If you’ve ever sat behind me in a class or glanced at my laptop screen while walking past me in Frist, you may have wondered why there is a band-aid covering my webcam. I come by my paranoid streak honestly (my father subscribes to a whole host of conspiracy theory newsletters), and I started covering my webcam accordingly after reading a series of articles on “sextortion.” Sextortion, an especially alarming invention in our era of tech-everything, is a blackmail scheme in which hackers use malware to take compromising photos or videos through the webcams of strangers and threaten to release the images if they are not paid off. Sextortion is terrifying but hardly surprising among scores of headlines detailing ever more invasive means of tampering with electronic devices, from viruses that deposit child porn on the computers of unsuspecting internet users to the software implanted in over a hundred thousand computers worldwide that allows for remote altering of data (even while offline) by the NSA.

I know that the odds of falling victim to a sextortion scheme are slim, but I have no desire to take my chances at a time when women are especially vulnerable to attack through particular kinds of privacy violation. As the personal lives of individuals continue their migration to cyberspace, the law has not kept pace, stranding people in a grey area in which they may fall prey to crime with no means of recourse.

Last month, the New York court system addressed the issue of criminal charges for “revenge porn” for the first time when charges were brought against 29-year-old Ian Barber, who tweeted nude pictures of his girlfriend and emailed them to her boss and sister. The suit was dismissed. “Defendant’s conduct,” wrote Judge Steven Statsinger in his opinion, “while reprehensible, does not violate any of the criminal statutes under which he is charged.”

Barber was charged with aggravated harassment, dissemination of unlawful surveillance, and public display of offensive sexual material. His sharing of the photos was not harassment under the New York penal code because harassment requires communications be directed at the victim. It was not unlawful surveillance because the images were provided to Barber legally. And Statsinger found that Barber’s actions could not be considered offensive public display for two reasons: firstly, the material was not sexually offensive purely on the basis of containing nudity, and secondly, a tweet does not constitute a public display, because postings to Twitter—a “subscriber-based social networking service,” as Statsinger describes it—are “private acts.”

Refusal to acknowledge communications on social networking sites as public displays ignores both the scope of the usage of such sites and the problematic tenacity of their content. According to the Pew Research Center, nearly 20% of all Internet users (and 31% of those age 18-29) used Twitter in 2013. 71% of online adults use Facebook, which also meets Statsinger’s description of a “subscriber-based social networking service.” The content of sites such as these is displayed as publicly as any storefront, depending on one’s privacy settings, and the results of Internet content are far more indelible.

And discounting the “realness” of internet harassment based purely on its venue excludes women from use of tools that are becoming increasingly critical to the arsenal of modern professionals in several fields, especially media. As Slate’s Amanda Hess writes in a recent Pacific Standard piece, “no matter how hard we attempt to ignore it, this type of gendered harassment—and the sheer volume of it—has severe implications for women’s status on the Internet. Threats of rape, death, and stalking can overpower our emotional bandwidth, take up our time, and cost us money through legal fees, online protection services, and missed wages. “

Technological considerations aside, the notion that revenge porn is not considered an appeal to the prurient interest by virtue of being only nudity is also worth addressing here. If a photo of a naked woman is shared in such a way that a reasonable, uniformed bystander might infer she had not consented to it, then it is not just a photo of a naked woman. It is the connotation of privacy being violated and boundaries being transgressed without consent that often lends such images their ability to titillate. It is this violation—this translation of an image from private to public and, thus, to pornographic— that makes exposure of naked pictures of a former partner an effective act of “revenge.”

It is no wonder that such implications are sexually charged; multiple clinical studies have suggested that acts of voyeurism are some of the most common of possibly illegal sexual behaviors, and one study of 2,450 18-60 year olds in Sweden found that 12% of men reported one or more instance arousal stemming from spying on others having sex.

It is not merely the content of the photo that titillates the viewer who has sought out revenge porn, but the tone of the illicit that’s present in viewing a photo that was not intended for the eyes of the public.

The information connoted by the disclosure of a nude photo is thus twofold. It exposes both the fact of the body’s existence such as it is, its appearance, and it also reveals the subject as the kind of person who takes naked photos. And once the photo is out of the hands of its photographer (up to 80% of the time, the subject him or herself, according to a survey by the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative) and intended recipient, it is no longer only a naked photograph; it becomes both an object of pornography and a symbol of the subject’s lack of control over his or her own image. And despite all the insistence on sex positivity and destigmatizing women’s consentual choices as autonomous sexual beings in the largely self-contained dialogues of college gender studies classes, associating a woman with pornography remains one of the most effective means of maligning her character.

