Posted on 08/07/2020 8:40:50 AM PDT by Kaslin
The pornographication of America's culture prevents victims from thinking clearly. Sadly, behavior once labeled bizarre or self-destructive is now common.
Police say Michael Cooper of Germantown, Maryland, approached women on social media and dating apps under the pseudonym “Rebecca Lattimore.” Through online conversations, Cooper would “slowly coax them to send nude photos and videos,” according to a recent article in the Washington Post.
Following this, he’d disclose the truth, that he was “actually a dude,” and demand the women have sex with him or he would send their compromising media to pornography sites, family members of the women, friends, and co-workers. That’s just the beginning of this bizarre story. Ultimately, it’s sadly emblematic of an American culture that has normalized hyper-sexuality to the point that it is now ravaging our society.
When last week investigators in Montgomery County charged Cooper with “threatening to inflict emotional distress” to obtain sex, it was the third time they had charged him with that exact offense in less than two weeks. “He keeps doing the same thing,” prosecutor George Simms declared in Montgomery County District Court. Judge John Moffett ordered Cooper to remain in custody with no option for posting bond. “I’m going to hold him until we get to the bottom of the case and find out what’s going on,” the judge ordered. Cooper’s attorney suggested he “may need mental health treatment.”
It gets worse. Several of the targeted women were heterosexual. Two persuaded their boyfriends to intervene. One of those boyfriends agreed, confronting Cooper in a parking lot, pinning him to the ground and threatening: “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t mess you up.”
In response to the fact that his girlfriend had sent nude photos of herself to a stranger, the boyfriend acknowledged, “It happened. … It was what it was. But no one deserves to be exploited like that.” Only two weeks later, Cooper was confronted by a different boyfriend, who detained the 22-year-old extortionist until police arrived.
In one of the cases (there are at least four, according to authorities), the photos Cooper elicited from the women ended up on a porn website. According to detective Joshua Locke, Cooper targeted “smart, professional women he didn’t know.” One woman, a 29-year-old corporate sales trainer, started communicating over Instagram and Snapchat with “Rebecca Lattimore” on June 13. The very next day, as well as again two days later, the woman sent sexually explicit photos and videos of herself to Cooper’s Instagram and Snapchat accounts.
Obviously, Cooper is an odious criminal who should be punished. But such deviants have always existed in the nether regions of our society. Before the internet, they frequented the seedy parts of town near pornography shops and “adult” cinemas; they would walk around in trench coats and flash innocent folks passing by. Now, thanks to the anonymity of technology, they are more capable of fabricating identities.
Another bizarre and concerning thing about this episode is how the Post presents Cooper’s victims as ordinary, intelligent, and “professional.” It says something about our culture that heterosexual women — with boyfriends, no less — who get involved with female strangers on dating apps are labeled “ordinary.” It says something about our culture that women who send nude media of themselves to strangers — in at least one case, the day after the online “relationship” began — are supposedly “intelligent.”
It also appears our culture is so saturated in pornography that activities once considered rare, immoral, obscene, and stupid are now condoned, if not celebrated. “Fifty Shades of Grey” normalized bondage, domination, and sado-masochism. Television and movies bring all manner of once-obscure sexual fetishes into American homes. Smartphones make the most obscene pornography accessible to us anywhere; they’ve become, as columnist and scholar Chad Pecknold puts it, a “red-light district in everyone’s pocket.”
Whatever one thinks of the morality of pornography, the results of this cultural and sexual transformation have been horrendous. In the United States, between 5 to 8 percent of the adult population is either addicted to pornography or engages in problematic porn use. Almost one-third of males between ages 18 and 30 use it daily, and the average age of first exposure is 11 years old. One website recently featured an advertisement urging kids to use their site when their parents leave the house.
Pornography’s effects on the brain are similar to that of compulsive drug use. More than half of divorce proceedings cite an “obsessive interest” in pornography. Porn fosters physically aggressive forms of sexual behavior — one study showed that almost 90 percent of porn videos depict physical aggression.
It would be naive to think that the pornographication of our culture is not at play in the story of the creep Cooper and his female victims. The lust and sexual addiction it fosters leads people to do evil and stupid things.
Even the supposedly happy, wildly successful, and fabulously wealthy aren’t immune; just consider former Democrat Rep. Anthony Weiner, Charlie Sheen, and Tiger Woods. Or, consider the biblical examples of David’s affair with Bathsheba (resulting in the murder of one of the king’s most trusted soldiers) or King Herod’s decision to behead John the Baptist after Herod watched his daughter-in-law perform a seductive dance. Obsessive sexual behavior also seems intimately linked with murder and other evils.
