What I Learned While Exposing Myself on LiveJournal
Long before Snapchat sexting scandals and hacked celebrity smartphones, I got a live preview of online harassment while sharing naked photos of myself on one weird little corner of the World Wide Web.
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Illustrations by Devyn Park
In the basement bedroom of my parents’ house, I closed the door and wished there was a lock. I set the camera on my childhood dresser, and fiddled with the self-timer. I took off my clothes, trying to think of what on earth I would say if someone came to the door. I sat awkwardly on my bed, unsure how to pose, and waited for the flash to go off.
At eighteen, I’d never seen a photo of my own breasts before. Was that what I looked like? Was that who I was?
I picked four of the images and put them up on the LiveJournal group I’d recently found and fallen in love with.
This is my first post,” I typed, “I’m nervous. I’m still getting used to this camera.”
This was all the way back before we all heard the term “social media” every single day; in 2005, LiveJournal was paving the way. LiveJournal was (and still is) a blogging website with a delightfully simple premise: Here, you can keep a journal, it can be online, you can share it with your friends. It also allowed fo…
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