way that was unacceptable and shameful so there's a shame layer through there this is just the shame episode i feel like digital shame digital shame uh the digital age exploits shame yeah but i do want to hold on i gotta take a note oh I get off camera sorry about that yeah talk for a second while I'm writing note

so really for me this this revenge porn and I and we'll dive into more of why Dr. Sue doesn't like that term um the another piece of this is it you don't even have to be an ex-partner to experience or be a victim of this because it can all, it often is tied to, um, abusive relationships, mental or physical, emotional, abusive relationships, because it's used as a form of control. It is, I'm going to, I'm going to make you feel safe enough to say, Hey, it'd be really awesome if we could record this, or let me take these pictures of you. And then something turns um some some dynamic changes or this person you know because abuses like abusers use a formula where it's a gradual it's like the toad in the frog in a boiling pot they don't know as the heat

is getting turned up um so then it's used as uh like black blackmail within the relationship to control whether or not the um the the victim leaves or reports or does something to get out of the situation that they're in yep so did i stall along i mean that was important to say yes no absolutely so why don't you like the term revenge one thank you yeah i had to take a note my brain wasn't doing two things at once um so one i don't like the word the fact that it's porn because that is used to shame the person that the images are of and was really fascinating perpetuate it perpetuates the shame around porn around porn consumption yes and and what's always interesting

is that like if there are two people in the video or in the image it doesn't seem to hit both of them with the same level of shame but that's that's another conversation the other thing I don't like we have so many episodes out of this one um the other the other thing is that it's this idea of revenge that I am doing this because someone hurt me and so I am doing this to get even not what it really is which is I am violating trust and exploiting someone and possibly putting their life in danger their health in danger their job in jeopardy like it's not I'm doing these things because I'm pissed it's I was hurt and so I'm going to lash out and revenge and it's not revenge it is manipulative bullshit so but manipulative sex images does not really carry

the same weight as revenge porn but I do think it's one of those things that's that's where the words are important I mean words are always important but I think here the language is really important because I inherently it's the first word is about I'm victimizing I am going to do something to someone because they hurt me when really what you're doing is willingly victimizing someone right for whatever happened real or real or not under the guise of you being a victim so you're balancing the scales so to speak right and then again that word I don't have to keep diving into porn so so yeah um that's why i hate the term there's so many terms i haven't hated a term in a while though if you think about it's been a minute so i don't think the term is so

great but i use it because it's it's one of the terms that people know and i have it's in the zeitgeist it's what we use right and i do know people who've been a victim of this but i found recently that we're talking about it less and less sort of um because there was legislation that was passed it's federal law and it was passed we all know i don't know years and numbers i want to say it was passed actually earlier this year 2025 finally um and it's basically called the take it down act and so what it says is was i right was it 2025 are you double checking me you're fact checking me live fact checking april 28th 2025 congress okay there we go down act so basically says that um you shouldn't be putting these images up and if you do put these images up and someone

said that is my image take it down that sites have x number of hours to take it down and just because of what's happening with that law being passed there were several states that had laws before that but now that it's a federal thing i feel like there's more of a risk for people who are hosting those kinds of sites however it doesn't stop i don't i wouldn't do it so i don't want to use me as an example let's use me as an example because i'm safe so i'm in a relationship my partner pisses me off and I decide to send Charlie like oh look what this person did last week this freak and I send the images to Charlie that is also still revenge porn it may not be on a website but it's out without my partner knowing so I yeah so it's it is it does not have to be on

a website somewhere though that does happen but it could be as simple as I'm sharing it with my friend group I'm putting it on snapchat I'm you know sending it through Instagram whatever it may be I'm putting it in the group chat that also counts so yes that's that's the whole definition well and with this since we're talking about the downside of digital what comes to mind is one of my favorite brain rot shows a couple of years ago a reality show for those of you um that don't equate brain rot with reality tv although why wouldn't you um so there was this whole scandal where um where there were two people that were on the show that were having an affair and they were facetiming being intimate on facetime and the male in the situation recorded the facetime

