We all know the pattern by now. Something minor happens. One of the affected parties doesn’t want people talking about it. So they go on a crusade against anyone tha makes a small mention about the thing which ends up making the thing super famous.
It is called the Streisand effect after Barbara Streisand who famously went through such a thing. But for all the fame the effect has, how many people actually still remember what it was originally about, without looking it up?
I certainly don’t. I’m pretty sure I looked it up once but apparently it wasn’t interesting enough to remember. This just proves once again that ignoring the thing is much more effective than trying to silence talk about the thing.
Kind of similar to the Watergate scandal and all subsequent -gates. I think it’s about some spy drama revealing the president’s crimes at the Watergate Hotel that led to Richard Nixon resigning but that’s about it. And that’s probably wrong.
Now that I think about it (I should really get out of this shower) there are probably tons of idioms that are even further removed from their origin. I bet some are so far removed that we don’t even register them as being idioms. They’re just words.
Streisand didn’t want aerial images of her house to be available on the internet. The subsequent outrage made it so those pictures got on newspapers nationwide.
Well, that actually doesn’t seem unreasonable.
“Please stop photographing my private property.”
Pictures of property go in newspapers instead
I mean…she has a point…
Thing is, it wasn’t labeled as HER house; I don’t even think the photographer knew. They just took a picture of a large house on a beachside cliff.
Once she began making a big deal out of it though, every newspaper and website had it published. She made it worse by making it a thing. It was the original celebrity self-own of the internet era.
And it was inside a huge (10k+) batch of pictures documenting the entire California coastline. Basically nobody had even seen it at the time she, or at least her lawyer, threw a fit about it.
Victim blaming and gaslighting
??? How am I blaming her? Am I misunderstanding you?
The Streisand effect itself is victim blaming
There was no “victim” originally. She turned herself into one by pointing out that it was her house. Before that nobody knew.