I’d love to hear you weigh in on the case of Jason Fortuny, the person who posted an ad on Craigslist posing as a woman looking for a dom male, then posted all of the responses, including the pictures some men sent him. I thought that, as a person who receives voluminous amounts of damaging and embarrassing e-mail from people who count on your discretion, you might have an interesting perspective.
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OK, on to Jason Fortuny. I’ve been following this story, Chuck, and it pisses me off in so many ways I hardly know where to begin. In what Fortuny grandly called the “Craigslist Experiment” he posed as a kinky woman and posted a sex ad with a photo, then invited “str8 brutal dom muscular” males “who like 2 give intense pain and discipline” to write and respond. Now, an experiment is a test designed to discover whether a particular theory is correct, and Fortuny’s grand hypothesis basically amounted to this: would extremely kinky men respond to a personal ad that they believed had been placed by an extremely kinky woman?
Well, what do you know–they would and did, in droves. That should have been the end of this experiment, except Jason wasn’t really interested in seeing what sort of response his ad would get. He was interested in exposing and humiliating the men who replied to his ad. Not only did he post their responses online, he also posted pictures he had been sent–along with real names, work e-mails, phone numbers, addresses, and transcripts of chats he had with some of his victims.
As for Fortuny, if there’s any justice on this earth he will shortly be the subject of a similar experiment in sadistic privacy violation. Surely he, like 98 percent of all men, has some sexual interest or interests that others might find odd. I suspect pissed-off BDSMers are currently hacking his home computer in an effort to find out.
“The reason there’s no parallel imbroglio in the gay community is because adult gay men rarely, if ever, decide to change their gender,” I wrote. “I’ve never known a single adult gay man who decided to run off and become a woman. The only men I’ve known who changed their gender as adults were heterosexually identified men who now identify as lesbians.”