“Lust is forever threatening to stifle virility as well as intelligence. Impatient to create, it can only contaminate in the germ the frail promise of humanity; it is probably at the very source, the primary cause of all human blemishes,” writes George Bernanos in his novel The Diary of a Country Priest. “Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need of it. … You no longer wish to know yourself. … You no longer want to possess yourself.”
The pornographication of American culture incited Cooper’s exploitative behavior; it also deadened the ability of his victims to think clearly. We can conclude the Washington Post fails to acknowledge this because such behaviors — widely considered bizarre, foolish, and self-destructive only a generation ago — are now, sadly, so very common.
Casey Chalk is a columnist for The American Conservative, Crisis Magazine, and The New Oxford Review. He has a bachelors in history and masters in teaching from the University of Virginia, and masters in theology from Christendom College.
Smart women do not reveal anything until they have him firmly roped and tied.
I don't quite see how it could be accomplished, but people need real community and social media isn't it. I can imagine some kind of local community center springing up all over the country, like Starbucks. Or the old Grange buildings. Especially when people seem to be leaving the cities and moving to smaller towns and working from home. To have some sort of local place to go and meet people face-to-face. Of course, Church is wonderful for this, but so many people are unchurched that something purely social seems needed.
I could imagine this tied to hobbies like wood-working or cooking or whatever. I think people long for wholesome connection and when they can't find that, they end up sending nude photos to strangers.
Smart women are also impressed by responsible, relatively virtuous men and not by bad boys.
Which is to say, whatever Common Sense Quotient there is that should complement IQ (but hasn’t been derived ... probably should be) half of everyone is below average too. And “average” isn’t that great now anyway.
Actually, having a high CSQ would be an amazing thing to provably have.
Ask Dr. Laura.
Her nudie pics for a significant other sat in a desk drawer for years after they had split-up until she became a radio star and the ex decided to cash-in on her fame.
Bookmark
Free Republic is social media.
Like one comedian observed, when he was a kind they played with fireworks, knives and guns ...the herd got weeded out a bit ... but the safe and coddled kids never had to learn more than they learned in kindergarten resulting in people with low Common Sense Quotient.
Funny: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1Zg2S2-heY
Honestly, I spend too much time here. But it is the only social media I use.
There are idiots everywhere.
SO no red flags went up with these women when someone asked them for nude photos?
IDIOTS!!!!!!!!!
They deserve what they got.
No, we’re more anti-social media with way more letters to use in a post ... I know because I’m a member of the wall-o-text club.
Had to look it up. She certainly reaped what she sowed.
In 1998, Schlessinger’s early radio mentor, Bill Ballance, sold nude photos of Schlessinger to a company specializing in internet porn. The photos were taken in the mid-1970s, while Schlessinger was involved in a brief affair with the then-married Ballance.[83][84] Schlessinger sued after the photos were posted on the internet,[85] claiming invasion of privacy and copyright violation. The court ruled that Schlessinger did not own the rights to the photos. She did not appeal the ruling.[86] She told her radio audience that she was embarrassed, but that the photos were taken when she was going through a divorce and had “no moral authority.”[83][87]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Schlessinger
So do I, so do I. But my point was that it isn’t the Social Media platform that is evil, it is how it is misused and abused by people who don’t consider the consequences.
These people sending nude selfies to strangers are the same sort of people who were hanging out in Discos in the 70s looking for Mr. Goodbar and snorting Coke in the bathrooms. There’s something about human behavior that leans towards evoking the adrenaline response from doing something “forbidden.”
Stupid is as stupid does. And that’s all I have to say about that.
At least you’re not a member of the Opus-of-the-Month club.
George Costanza’s “I’m a woman trapped in a man’s body” .
Also the big naked selfie cloud hacking scandal of a few years ago. Virtually every young actress in Hollywood got caught up in it. That’s a LOT of naked selfies getting uploaded.
The FBI said that Jennifer Lawrence sat in their office and cried for two hours.
She apparently did not realize that the cloud is NOT an actual cloud.
It might be, but it seems to me there has always been a big difference between sites that use real names and identities and those that don’t. It seems like most of the problems with social media happens on the sites that use real names.
Freegards
It’s hard for me to imagine someone looking back from the year 2050 and thinking to themselves that social media has been this really great thing for culture and society.
Freegards
When I was young the girls used to keep diaries and they were secret.
Now they show and tell everybody everything about themselves.
And they wonder why men don’t give a shit about them anymore.
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