While pornography’s crimes against women are well-catalogued, its definition and regulation by authorities has also enjoyed a long history as an exercise in power that often yields outcomes detrimental to women. In late nineteenth-century America, a dry-goods salesman from Connecticut named Anthony Comstock launched an assault on pulp novels and their promotion of lewdness and immorality. In 1873, his lobbying led to the “Act for Suppression of Trade in, And Circulation of Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use,” which restricted not only erotica, but also articles related to contraception and abortion. Even doctors were fined for publication of sex education materials, and through enforcement of the laws, Comstock targeted any material that discussed the value of sex apart from reproduction. Controlling sexual material in the public sphere kept fears of sexual chaos and moral anarchy at bay and prevented the emergence of competing narratives of sexual experience. The story of statutory rape laws is similarly politicized—for most of their existence, statutory rape laws have been applied only outside the boundaries of marriage. As Justice William Brennan wrote in the 1981 Supreme Court Case Michael M. v. Superior Court, “The historical development of [the statute] demonstrates that the law was initially enacted on the premise that young women, in contrast to young men, were to be deemed legally incapable of consenting to an act of sexual intercourse.” Such laws were also enforced to protect the chastity of white females only, as black female chastity was not as relevant to the economics of marriage contracts. One of the most oft-used defenses against charges of statutory rape was an assertion of the experience of the woman in question, as statutory rape could only be committed against a virgin. Although contemporary statutory rape laws have become gender neutral, the narrative of the male aggressor and pure female victim persists to this day, and is still relied upon as a tool to police sexuality. There is a clear and enduring trend of denial of female sexual agency under the guise of protection.

It is against this backdrop that the story of the porn star in Duke University’s freshman class has worked its way into the national media. “Lauren,” the pseudonym under which the woman gave an interview to Duke’s on-campus paper, defended her choices on XOJane.com, and has used her national platform to lambast the dehumanization of sex workers. She writes, with insight that is uncharacteristic for the shamelessly click-baiting XOJane: “I am well aware: The threat I pose to the patriarchy is enormous. That a woman could be intelligent, educated and choose to be a sex worker is almost unfathomable.”

Lauren is not like Ian Barber’s girlfriend in that she made a deliberate choice to enter the adult film industry, a choice that she defends. But the act of “revenge” against the latter is made possible only by the degradation of the former. They are victims of the same forces in a culture in which a human being who is good enough to jerk off to is not good enough to treat with basic decency and respect, a culture in which the act of “outing” a grown woman as a sexual being who takes a picture of her body and shares it has a destructive power because it means she can no longer be seen as a person with a particular kind of value. In all these cases, female sexuality is turned into a weapon to be used against a woman herself, an instrument of “revenge.”

Last year in Iran, Elham Asghari broke a record swimming over 12 miles in the Caspian sea in a special, headscarf-including bathing suit that added thirteen pounds of weight to her frame. Authorities did not acknowledge her swim because too much of her body was exposed. In America, we love to judge other countries for their oppressive practices, but we are not so different. We live in a society in which one of the very worst things that can be revealed about a woman is the obvious—that she has a body and uses it as she pleases.

Revenge porn is only illegal in New Jersey and California (and in California, only if the person who shares the photo is also the photographer). Legislation targeting the phenomenon is in the works in Illinois, Virginia and Maryland, and a Texas woman recently won half a million dollars in a revenge-porn-based suit against her former boyfriend in civil court. But the road ahead is also fraught with pitfalls. Under the Communications Decency Act of 1996, the first major Congressional attempt to legislate against Internet pornography, Interactive Service Providers are exempt from liability for user-generated content as long as they are not producing their own content. And many argue that altering that portion of the law would expose web sites to lawsuits to an extent that would devastate free speech on the Internet.

Perhaps the law is beside the point. Legal measures are important, but they are treating the symptom and not the cause. The true cause is the existence of deeply entrenched rules governing shame and modesty in our society, rules that make it possible to blackmail a woman or exact revenge on her with nothing more than a covertly taken or unwillingly shared photo of her body. Ultimately, it is a weapon that can only be disarmed by a change in our values.