Revenge Of The Ex In The Digital Age
Success is the best revenge, they said. They clearly didn't have a webcam, a voodoo doll, or a vial of pubic lice on hand.
If you happen to be in need of a reminder that 90% of everything in the world is just awful, then you’re in luck. Because people are selling pubic lice on the Internet.
I used to think success was the best revenge, but stumbling upon CrabRevenge.com changed all that. “The Ultimate Revenge”, their website sagely informs, involves buying vials of human-farmed crotch louse to “sprinkle on the bedding or clothing of the one you once loved the most”.
While the site does helpfully offer other reasons you might be in the market for some revenge crabs (“If you’ve ever found yourself on the receiving end of a cruel joke……..”) it’s clear that their main USP is wreaking vengeance on past lovers.
Hey, we’ve all been hurt before right? No one is above considering revenge. But is this where modern society is heading? Really? Girl meets boy, they fall in love but part ways after a brief and unfulfilling union wherein boy reveals a nature that is vindictive, emotionally immature and rabidly insecure. So boy buys a package of Pediculosis pubis from the Internet, questionably gains access to girl’s home and introduces an infestation of said lice to her bedding and/or intimate apparel? If so, cancel my OkCupid account and put my pussy in a sarcophagus now, thanks, because I’m done.
IsAnyoneUp.com
Romantically-motivated revenge is nothing new, but it is interesting to see how it — like love — has been transformed in the digital age. Last year, women around the world mentally high-fived karma when Hunter Moore, creator of revenge porn site ’Is Anyone Up‘ and general douche-basket, received a litigious lashing that ended in his bankruptcy. His sex-trolling even managed to awaken the ire of hacktavist collective Anonymous, after he told an interviewer that he didn’t care if anyone killed themselves because of his website. It seemed between that, the lawsuits brought about by the women in the unpermitted videos, the selling of the site to an anti-bullying group, and his embarrassingly Twitter-public, coke-fueled tantrum, the world had heard the last of old Hunter M.
HunterMoore.tv
Unfortunately not. With the relentlessness of a particularly viral strain of herpes, Moore has since sprung forth with a whole new bunch of nasty, deeply misogynistic bullshit. He has another as-yet unlaunched website huntermoore.tv, which is once again calling for submissions from jilted men folk to post incredibly private videos and photographs of their ex-girlfriends as means of pay back (with no clear distinction how this site is any different from the last one.) Oh, and he also threatened to rape a female DJ on air, and awarded an iPhone to a girl who brushed her teeth with her own poop for him. Because he is just a nice guy like that.
GetRevengeOnYourEx.com
Then there’s the frankly psychotic yet pragmatically named GetRevengeOnYourEx.com, with its delightfully-titled side-bar, ‘Crush your ex!’. The site offers a whole range of ex-crushing methods including but not limited to ‘Voodoo Dolls – the revenge curse’ (exotic!); ‘Send Your Ex A Sick & Twisted “Gift”‘ (I never get mail anymore.); and, my personal favourite, ‘Send your ex an offensive e-card or anonymous fax!’
The site also offers a map-function that pinpoints the home addresses of member’s ex’s (“Is someone’s ex living near you? Where’s your ex?”) which seems preeeeeetty illegal; meanwhile, the bio of the site’s creator, Nick James, sounds like the synopsis from an episode of NCIS Miami:
Maybe it’s because I don’t think I’ve ever experienced “pure rage coursing through my soul” (I grew up in the suburbs), but if I was that guy’s ex-wife I would be living in Peru with a new face faster than you can say, ‘Hey, isn’t that Nick over there in those bushes, breathing heavily over his fax machine?”
CrabRevenge.com
But none of these got under my skin like CrabRevenge.com. While it was hard to put my finger on the thing that most represented the death of love and hope — from the site’s horrifying omission of where the lice actually come from to the startling overuse of ellipses that permeates the copy — I was really struck by the raw emotion of the language. It’s heartbreaking because the examples the site’s creator offers are so obviously, so transparently, his own:
“If you have ever had an ex cheat on you and break your heart……
If you have ever punched above your weight and found yourself being taken for granted……..
If you have ever been hurt physically or emotionally by someone who didn’t deserve your love or friendship in the first place…………”
Oh sadcrabnerd. I ended up finding it really hard not to feel sorry for the guy. Somewhere in England there is a broken-hearted 4chan geek, whose only claim to fame is that one time he got a mention on The Jonathan Ross Show. And there he works quietly and calmly, farming and packaging pubic lice from his own nether regions in a dark room with walls papered by photographs of his ex.
On Regaining Control:
The main thing that all the revenge sites had in common, besides their touchingly simple HTML, their predilection for Comic Sans and their alarmingly bad punctuation, was how focused they were on “regaining control”. This sentiment was repeated over and over on each site — this insistence that brutal revenge is warranted because it’s the only way to… what? Feel better? As if putting pubic lice in the underpants of someone you whose hand you used to hold while you slept will make you happy?
I may not be an expert on love gone wrong, I’m no Richard Mercer, but I am fairly certain that in the end the best revenge is just not being the kind of person who orders crabs from the Internet.
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Alice Williams was one of the original creators of and long-time editor for Melbourne print magazine SPOOK. You can read her at Pedestrian.TV, TheVine, SPOOK and Daily Life, but she looks better on Twitter @shutupalice.