Hacking as a tool of social disapproval

“The street finds its own uses for things.” —William Gibson, Burning Chrome

Last year, my wife, my co-author, and I launched a new podcast, The Skeptical Pervert. We talk about sex…and more specifically, we talk about sex through a lens of empiricism and rationality.

The Skeptical Pervert’s website runs WordPress. Now, I’ve been around the block a few times when it comes to web security, and I know WordPress tends to be a rather appetizing target for miscreants, so I run hardened WordPress installs, with security plugins, firewalls that are trained on common WordPress attack vectors, and other mitigations I don’t talk about openly.

I run quite a few WordPress installs. My blogs on franklinveaux.com and morethantwo.com run WordPress. So does the Passionate Pantheon blog, where Eunice and I discuss the philosophy of sex in a far-future, post-scarcity society. In addition, I host WordPress blogs for friends, and no, I won’t tell you who they are, for reasons that will soon become clear.

I automatically log hack attacks, including failed login attempts, known WordPress exploits, and malicious scans. I run software that emails me daily and weekly statistics on attacks against all the WordPress sites I own or host. I also subscribe to WordPress-specific infosec mailing lists, so I am aware of the general threat background.

Because WordPress is such a common target—it’s the Microsoft Windows of the self-hosted blog world, with everything that implies—any WordPress site will get a certain low level of constant probes and hack attempts. It’s just part of the background noise of the Internet. (If you run WordPress and you’re not religiously on top of security updates, by the way, you’ve already been pwn3d. I can pretty much guarantee it.)

The fact that I host WordPress sites not connected with me to the outside world gives me a good general baseline reading of this background noise, that I can use to compare to hack attacks against sites that are publicly connected with me.

And the results…well.

In all the years I’ve been on the Web—and I started running my own Web sites in the mid-1990s—I have never seen anything even remotely close to the constant, nonstop barrage of attacks against the Skeptical Pervert site. Joreth and Eunice are probably quite sick of my frequent updates: “Well, the firewall shows over a thousand brute-force hack attempts against the Skeptical Pervert site so far today and it isn’t even noon yet” (seriously, that’s a thing that happened recently).

Here’s a graph showing what I mean. This graph covers one week, from June 13, 2022 to June 20, 2022. The “baseline” in the graph is an average of several WordPress sites I host that aren’t in any way connected to me in the eyes of the Internet at large—I don’t run them, I don’t put content on them, my name isn’t on them, I merely host them.

Note that the attacks don’t scale with traffic; the More Than Two blog has the most traffic, followed by franklinveaux.com, then the Passionate Pantheon blog, then the Skeptical Pervert.

So what to make of this?

Part of it is likely the long-running social media campaign my ex has been running. Attacks on franklinveaux.com and morethantwo.com increased in the wake of her social media posts.

But that doesn’t explain what’s happening with the Skeptical Pervert, which has turned out to be targeted to an extraordinary degree.

Now, I don’t know who’s attacking the site, or why, so this is speculation. It’s hard to escape the idea, though, that when a site and podcast explicitly about sex, co-hosted by two women of color, talking about non-traditional sexual relationships is targeted, at least part of the answer might simply be the same old, same old tired sex-negative misogyny and racism we see…well, everywhere, pretty much. The fact that my ex doesn’t like me (and will say or do anything to get other people not to like me) doesn’t explain what’s happening here.

It’s easy to blame conservative traditionalists, but Eunice reminded me there’s another factor at work as well. The Skeptical Pervert approaches sexuality from a rational, evidence-based, skeptical lens. In the United States, there’s a stubborn streak of misogyny amongst the dudebros of the skeptics community. A podcast with two women that looks at sex from a highly female-focused, feminist point of view taking on the mantle of skepticism? It’s possible there are dudebros who will perceive that as an encroachment into their space.

In short, I don’t think this is about me. I think this is about women talking openly about real-world non-traditional sex, and getting the same pushback that women always get when they dare to do that.

If the podcast were just me, or me with obviously male co-hosts, I don’t think the level of Web attacks would be anywhere near the same.

The street finds its own uses for things. In the hands of people threatened by or frightened of non-traditional voices, the Internet has become a safe, anonymous tool of harassment.

Spintriae, sex work, and ancient history

I’ll admit I’m probably a bit late to the party here, but I’ve only just recently learned of the existence of Roman spintriae coins, coins that were (allegedly) minted at Roman brothels either as a form of token patrons could buy representing different sex acts or as an alternative form of currency because Roman law forbade paying sex workers with coins bearing the likeness of the Emperor, depending on which archaeologist you believe. Or maybe neither of the above; it’s complicated.

Anyway, they’re super cool: each coin shows a sex act on one face and has a number on the other. And, of course, the world being what it is, you can buy replicas on Etsy, because of course you can (though this particular design is, at the moment, sold out).

Roman spintria front
Roman spintria back

I have, for completely unrelated reasons, also been doing a dive into the archaeology and anthropology of sex work in ancient Rome and Greece, since we’re doing an episode on the subject for the Skeptical Pervert podcast, and it turns out nobody really knows how sex work worked back then.

I mean, there are lots of competing ideas, and the general consensus was that sex work was definitely a thing, but if you try to drill down deeper than “yes, it existed” you quickly run into all kinds of ambiguity.

Like, surviving writings from ancient societies frequently make no distinction between “prostitute” and “woman who likes sex and wasn’t ashamed of it” (rather like, oh, I don’t know, modern society today!), and on top of that, few records exist that detail how brothels worked.

In fact, it’s not entirely clear if there were dedicated, single-purpose brothels at all; some archaeological evidence suggests “brothels” may have been any place where women worked, and that dedicated sex workers were few—people who did sex work may typically have had other jobs as well.

And its not entirely clear spintriae were used exclusively or even primarily as currency or tokens for sex work. They’ve been discovered all over the place, leading some folks to the hypothesis that they may have been used as part of a game.

Which, I mean, I can get behind that—the folks in my social circle have already started talking about fun kinky uses for Etsy spintriae coins, and I reckon they’d be a big hit at a play party. But I digress.

Anyway, I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole, and I appreciate the fact that people in ancient societies were complex, messy, cool, and, well, very human.