without the female knowing so do you not get like what you get in zoom of like this this video is being recorded i don't think you do huh i well not on facetime all that much not at the time because i know that there are certain things that um that so i've referenced facetime so this is um ios apple and so for instance i know on my iphone when my camera is engaged there is a little dot in in the upper left hand corner to say hey your camera's on or your microphone's on um but at the time that this happened okay sorry i got derailed by the by the technology piece but that's that's part of the thing though is that um she had no idea she didn't consent to being recorded she consented to engaging in facetime well i'll say sexting

you know phone sex facetime sex um but she didn't she didn't say it's okay to record me at all and so that so that's i think um a little bit more of the layers that we're going to get into with this is understanding this digital beast and the ways that it can open us up in ways that we don't even fathom because maybe you don't you're you're a person who would never do that to another person so you don't you don't anticipate being taken advantage of that way yeah and and like there's a part of my brain that's going wait that may have been illegal given certain recording laws depending on the state they were in which i think is what some people would say i'm like oh well that was illegal and they'll have to pull the video down but in the

time the video gets pulled down how much damage has been done you know and that's that's the peace we forget about that the behavior may not be acceptable but once it's done the person who it's focused on is going to have to deal with the consequences and the fallout what was the consequences in the fallout of that yeah oh um the the partner of the person having the affair found the video on the partner's phone and the um the person that was the extra i'll say in the relationship um was is suing them both good both why both i i mean i don't want to get too much okay nevermind sorry yeah that's not really what this is about um it could be it's a really well known show and those who enjoy the same brain rot will know exactly the education of dr sue

sorry we will have a very fun while dr sue is out doing all these great things charlie is brain rotting um so yeah so i think i'm not really sure where i want to take this because there's like a couple ways i want to go like one is how to protect yourself um i think that's what we do yeah because i think that it was kind of a clumsy segue into i mean we have this very specific example and it's a pop culture example of you think you think you're engaging with someone and you think okay this is just between that between us yeah and then and then you find out that it's not yep and then and then what does that do to you like emotionally internally outside of the fallout externally but like how do you trust how do you know that you can take someone at their

word how are you ever going to feel uninhibited with someone who's saying no trust me trust me trust me trust me I'm safe I'm safe I'm safe I'm safe when you have this and then you you could spiral and say well how many of his friends did he show and right and all of that stuff so yeah i mean i think you really nailed it because the person who is being victimized and they are being victimized if you are having images released without your consent that is you being victimized or knowledge yeah yeah um there is a lot of how do you rebuild trust and it would be very hard to do and i don't want people being like okay so we can't ever have a camera we can't ever do images or things like that i i get why you want to do that like it's fun it's a great way of turning

your partner on if you're separated by distance like sending them nudes of yourself or videos of yourself doing things or like this one with the with the tv show it's you know they were building up to probably something bigger outside of it there's a lot of reasons why you may choose to do it and i don't want as much of a pessimist as i am i don't want you know in the back of your head being like oh i should never do this because this may come back to bite you um bite me i guess anyway i do kind of think that in today's day and age we do have to think about those kinds of things a little bit like if i'm recording this whose phone's it going to be on who's going to see it is it going into the cloud is the cloud going to get i mean that's a quick turn off like

if your partner's like hey can we video record this next thing you know you're like in your head 15 steps ahead of your iCloud being your your cloud account being hacked like that just took you straight out of the mood um if you are gonna video i would have a really clear conversation about whose phone are you using um or tablet or whatever you're using to record and then have a conversation about whether or not it's going to be shared i would tell you to hold on to the master or only copy but then the partner might be like no i want a copy um it's one of those things that we're teaching kids right now which is you know that digital footprint lives forever so before you agree to do those things you have to as much as a as a buzzkill as it might be

and as horribly pessimistic as this sounds you have to kind of keep in the back of your head like what happens if this gets out unless you have a prettier way of saying that that doesn't sound so people suck and don't trust them i i it's it's just one of those things right where we talk about in in our episodes that we've done with a similar tenor it's about literacy and Diligency, like teaching yourself, okay, I don't, I don't mind doing this with someone that I trust, or I actually kind of get off on sending my pictures to people that, that are quasi anonymous to me. Um, but it's, it's the awareness that when you send it out there, there are ways that it can be intercepted, duplicated, exploited, that you will, you may never see or may never encounter.

