When Hunter Moore first entered the revenge porn game, he was known for trafficking in dick pics. Moore’s website, “Is Anyone Up?” rose to prominence by publishing nude self-shots of male musicians, like the bassists from Passion Pit and All Time Low. Naked band members became such a phenomenon on Is Anyone Up? that indie labels starting buying ad space. But Moore’s site became truly infamous for its unauthorized nudes of girls next door, their photos culled from the cellphone galleries of spurned ex-boyfriends. In March, one woman stabbed Moore in the shoulder with a pen after he featured her on the site against her will. He is undeterred. After a brief hiatus—Moore shut down the site and pledged to sell it to an anti-bullying organization back in April—Moore announced plans to resurrect the effort this week. Hacker group Anonymous vowed to take him down. Moore’s fans went wild.
Organizing Moore’s supporters is Amanda Collins, a 24-year-old New Jersey personal assistant who maintains Moore’s fan page on Facebook. That’s a unique role for a female Hunter Moore follower. Despite Moore’s commitment to equal-opportunity sexual shaming, the leaked nude photo game is still different for boys and girls. By the looks of Moore’s intimate Village Voice profile, the women he touches generally fall into one of two camps: They are either crawling all over him in a limousine, trying to get into his pants, or else they are drying their tears in a Starbucks, the unsuspecting victims of hacked hard drives. Meanwhile, Moore’s male friends are just hanging in the limo, along for the ride. The site’s voyeuristic audience is dominated, as The Voice reported, by “childless men browsing from home who have no postgraduate education.” Most of his 3,000-plus Facebook fans are male. The Passion Pit penis may have been Moore’s pièce de résistance, but it’s failed to upend the entrenched sexual dynamics of most internet porn. So where does Collins fit in?
Like many fans, Collins initially logged onto Is Anyone Up? to check out its male content. “A friend of mine mentioned the site on her Facebook, because a few of the guys she dated who were in bands at the time were posted on IAU,” Collins told me. She got drawn in by “the reality of it all. These were people that you may actually know in person.” When she launched the fan page for Moore last year, she gave it the motto “FCUK DOODZ, SUBMIT THEIR NOODZ.”
But as Is Anyone Up? evolved, Collins noticed an uptick in posts of women’s bodies. “I believed it to be mostly women that would come on to Hunter online,” Collins says, to post photos of themselves. Indeed, Moore’s Twitter account is inundated with nude selfies sent to him directly, and publicly, from women. That’s one bizarre consequence of Moore’s brand of public shaming: If you send your nude photos directly to Hunter Moore, you can avoid the more extreme humiliation of having them leaked without your consent. Women who flash their bodies publicly are one step ahead of women who prefer to keep them private.
But whatever Collins first thought about how most photos got to IAU, it’s clear that, aside from the semifamous, the nonconsensual posts are the site’s biggest draw. The women who fight to get their photos removed from IAU just end up “directing more traffic to their post,” Collins says. “It’s a life lesson, in a way.”
As those revenge posts gained traction, a sexual double standard was born. Men who appear on Is Anyone Up? “are looked at as more of a joke. Not something to be taken seriously,” Collins says. “Women, on the other hand, are going to get ripped apart whether they’re attractive or not. Attractive females will get a bunch of guys drooling over their bodies, and also get a handful of haters based on pure jealousy. Unattractive females definitely get verbally torn to shreds.”
Not that Collins cares: “People lose sight that this all could be avoided if they didn’t take the pictures in the first place,” she said. And Collins’ own avoidance of such public shame helps her to successfully rule over her fandom. On Moore’s Facebook fan page, she repeatedly reminds readers that she’s “NOT Hunter Moore, just a fangirl from Jersey.” That’s partly to tell Moore’s fans, “don’t message me to bang you or send you free shit.” But it’s also to telegraph that she’s one of the few girls who gets it—she’s not hanging all over Moore, she’s not getting hacked, she’s just watching it all unfold, one of the boys.
But even though Collins hasn’t been physically exposed on Is Anyone Up?, her mere presence in the fandom has prompted plenty of gendered responses. After leaving a comment on Moore’s Instagram, “all of a sudden I had between 20 to 30 follower requests—all guys,” she says. “Probably because I’m female, and they assume I’d be a girl to ‘just get naked.’ It’s crazy.” Other men take a different tack. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” one guy wrote on her wall. “I hope some self respecting women kick you in the cunt a few times to smarten you the fuck up.” Collins takes the criticism in stride. “It’s definitely not easy being a female fan of Hunter’s,” Collins says, “but I knew that going into creating the fan page.”
