Food for thought

A new year of femdom blogging is opening up before me. So what better way to get going than with some articles on a man who fantasies about killing and eating women? Not exactly femdom I know. If fact, about as far from femdom as you can get. However, the story does raise some important issues around fantasies and on-line behavior that are worth pondering.

The man in question is Gilberto Valle, a former NYC cop. He frequented fetish websites and chat rooms where he shared some very dark discussions around torture, murder and cannibalism. More problematically he used the names and photographs of his wife and female friends in these discussions. When his wife found out she was understandably horrified and told the police. He claimed the discussions were all fantasies. They claimed they were a conspiracy to commit a heinous crime. The jury believed the police and found him guilty. That conviction was then overturned by the judge who said he couldn’t be found guilty for a ‘thought crime’.

There’s a good article on the case, written just after his conviction, available from the New York Magazine. Slate has a follow-up interview with him after he was released. What prompted this post was a fascinating HBO documentary on the case called ‘Though Crimes’. I watched it last week and it raises some really interesting issues around how lines can be drawn between fantasy and reality. If you’re in the US and have HBO on-demand, it’s currently available there.

A key part of the goverment case centered on his Google searches. For a crime to take place there has to be intent – a substantial step taken towards committing it. In this case, lacking hard physical evidence, his searches were taken as evidence of intent. That’s a pretty scary jump to make. The barrier between having a thought and expressing it to a search engine is almost non-existent. How do you distinguish between the intent of someone trying to create a realistic fantasy and the intent to carry out that fantasy? How many of us would like to explain our search histories to the world? Or to defend them to a prosecutor trying to cast them in the worst possible light?

The law has evolved based on the physical world, where actions have costs in time/money/effort. That tells us more about intent. I don’t have much sympathy for the conviction of Chris Asch, one of the people involved in the online discussion, who amassed a very scary collection of tools. You don’t need to own a stun gun to write a good fantasy about using one. But the online would has essentially zero barrier to actions like searching, typing or clicking. One can only hope the law can evolve to incorporate this fact. An online search is much more like a thought than an action.

I generally think that incorporating real people into sexual or violent stories without their knowledge is pretty unpleasant and unethical. But if my opinion doesn’t sway you, and you write about dark non-consensual fantasies online, then keep this case in mind. If you end up as next weeks headlines, it might suck to be thought sick and weird, but that’s definitely better than adding dangerous and criminal into the mix.

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