A Violation

I recently had a disturbing conversation with a friend named Lucy*.  Lucy and I have a strange and tenuous connection.  We chat online and have only done so a few times.  We don’t know each other’s last names.  We are veritable strangers.  So it was odd when one morning when I woke up and saw a message from her asking for my help.  She told me a guy did something bad to her.  And that she might need the help of the police.  She wanted someone to talk to and, as you will learn below, she had some reasons for choosing me.

What happened to her is terrible and private and humiliating.  I suppose one of the reasons she came to me is because we are so disconnected–such strangers to each other–that she could tell me something she could not share with her close circle in her home town.  Below is this story.

Lucy is Chinese and was recently dating an American.  This American is tall and handsome and the son of a two barely famous American actors.  He charmed Lucy and cooked for her and treated her in ways that are pleasantly surprising for Asian women.  They became closer and were sexually active.

This guy was fixated on taking pictures of Lucy’s naked body.  He flattered her by saying he loved her body and wanted to see it any time.  He explained his interest was not just sexual but also artistic.  She was and remains uncomfortable with any man possessing pictures showing her naked.  Like most women she wanted to protect an appearance of modesty and feared pictures becoming public.  Allowing photos yields some control of her appearance to the photograph’s possessor.  Lucy wanted to retain full control over who saw her naked.

As time passed Lucy fell in love with this American boy.  He is four years younger than she but more experienced in romance, which is common when western men date Chinese girls.  As he made inroads to her heart he pressed the issue of taking her photo in the nude.  Eventually she relented.  But she insisted the photos not show her face.  Like every good Chinese girl, she must guarantee beyond any doubt that her public appearance of modesty stays intact.

One day Lucy and her man got adventurous in bed.  She and her lover engaged in BDSM, something she fully consented to.  In fact, as she recently told me, she likes adventurous lovers.  Her young man dimmed the lights, brought out rope, and gently but firmly tied her to her bed.  He stood over her and looked down at her naked, helpless body.  She looked up at him in anticipation.  Then he went and got his camera.

She did not go into much detail about how many pictures he took and how she got him to stop.  But she heard the digital SLR snapping photos as she squirmed in bed.  Tied down, against her will, she lost control of her privacy under camera’s eye.  She pled with him and yelled at him and possibly cried.  He eventually stopped.  She was traumatized and felt violated.

In the heated discussion that followed she eventually forced her young lover to delete the photos from the camera as she watched.  She inspected his expensive camera afterwards to make sure the pictures were gone.  And in the predictable naivety of young, immature girls she began to forgive him.  I feel that although she was bothered she was emotionally dependent.  She found ways to forget and go on.  Until she found something on his computer a week later.

Lucy did not tell me why she was inspecting her boyfriend’s browser history.  Clearly she was shaken by that terrible night.  In any case she had the opportunity alone in his house and spent some time analyzing his reading and searching habits.  What she saw stopped her heart.  Her lover had been searching for and visiting sites that help recover deleted pictures from flash cards.

She was still alone in his bedroom and somewhat panicked.  She grabbed his camera to see what images were stored on its memory.  She recognized pictures on the camera and so knew it was the same card.  Lucy believed that the photos had not yet been recovered but was sure it was just a matter of time before her man got them back.  She saw only one way to protect her modesty: steal the camera’s memory.  She pocketed it and left the house.

Lucy later told me that her plan was to confront her soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend and offer him a replacement card.  He was now beyond her trust but she remained uncertain as to whether taking his camera’s flash memory was justified.  To confirm that the card was still dangerous to her, she purchased and used a tool for recovering the images on the card.  She was shocked by what she found.

Indeed the pictures of her tied up naked on his bed were on the card.  The recovery tool had undeleted them.  But it also undeleted many other pictures.  Many were photos of other naked women this young man had captured.  And more pictures of Lucy taken without her consent.  The camera had apparently been hidden in his house and captured her unaware.  But she had never seen those pictures on the card before they were deleted.  So clearly her boyfriend had snapped them, moved them to his computer, then deleted them from the camera’s memory.

