When Theresa split from her partner of several years, they began the painful process of separating their lives, notifying friends as they divided the dishes and furniture. They confronted the dozens of Facebook vacation photos, the Instagrams of Sunday morning brunch, the tweets and text messages that professed their undying love.
Finally, they had to figure out what to do with their handful of amateur porn videos.
“I never wanted those videos online in the first place,” Theresa (real name withheld) tells me. “My partner put them up without asking me.”
Amateur pornography exists in many forms, beyond the videos shared publicly on porn sites like YouPorn and RedTube. It lives in the private sexts, Snapchats and videos that couples create for each other, never imagining they may eventually be used to harm, manipulate or humiliate one of the participants in the midst of an argument or after a divorce. The phenomenon has spawned an entire cottage industry of “revenge porn.”
