Every minute, 66,000 photos and videos are shared on Instagram from across the world with users posting in the belief that they have consented to their image being uploaded on Instagram, and only Instagram.
Now imagine the horror when you walk into a train station one morning on your way to work and see your deeply personal engagement photo has been repurposed into a billboard advertising a swingers dating app plastered all over the station walls. Well, you posted it online so what did you expect?
Luckily, you would be within your rights to go after the brand for a hefty fee under intellectual property right laws because posting an image on Instagram isn’t blanket consent for anyone on the internet to do what they want with your photo. Thank God. So why is this understanding of image ownership and permission eradicated when it comes to content that features women’s bodies?
There is a whole ecosystem online that thrives off of the absence of women’s consent, which I delved into for my new book No One Wants To See Your Dick – an investigation into the epidemic of violence against women and girls playing out online, and spilling over into the real world. In 2010, Hunter Moore, an aspiring DJ from Sacramento, California, gained notoriety for launching the forum website IsAnyoneUp.com, which saw him share intimate images of people without their consent.
Users, typically men, submitted nudes of their ex-partners along with information like their name, hometown, social media username and place of work. Moore also hired hackers to access the email accounts of victims and steal their private nude photos, which he then shared on his website.
At its height, Moore claimed IsAnyoneUp.com was being accessed by over 350,000 people a day and allegedly earned him up to $30,000 a month in advertising revenue. While IsAnyoneUp.com was eventually shut down, it started the genre for leaked ‘revenge porn’ content, which is the unauthorised release of someone’s intimate images or videos, that spawned dozens of copycat sites and a network of forums that still exist today, hosting millions of members.
In these forums, a lack of consent is lucrative to its users who hunt down intimate images and videos of women they know they are not entitled to see. There is an attitude of ownership over women’s bodies, where the men believe they can do whatever they want with their images and videos, regardless of their original purpose or non-consensual nature.
As a former model and survivor of multiple forms of image-based abuse, including having private photos I sent to someone I trusted shared around school as a teenager, while trawling the forums for my own pictures, I came across a desperate quest of men searching for ‘pussy slip’ images. Specifically naming me and many of my friends from my modelling days. Pussy slip is used to describe a photo where unintentionally and unknown to the woman, her vulva or labia is on display due to the awkward placement of underwear, see-through fabric or a risqué pose captured by the photographer.
Unless the model has specified that she is happy to shoot full frontal nude then all of these images are non-consensual and have been uploaded through a lack of due diligence by the photographer, who has not thoroughly checked the image before posting it.
Mistakes of course happen, but when working with models who have specifically set boundaries that they do not shoot fully nude then it is a photographer’s responsibility to ensure that these boundaries are respected. On photoshoots, when holding a pose, I have had to put my full trust in photographers when they promised me nothing intimate could be seen – it is their job to follow through with that promise.
In one of these forums, I discovered several posts that included ‘pussy slip’ photos and video screenshots of models that I knew – their vulva on display through mesh underwear, in poses where their hand wasn’t fully covering their genital area and in screenshots from videos where they were captured mid-changing pose. The forum users described how a known female photographer had been selling the images on her own subscription site.
It was clear from the men’s comments they were aware of the non-consensual nature of the images, but this did not seem to raise concern. I decided to check out the photographer’s subscription site myself.
Signing up for free access, I was greeted by a welcome video which featured a short, behind-the-scenes clip of a model moving her hand to change pose, her vulva coming into view. I knew that the model would be absolutely mortified if she was aware this was available online. My eyebrows folded inward with the wrinkles of disgust as I clicked through the photo albums, uncovering unforgivable betrayals at the hands and lens of another woman. If this was just the free shit I could see, I dreaded to think what was being sold privately.
Most of the images on the page were years old and had originally been taken for newspapers, with only a chosen few going to print. It seemed that the outtakes and unused images had been stored in a vault unbeknownst to the models and had now been repurposed and sold online without their consent.
By now, some of the models were mothers and/or had changed careers and left the industry completely. Almost all, if not all of them, had never posed full-frontal nude and now, years later, a woman that they had trusted and respected had set up a subscription page to sell their nude images to strange men on the internet. I don’t know how she sleeps at night.
I let the women involved know about their images and the account I had found, and they were understandably livid. Apparently, the female photographer denied ever posting the photos, even though I had provided screenshots, but the account was swiftly shut down once they confronted her. Maybe that was a coincidence.
There will be people out there who think that the women have no right to be upset over their nude photos being shared online because of their job as models, but ‘pussy slip’ photos are non-consensual and feed off of voyeurism fantasies. I mean, even just the word ‘slip’ acknowledges that they are an accident and unintentional.
It is a depressing thought that because of the deep-rooted victim blaming tropes that still thrive in our society, these women will be judged more harshly by some - for their job and choosing to be photographed in a state of undress - than the multiple people who removed their consent. The female photographer, a trusted colleague, who shared their intimate images. The website which hosted this non-consensual content. The dozens of men who subscribed to the page in the hope of viewing something they openly admitted they were never meant to see...
Each one of these individuals played an active role in the removal of the women’s bodily autonomy and freedom to choose which part of their body they shared.
While the female photographer, to my knowledge, has never been charged in relation to anything connected to the website, Hunter Moore – founder of IsAnyoneUp.com – was eventually charged with aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting in the unauthorised access of a computer (hacking – in other words), receiving a sentence of two and a half years in prison. Nothing specifically relating to the intimate, private nature of the content he stole from unknowing women.
The men on the forum were aware that they should never have seen those photos, yet they relished the leaks and did their best to keep them a secret. That is terrifying to me. Because what else are they doing to women when they think they can get away with it? This is barely scratching the surface when it comes to online harms against women and girls – and how they have deeply real consequences offline.
No One Wants To See Your Dick by Jess Davies is out now (rrp £20, Waterstones)