And it's just having that awareness. It, we just want to make sure we're giving you as much information as we have today with these kinds of things, because that's the most important thing. It's reducing the shame, trying to minimize the shame around perhaps enjoying sending nudes and sending you know boob pics dick pics all the thing all the pics um or taking video of yourself masturbating um like there's an excitement there can be an excitement around that um but just be aware that when you share it you no longer fully control it yeah you stopped owning it the second you hit send and i would some people would say you stop owning it the second you hit record on someone else's device so yeah be aware of it again we're not we're not saying not to

do it especially if that's what gets you off like great good for you um just recognize what might happen from it and recognize the ways that your phone or your device um might attach info to that image that you don't anticipate like location geographic information and things like that yes um so that that's what we mean about being diligent and your literacy around these types of things if you're using certain devices make sure you turn off the geolocation stuff um and and and then also be aware that once you send it out there digitally you won't have complete control over it you'll have control over what you have on your device in your cloud but you don't know what's going to happen beyond that you could go old school

and do like film polaroid isn't polaroid coming back or did i miss that was it back and it's gone again no it's still out there okay there you go do a polaroid um but the funny thing about that so one of the when i used to teach my my um my sex and technology class we would always start at the beginning of the semester talking about the fact that technology is not inherently bad and i know charlie you quote shakespeare all the time and you would think at this point i would remember the quote do you remember it of course you remember yeah it's from hamlet and this i think i kind of anyway there's nothing good nor bad only thinking makes it so yes technology has like i i'm a firm believer that technology has a great place except in my classroom when i'm

teaching um much to my students dismay uh and so i would we would always talk about you know it's like the the internet it's like it's it's be afraid be very afraid and it's going to cause us to all disconnect and then i would show this really old picture from like an old subway in new york where everyone's reading the paper and it's like newspapers are bad no one's interacting and i mean they have like papers open in front of their face and so we have these behaviors that are going to exist no matter what because i get this a lot when i talk in my class about cheating it's like oh it's those it's those dating apps and i'm like whoa people people cheated way before the internet i mean i mean it may make it easier in some ways but like this happened before and so

when we talked about and we it was it was still relatively new whether we were talking about revenge porn back then um but that's not new even with polaroid before it came back in and got popular again like way back in the day people would take polaroids and some of those polaroids would get shared or people would do film old-fashioned film take it in to get copy you know they're taking it in to do whatever with it and the person who's developing it develops two copies of everything and then suddenly you didn't know and copies of the negatives wow it's been a long time since i should come up with that word are being shared so i don't want people thinking that revenge porn is a tech thing does tech make it easier absolutely hundred percent has it existed

before technology yes so i want to make sure that we're owning that what is different with technology are the deep fakes yes yeah and i think because you were talking before about the manipulation and control of like i will do this i will release it i will shame you i will shame everybody and now thanks to ai um it doesn't even have to be you we can make it look like you just enough just enough so that people think exactly yeah yeah i mean you know it used to be like a few years ago it was like picture it didn't happen and now everyone's like oh picture whatever it's probably fake people are being put in compromising positions in images and it's not them and they're having the same fallout and it is not covered in the take it down act specifically my brain is trying

to remember all right not right now but there are several states i want to say california new york or two of them but i may be making that up i'm making up details it's what i do um but i own it there's three states where they do specifically include deep fake in the their state legislation about this but that's even more like terrifying because now it's like not even yeah i did this and okay i shouldn't have done it or i did do it i'm proud of what i did in the moment and got released without my consent now it's like wait I didn't even do that and I'm having to suffer this like the fallout of it and that that is deeply terrifying for me because how do you prove it's not you right so yeah the deep fake is definitely a tech thing yeah the revenge porn not so much

