This whole thing has blown up into creepiness galore. Compare the Owens and Fortuny studies. Controversy abounds.

The Simon Owens experiment where he ran sex ads on Craigslist to determine what sort of ad gets more responses (overwhelmingly, girls looking for sex with guys get tons more responses than guys looking for babes). He ran the ads and then tallied his results and posted them on bloggasm as a formal case study Pretty straightfoward and tongue in cheek but no real ethical bounds crosses and no malice intended.

Jason Fortuny’s approach was very different. He copied a very explicit advert and posted it to Craigslist to see how many responses he would get in a twenty-four hour period (a LOT). However, he didn’t just post his tally, he posted the responses with the full names and email addresses as well as all the photos he got (many explicit – evidently, a lot of guys like to send strange women photos of their penises). Obviously, this humiliated the guys and their unsuspecting wives and more. See the thread with comments here (extremely NSFW, we’re talking very much NSFW).

Now, the question becomes was what Fortuny did illegal or unethical or in some grey area. The folks at Waxy have some background on the legality questions . . . Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds. The phenomenon of sex baiting, of men pretending to be women to lead other guys on, has been around for quite some time. Back when I ran my experimental hypnosis group specifically for women using hypnosis audio recordings, we would every once in awhile discover one of the ladies in the group was actually a guy pretending to be a girl.

However, Fortuny’s “study” was no study. It was a prank or worse. However, was it technically illegal. Embarrassing and humiliating for the men who sent their nude photos or explicit letters to an unknown “woman” who turned out to be a guy posting their private correspondence to public forums but was it in fact an illegal act. Tasteless and rude, yes. But was it illegal? At least one marriage has fallen into disarray because of the fallout of the “experiment” although one could argue there were problems in that relationship before the husband’s attempt at infidelity was posted publicly. Fortuny did not force the husband or any of the others to respond to the Craigslist advert in the ways they did, but one might still argue a form of entrapment.