Now she knew that he had other pictures of her showing her face and without wearing clothes.  And for all she knew he had more than she had seen.  Lucy feared that this kid had also photographed her while sleeping.  These pictures are perhaps less humiliating than her BDSM photos but no less invasive.  And they were somewhere on this man’s computer.

This was the story she told me when we recently talked.  She turned to me because she’s a young Chinese girl caught up with a bad American.  I’m 15 years her senior and perhaps a little wiser to the ploys of miscreants.  She’s embarrassed and afraid to talk to her friends and the very tenuous link between us ensures that me knowing cannot effect her life.  So she told me this story hoping for my advice.  Because what she wanted to do next was take action to ensure no pictures of her remained behind.  She wanted to temporarily reconcile with her ex so she could get in his house and steal the external hard drive she was certain contained her photos.  She asked me if I agreed with this plan.

I could not agree.  Practically speaking, there was no certainty that taking the USB hard drive would remove from him all copies of her naked photos.  They could also reside on his laptop’s internal drive, on another drive accessed wirelessly, on a USB thumb drive, or even some cloud storage like Dropbox or Google Drive.

Also, stealing his hardware would escalate the situation.  Given the lack of respect this young man already showed Lucy it is difficult to predict his reaction to her planned theft.  She could find herself in a worse position.  She must walk away.

She tried going to the police.  But her local police said her lover had committed no crime.  Naked photos are a legally thorny issue anywhere in the world.  But in her city photos are taken in a bedroom, when both parties are consensually naked in the first place, are acceptable private property that has done no harm.  Of course if this American kid posted those photos online he could be arrested.  But for Lucy that would be too late.

Any woman in any country would be horrified to be in this position.  But Lucy feels it is even worse for her.  She is Chinese and assumes she will someday marrying a Chinese man.  Most Chinese men are more conservative than their western counterparts.  They expect, with a degree of willful ignorance, that their wives were virgins when they met.  They generally will not force a discussion on the topic and if those men, their friends, and their family can all happily believe in their wives’ former chastity.  But if a photo of a Chinese man’s naked wife shows up on the internet it is doubly humiliating.  Of course any woman will be mortified.  But a Chinese man will also lose face.  And there are few things more important to Asian men than face.  Losing it due to a wife’s behavior could have horrible consequences for her.

So Lucy is agonizing over her situation.  Her evil ex certainly retains some photos of her.  And she wants to be a little evil herself to attempt to recover those photos and potentially capture some illicit material that she can use against her former lover.  She wants a photographic version of mutually assured destruction.  This man’s parents are famous enough to have their own Wikipedia pages so they would certainly want to head off a public relations disaster caused by their wayward son.  Lucy believes the content of his hard drive could serve as ammunition in a threat to expose him should he ever release the photos of her.

Security through this arrangement would be illusory.  He may overreact to the theft.  He may laugh at her threats.  And she cannot predict the second and third order effects of entering that kind of toxic bargain.  I told her to stay away.

Her situation is really terrible.  She will for the rest of her life wonder where those photos are and who might see them.  Of course the limitless supply of high quality nudity on the internet makes it highly unlikely a photo of some average Chinese girl will make its way to the eyeballs of any man, nevertheless one she knows.  But “highly unlikely” is not impossible.  And the mind is capable of worrying tiny probabilities into disastrous outcomes.  I feel for her.

But in the end I think this episode is likely to do her more good than bad.  I think those photos will likely never see daylight.  And I am certain she learned a lesson that will protect her against all men and especially western ones, who often come to Asia with a surprising set of values.  Our world is complex set of clashing cultures where people get confused and surprised by others.  Technology can record and amplify this engagements and expose them to the world.  Lucy’s tale is one that is not Chinese or American or any single culture’s.  It’s universal.  Although its consequences may be worse in her world.

Whether you are a girl in Singapore or London or San Francisco, be careful.  Be on guard.  Figure out soon whether you’re with a man that respects you and will honor your requests.  And learn to walk away at the slightest sign that he won’t.

(*) Lucy is not her real name.  In fact, she’s Chinese so the English name I know her by is not her real name either.  The reason for our connection is odd and must remain unstated.  But she is so unknown to me that all I know of her are her hometown, her self-selected English first name, and her age.  And of course this story.