though it is easier now but I don't know if you want to talk more about the deep fakes i think um i think it feels especially terrifying right now because we're at the beginning of it and so there is um there's not a lot of ways or markers quite yet to help in the literacy and being diligent to to be able to point out like hey that that video of air quote me my right hand has eight fingers so like that's not me which is always a telltale sign yeah telltale sign of charlie do you want to hold your hands up to the camera just to show us okay thanks not to shame anyone who does have i'm not deep faked um but yeah and not to shame anybody um but but i think that's what makes this piece terrifying in this moment is that we don't

have a lot of ways to um to recognize deep fakes just yet yeah because because i mean some of the things are it's super filtered or the person if you know the person it doesn't look a whole lot like them and i'm thinking specifically of some of the ai videos that this administration has released, um, where we, we all know this president doesn't have a muscular, uh, yeah, body. So anyway, um, so I think that's what makes it a bit terrifying, but with the speed of which we do get education and these things develop there, we might be a little bit behind, but we will also catch up and and can get ahead and start to recognize some of the ways so that's that's the diligent piece about your literacy yeah it is paying attention um to some of the articles if you can um but there

there is always going to be evolving information as this kind of stuff evolves yeah and we we can't rely on the laws to take care of us because the laws are so far behind um and just because something is illegal doesn't mean that the local DA is going to choose to press charges like that is it my understanding I got not a legal scholar but my understanding is that the DA has the right to sit there and be like man you know I'm not gonna press charges on this there's not enough evidence things like that so if you're like oh this happened to me and it's illegal one it it's not covered under federal law so if you're not one of those three states I really

want to know what the states are now but if it's not one of those three Charlie's going to fact check me um if you can't rely on the law to protect you and there may not even be enough precedent to know how to handle that and then if it's not you but it's supposed to be you can you you know can you seek some kind of control of an image that's technically not you and so we need you to be more diligent about this but you would need to know it's out there and that's so you would need to know that this thing exists so we want we're doing half of it right now we're letting you know that deep fakes exist if you did not know it is a thing um but in terms of what's out i mean you may not even know there's an image that's supposed to be you out there

unless someone finds it and shares it with you so it's it's going to be hard for us to give really good information on how to protect yourself from this because there's no way that i can think of to protect yourself yeah i think no that's the i mean that's the thing that makes the deep fakes tricky um so in my quick search deep fake ai deep fake is in take it down it is yeah oh my bad i got that completely wrong everybody there is varied state legislation um california shocking um passed eight new laws last september to address deep fake harms um including sexually explicit content um and then i'm seeing a lot of things uh because this is this is what terrifies me about the deep fakes is that it um targets um minors yeah yeah so parents listening yeah

was diligence and literacy was new york on the list um since i got the whole thing wrong about it not being in take down take it down i can find out um just want to guess the second statement sorry about that folks no that's okay so with that one completely but yeah so i'm trying to figure out i don't sorry i'm i'm hemming and hawing because there's a story that i want to tell but it's not mine to tell and i don't have consent so i'm actually not going to tell it um but those those images can be really convincing and it's not like someone has to have photoshop skills like serious photoshop skills to make this happen it's all it's it's a it's a lot because of ai um so it's it's hard to protect against because you don't know it's happening like

someone could just decide to grab an image of you um and put it out there so i feel like we ran into a wall of like i don't want to be like there's nothing you can do it i'll just i'll i'll say it right now it is tricky with deep fakes as far as um being able to recognize that it's a deep fake and how to protect yourself but so the thing that i would say is if someone says that's not me lean on the side of believing them if you can yeah especially if it's something that seems so incongruent with what you know of them um especially if you're an intimate partner because you might you you likely have more access to the intimate parts and the vulnerabilities that they have and then you see this video and you're like i never knew um we we are in an age

of just fucking overload of images and information and it is it is more than a fire hose it is it's like a it's like a goddamn broken dam yeah of of shit so that's a lovely image thank you you're welcome i would love to equate shit with deep fakes so there you go mission accomplished so Well, there may not be a lot of things you can do to protect yourself from the deep fake. And I do think that's one of them. If someone's coming to you and being like, oh, did you see this picture of your partner? And what they're doing in the image is highly out of character for them. Maybe have a conversation with them.

