Their hatred and depravity shocked me

‘I can’t wait to rape her,’ said one web user

STARING at my laptop, I scrolled down the hundreds of vile comments gathered on the screen under the photos I had uploaded just hours before. ‘I would destroy this b****’, read one. ‘I hope she dies from Aids’, was another. Shocking, ugly and coarse though these sentiments may be, they are also among the more printable: the others are too explicit, sexual and disturbing to publish. Many were crudely personal, attacking my middle-aged body. Others contained threats of rape and other violent acts. Reading them was like staring into a deep, dark well of toxic misogyny.

The only comfort was that this was something I had subjected myself to willingly for a television experiment — unlike the thousands of women worldwide, many of them in the UK, who find themselves genuine victims of the vile internet phenomenon known as ‘revenge porn’.

A relatively new and deeply unsettling by-product of our digital age, it’s the name given to the practice where spurned or angry lovers upload explicit private pictures of someone onto the internet without their consent in order to humiliate them.

Earlier this year it became a criminal offence in the UK, punishable with up to two years in jail. Last month, Jason Asagba, 21, from Essex, became one of the first people to be convicted under the new law after pleading guilty to disclosing sexual photographs and films on social media of a 21-year-old woman. He will be sentenced in September.

I’ll admit that when I was approached by Channel 4 to make a documentary exploring this very modern topic I was intrigued.

My 20-year career in television has seen me try everything from radical diets in a bid to understand why some women crave a size-zero body, to presenting four series of Channel 4’s no-holds-barred Sex Education show. So I’m not easily shocked.

I’m also happy to admit I’ve taken the odd sexy selfie of my own over the years. In that, I am no different from many other men and women: with the onset of smartphones, sending revealing photos has become normal currency in many relationships.

I certainly didn’t think I was putting myself at risk — although as I was to discover, once a photo enters cyberspace it can all too quickly end up being a target for unsavoury men who trawl the internet to expose and humiliate women. That realisation, like so much else in the making of this documentary, left me disturbed.

First though, a confession: before I started making this documentary I didn’t really understand the fuss about revenge porn. Along with, I suspect, many others, the phrase meant little more than misguided young men putting revealing pictures of exgirlfriends on Facebook. Not nice, but nothing to get too upset about.

As I was to discover, it is far more sinister than that. After meeting both victims and perpetrators, as well as uploading intimate photos of my own body onto the internet in the guise of an angry ex-boyfriend, I was appalled by the level of depravity involved, the visceral hatred it exposes, and the damage to its victims.

Of course, I knew none of this when I agreed to present the programme. In fact, I was completely unaware that these sites existed. I soon got educated though. Just a quick tap into an internet search engine quickly takes you into a dark world in which shaming women — and it is mainly women — is a hobby. The first time I set eyes on such a site, based in America, I was stunned: thousands of women’s intimate pictures had been uploaded, 800 of them from the UK.

Underneath were the most lewd comments imaginable, along with, in some cases, links to the women’s social media accounts.

Because far from being ‘just a few pictures’, revenge porn is a multi-layered process. Aside from the dedicated websites set up to allow people to upload their photos, there are, I discovered, people who trawl social media looking for intimate pictures which, in turn, they load onto these sites — meaning that a simple post on Facebook or Instagram uploaded by a jealous, bitter ex can quickly be taken into an even darker sphere.

The shattering consequences were set out by one young woman I interviewed. An articulate, educated student in her 20s, she had left her boyfriend when he became domineering and possessive — at which point he uploaded onto Facebook some explicit pictures she had sent him in the better days of her relationship. ‘That’s what you get for being a f****** b****,’ he told her.

Horrible enough for sure — anyone, including her university tutors, were then able to see these most private of pictures. But then someone copied the photographs and sent them to a revenge porn site, along with her name, address, the name of her university and her course. ‘I can’t wait to rape her,’ was just one of the many comments her photos attracted.

It’s no surprise that the young woman — let’s call her Laura — felt humiliated and terrified. She had suffered depression and come close to dropping out of her course. What did surprise me was that she blamed herself. The phrase she kept using during our interview? ‘It’s my fault’.

It’s an attitude, I quickly realised, that was shockingly widespread. A straw poll on the streets of London showed me that many men and women thought that if you took explicit pictures of yourself and they found their way onto the internet, you had to accept a degree of fault.

This, incidentally, is the attitude of the people hosting the sites, who argue that they merely provide a platform — a sentiment echoed in some part by the law, which although it now prosecutes those who upload the photos, does not do anything about those who set up the websites.

Nor is this a phenomenon confined to the young. During filming I met a mother in her early 40s who had been the victim of revenge porn by someone she had been very much in love with, but who had decided to punish her when their relationship went sour.

Part of her was still in shock that someone she loved could have been capable of this but, as I discovered, the victims of this crime cross boundaries of class, race, education and age. If you have a camera phone and you have shared pictures within a relationship online or by text — and if that relationship then goes wrong — this could happen to you.

The sorrow, fear and self-loathing of the victims I spoke to was deeply unsettling and a revealing insight into the toxic legacy of revenge porn.

But one thing was missing: I had no idea how quickly an uploaded photo could gain traction, and to do that I needed to upload my own. It’s something that had been mooted by the production team at the start, and my response had been simple: ‘You must be out of your mind.’

But then I realised that the alternative — hiring a model — felt exploitative. If I was to fully understand how things worked, I needed to do it for myself. And so after discussion with my partner of the past two years, the television presenter Sue Perkins, and my producer, I decided to go ahead.

It wasn’t easy: to make my photos convincing they had to look as authentic as possible — candid, rough-hewn and explicit. After a