Somebody has got hold of a video of me doing some of my empowering BDSM sex work (nothing too wild, I was just murdering a commodities magnate with my usual modus operandi) and posted it on some porn sites.
Needless to say, I was surprised, because I thought I’d knocked out all of the CCTV in his office, but apparently someone was recording it and now it’s all over the Internet.
At first I was a bit worried – do I have any control or rights over the video? Will this ruin my career? Does it normalise sexual violence? What does it imply about our culture that videos of sexualised violence are so popular?
But then I stopped to self-crit and really thought about it, and I came to the conclusion: it’s just a harmless fantasy.
I don’t mean it’s a fantasy in the sense of objective material reality (Mr. Secombe is definitely dead), but I mean it’s a fantasy in the mind of the viewer. They might watch this video of me murdering Mr. Secombe, and they imagine themselves in my place, doing the same thing to someone else. And it’s harmless: when they watch it, nobody is actually killed
(except for the original scenario on film, when I actually killed Mr. Secombe)
and arranged into a compromising position post-mortem (again, except for the original). No more harm is done by people watching a recording of me murdering him. In fact, if it helps them to indulge their violent urges, it might even lead to LESS violence, so in many ways, you could argue that the correct, progressive, feminist position to take on this is that this video is a force for good! Otherwise, Mr. Secombe would have died for nothing (except my £10k fee plus the extra £5k I charge for politically exposed persons).
The one issue I have with the video is the title under which it was shared: “HOT XXX GUY-ON-GUY EXTREME BONDAGE CHOKING SNUFF”. This is clearly problematic, because by calling it “guy-on-guy”, they assumed my gender (and the late Mr. Secombe’s). In fact, at the time, I was identifying as a woman – specifically, a Ms. Sharon Ajiboye, a sales manager whose security swipe card I’d “borrowed” in order to gain access to the building. (Ms. Ajiboye, if you’re reading this, sorry about that! If it’s any consolation, I have returned your card – your home address was on the same server as the camera feeds, so I’ve left it in the top drawer of your bedside table. Hope that’s alright!)