Three Links to Destroy Your Faith in Humanity

Seriously, if you’re feeling depressed, don’t read these.

1) Hunter Moore’s ‘Scary as Shit’ Revenge Porn Site Will Map Submitted Photos to People’s Addresses

Remember the guy behind the revenge porn site Is Anyone Up, which enabled assholes to post nude pictures of their exes for a worldwide audience to see? That site’s down, but he’s got a new one about to go up, with a new feature:

Scorned lovers who submit photos of their exes for revenge can now also enable others to physically stalk them by including their addresses along with the photos. HunterMoore.TV will then display the photos on a map. …

“We’re gonna introduce the mapping stuff so you can stalk people,” Mr. Moore gleefully told Betabeat, adding, “I know–it’s scary as shit.”

More here.

2) Creepy ‘Love Surgery’ Performed on New Moms’ Unwitting Vaginas

This isn’t a new story, but Jezebel’s Erin Gloria Ryan has written a horrifying overview of the case of Dr. James C. Burt, a gynecologist who maimed countless women by performing weird, unnecessary, and often quite damaging “vagina tightening” surgery on them without their knowledge or consent over the course of several decades.

Burt’s “Love Surgery” was based on the doctor’s cockamamie idea that women are “structurally inadequate for intercourse” and that the only way to fix their “pathological condition” was through surgery that made the vagina and vulva more penis friendly. He also believed that Love Surgery would turn women into “horny little mice.” In his 1975 book, entitled “Surgery of Love,” Burt … says that “hundreds and hundreds” of women were treated this way, but other sources estimate that the number is actually in the thousands. …

 In his tireless efforts to make women more fuckable, he actually ended up causing his patients serious, irreversible damage.

Perhaps most astonishing:

[O]ther doctors and medical professionals knew what Dr. Burt was up to, but did nothing. St. Elizabeth Hospital in Dayton, Ohio, where Dr. Burt practiced, didn’t require medical consent forms for the procedure for the first 12 years it was being performed.

3) When “Men’s Rights” Narratives Kill

Amanda Marcotte writes about a sad story related to Slate’s Dear Prudence in which a man stalked and killed his ex and one of her children – after being alerted to her location by a sympathetic friend, who is now “haunted” by this terrible mistake and its horrifying consequences. As Marcotte notes,

The so-called “men’s rights” movement is very intent on convincing the public that domestic violence is overblown by feminists, and that many to most victims are lying to the police and the courts, who take them at their word because the justice system is supposedly in the thrall of the all-powerful feminist regime. This narrative tends to have a lot of power, because it feeds off long-standing stereotypes of women as deceitful, manipulative gold diggers. Unfortunately, the widespread credulity for anti-feminist ravings about lying women in cahoots with the police does lead to tragedy … .

If you are not already depressed enough by this story, take a look at Domestic Violence Crime Watch, a site that chronicles cases in which domestic violence leads to murder and other violent crimes. While women account for some of the violence, the overwhelming majority of the cases on the site involve male perps and female victims; sometimes children and other family members are harmed or killed as well. Data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics shows clearly that women are far more likely to be murdered by intimates (and exes) than men.  (The one bit of good news in all this:  the number of such murders has been declining for some time.)

If this is all a bit much, here’s a live stream of kittens in action. (Or, at the moment at least, napping.)