Yeah. Yeah. And then for some of the other stuff, I mean, if revenge porn is happening to you, report it. Report it as best as you can. If it's being published somewhere where other people can see it. if it has gotten out there's nothing you can do like if again if i send something to charlie it's out of my control now um or if it's being used if you're in a situation where it's being used to keep you in a situation and control you um then maybe we can post rain resources or something

along those lines with this episode um but know that it is not okay to to be blackmailed with things that you thought were intimate and just between you and the partner and then also if you're someone who has the the original or like you're the keeper of that that beautiful video that you made with your partner and um and then things go a little awry and you think fuck it i'm gonna do it don't be an asshole yeah don't do it i feel like that's just a good one because it's a federal offense number one but also just don't be an asshole like yeah just don't be a fucking jerk about it like yeah it hurts when somebody hurts you but but that's not the answer that's not gonna make anyone feel better no and it may make you feel better in the moment

but then you're gonna get you might get subpoenaed yeah and as you're sitting there going it's not really that big a deal let me point out two things one it's a huge fucking deal because this is a violation of trust on a level that you may not even be able to comprehend in the moment and two if you're like oh it's not that big a deal i want you to think about the last time you had a fight with someone friend partner whatever and you sent a text and you're like the next day or even maybe five minutes later you're like oh i was a dick yeah i want you to multiply that by a thousand and that's what happens when you send those images we all say things in the moment when we're pissed I mean, that's part of being human. I talk about it a lot with actually not just my students, also my friends. I don't know if you've ever had a fight that has you like you're not even like a willing participant. It's just kind of happening. And you're like, I don't even understand the things that are coming out of my mouth right now. I am just in the throes of this fight.

it's easy to get worked up and be like i'm gonna punish i just i have the right to do this one don't don't if you wouldn't say something hurtful don't share something that's going to be hurtful because that is a violation that is going to be very hard to ever come back from i mean it is hard sometimes to take the words back but you can't take the images and the videos back and and whether you wanted it to be the end of the relationship or not that may have just been the nail in the coffin so don't be an asshole yeah i think it's basically the end of i feel like we ended a couple episodes that way yeah yeah unzipping taboos don't be an asshole there's our march idea literacy diligency don't be a fucking asshole

yeah or just don't be an asshole for the pg crowd so oh that's true if we're gonna do a shirt you know i love that you're thinking of merch in this moment i'm so proud of you all right well with that on that note i want to thank you all for joining us on this episode of unzipping taboos candid conversations about sex we really hope today's episode sparked new thoughts opens up conversations worth having, maybe researching on your own and becoming literate on this digital age with information and being aware that if you receive any kind of sextortion, solicitation, whatever, that it's built around the shame that we have been conditioned to feel around sex. So remember that your curiosity is the key to breaking down these

barriers and these taboos and this shame. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe and leave a review, share it with someone who you think might need to hear this. And if you've got a question or a topic you want us to dive into, or you've got a sextortion email that you want to be like, hey, that's nonspecific. It's specific, as we said, take proper measures. But with all of that, if you have anything like that, that you want us to take a look at or build an episode around, please reach out to us via the link in the episode description. I want to give a huge thanks to jackandjilladult.com for supporting Unzipping Taboos. Please don't forget that you can get 20% off your order with code UNZIPPING20. And we want to give a huge shout out to Allie

O'Brien for our incredible theme music. Thank you so much, Allie. And until next time, keep the conversations going, keep unzipping those taboos, and everyone, take care. Thank you.