No Fury

I was wandering around on one of the news aggregation cites this week when I ran across this story about a woman who found out that her significant other was cheating on her, and decided to get revenge by selling all of his stuff on the Internet. Since it’s mostly stuff she bought for him during the time they were together – and since it was left at her place after she kicked him out – no one seems terribly worried about the legality of these sales; a much more interesting question is whether there is any truth to the story. It seems that every item offered for sale on the site is displayed in a picture of the alleged spurned woman holding it while in various states of undress – accompanied by the promise that the higher the auction prices go, the less she will be wearing in the next round of pictures…

You can pick up the original New York Post story if you want to, but the basic concept is simple enough. A man is caught by his significant other sleeping with other women, so she decides to both get revenge on him and recoup some of the money she spent on him during their time together by auctioning off his abandoned property while showing off the attributes he has lost access to with his philandering ways. The basic story turns up on eBay and most other Internet auction sites quite often, as people attempt to obtain higher prices for the goods they are selling by engaging the sympathies of their potential customers. This can be a jilted groom selling his runaway bride’s wedding dress (one guy gained brief Internet fame by actually modeling the gown himself for the pictures), a bereft girlfriend trying to erase painful memories while getting out of debt, or any number of other scenarios, but this is the first one I’ve encountered that is actually playing on the desires as well as the gullibility of the audience. Which, if the Post article is to be believed, is resulting in as much as 1,000% markups on what are, effectively, just used clothing items…

Now, there is no immediate reason to believe that the site isn’t legitimate. Certainly, there are many cases of unusually attractive women being cheated on, and there’s no reason that one such individual couldn’t either be an exceptional web designer herself or else have access to one. Nor does it seem like that much of a stretch to believe that a scorned woman might choose to take a course of action that would be both financially rewarding and humiliating to her faithless lover. It does seem a bit odd that the woman in this case is trying to accomplish these things by allowing anyone with an Internet connection to stare at her body, but she undoubtedly knows the man in our story better than we do; if she thinks this is this best way to get his goat, it probably is. There’s also the matter that she doesn’t seem to ever run out of new belongings to auction off, and the fact that this whole business model bears a considerable resemblance to the “pay for my plastic surgery” sites (men donate money toward a female participant’s cosmetic surgery, and in return she posts revealing or naked pictures of herself post-operative), but even so, it’s hard to see what about this operation is illegal – or how you could ever prove anything if it was…

In the long run, I suppose, it doesn’t really matter where the goods being sold by this site actually came from, or if the woman in the pictures is actually the same one whose significant other stepped out on her, or even if any of that happened in the first place. The Internet is full of pay services offering risqué pictures, and retail sites offering over-priced personal items, and if someone has found a way to make both businesses more successful by combining them, I can’t imagine why this should matter to anyone. I’m just pointing out that, as in almost every other aspect of life on the World Wide Web, you probably shouldn’t believe everything you read – and even if you do, you may want to consider if it’s really worth paying ten times as much to somebody who has a good story (and naked pictures of themselves) even so…