REVENGE PORN
It’s a sinister phenomenon: men posting explicit photos of ex-lovers online to humiliate them. One TV presenter staged a chilling experiment to reveal how it wrecks victims’ lives
‘Revolting’ was their verdict on my pictures
couple of stiff gins, my female producer and I took the plunge. Naked on my bed, I posed for a series of snaps taken on her smartphone as we laughed nervously at the surreal nature of proceedings.
The next day, finger quivering over the keyboard, I uploaded them on to one of the leading revenge porn sites, posing as a bitter ex-boyfriend who had discovered I had been cheating on him.
The Channel 4 team had created a fake identity for me: name, telephone number and social media links, as well as disguising my face.
But to the site visitors I looked all too real and within 48 hours my photos had attracted over 40,000 views, accompanied by every kind of degrading comment conceivable.
Some of them were just personal: as a pretty lived-in 44-year- old, I know my body is a far cry from the Barbie-doll aesthetic, and there were all too many men wishing to point it out. ‘Revolting’, wrote one. ‘She has clearly had children,’ wrote another (I haven’t). Most though, threatened abuse, talking in explicit detail about how they would hurt me.
I was stunned by the level of vitriol directed by people hiding behind keyboards, indulging in the sexually violent side of their personality. Nor did it stop there — a few days after I posted my pictures, I was contacted on my fake Twitter account by a man who attempted to befriend me, claiming he had stumbled across my naked pictures and was trying to help me by alerting me to them.
Laudable, you might think. Not according to Dr Emma Short from the National Centre for Cyberstalking Research. This was no knight in shining armour, she told me, and he didn’t find these pictures by accident. He was a stalker-in-waiting. I didn’t respond.
Who are these people, I wondered? Not all of them could be lonely internet trolls, sitting in their bedroom. One man I interviewed was an avid consumer of revenge porn, routinely logging onto sites to get his kicks from the humiliation of legions of unknown girls. Nicely spoken and neatly dressed, he was not unintelligent, yet there was an enormous disconnect between what he was seeing on the screen and the real world.
Only when I asked him if he had a sister, or a mother — and how he would feel if this was happening to them — did a light bulb seem to click on. ‘I haven’t really thought about it like that before and now I feel really uncomfortable,’ he told me.
Talking to him, I realised that many of the men looking at — and posting on — these horrific sites will have otherwise normal lives. They could be your brother, your partner, the man sitting next to you at work. Take the twenty-something educated man with a good job and wide social circle who agreed to talk to me anonymously.
Dumped by his girlfriend, he uploaded explicit pictures of her onto Facebook, determined to hurt her, he explained, as much as she had hurt him. His only regret was that he was socially ostracized when his actions were uncovered.
Of course, hurt is a normal part of human relationships, as is the instinct for revenge: it would be naive to pretend otherwise. But I was left wondering how we have ended up in a society where such revenge has become normalised. I worry, too, about what indulging in it is doing to the people involved.
We already know the extent to which exposure to porn can affect how people view intimacy, but in revenge porn that process is taken one step further: there’s a complete detachment from any expression of any concept of respect and love.
I was lucky. The men abusing me — or trying to track me down — had no chance of finding me. Then suddenly my pictures were removed, apparently in response to comments suggesting they were fakes, or some- one twigging I was researching a documentary. I realised the men who log on to these sites don’t want that. They can get naked pictures anywhere. What they want is to witness genuine humiliation. And that should tell you all you need to know about this most horrible of worlds.
REVENGE PORN is on Channel 4 on Monday at 10pm.