I Traded Risqué Photos With a Woman Years Ago. Now She’s Back With an Alarming Ultimatum.

How to Do It This is bizarre. Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by grinny/Adobe Stock. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. How to Do It is Slate’s sex advice column. Have a question? Send it to Jessica and Rich here. It’s anonymous! Dear How to Do It, I met a woman around 15 to 20 years ago on a web forum for a niche fetish we were both into. At the time, I was a young male college student, and she was a middle-aged, married, suburban mom. We traded photos and had what you would call “cybersex,” but that’s about it. We never actually met, mainly because we were both too scared to actually get off the computer and try our fetish in real life. Over the years, my interest in the website waned, and I visited it less and less. However, she went from being just a member of the website to being the webmaster when the original webmaster sold it to her. Recently, nostalgia (and horniness) prompted me to visit my old stomping grounds, and I found out that she is displaying my photos and our cybersex sessions very prominently on the web forum for everybody to see! I’m extremely mortified. I asked her kindly to take the photos and roleplay down, and she says she will, but only on the condition that I meet her in real life to finally engage in our mutual fetish together “after all these years”?! I really want the content taken down, and frankly, I am always keen to act out my niche fetish in real life, but her insistence that we meet has my spidey sense going haywire. What should I do? —Idiot Who Didn’t Blur His Face Dear Idiot Who Didn’t Blur His Face, Stop engaging with this woman and speak with a lawyer who specializes in what is called “revenge porn” or general blackmail. Depending on which states are involved, whether any hosting is based in a country that isn’t inclined to comply with takedown requests, and whether the sexual nature of these images will be apparent to a court, it may be quite simple to have those images removed. Before your first meeting with the lawyer, consider what roles blackmail and coercion might play in this situation. Are they often a part of the fetish in question? When you were interacting with the woman who is now violating your privacy and attempting to extort you, were either of those themes part of what she found arousing? This can help you and your legal counsel understand how much she is (mistakenly) considering her actions as part of a sexual game. To be clear, nothing about what you describe is appropriate, acceptable, or something that should be allowed. But her motivations and perspective may help a lawyer tailor their approach. Understanding whether blackmail, coercion, power imbalance, and shame are part of your own sexual interests can also help you work through your own arousal here and decide what (other than meeting with this woman—please don’t do that) you want to do with those feelings. No matter how niche the fetish, you can find other partners to play with in consensual ways. And the way this woman casually posted private interactions, including sexual images without permission, much less the required legal paperwork documenting age and consent, makes me concerned that she would record any sexual encounters and post those as well. Not to mention that participating in sex at this stage would make a potentially murky situation even muddier, and almost certainly contribute to delusions on her part that the two of you are having a fun, sexy time with this entire issue. —Jessica More Advice From Slate I’m a 50-something straight man in a healthy relationship with a woman whom I love deeply and find very sexy and attractive. Our sex life is active and fulfilling, and we communicate very openly about all things, including sex. We enjoy experimenting and are sexually compatible. But she doesn’t know what I think about when it comes time to orgasm. Advice Sex