To this day, she remembers the racing thoughts, the instant nausea, the hairs prickling up on her legs, the sweaty palms. She had shared a photograph of herself in her underwear with a boy she trusted and, very soon, it had been sent around the school and across her small home town, Aberystwyth, Wales. She became a local celebrity for all the wrong reasons. Younger kids would approach her laughing and ask for a hug. Members of the men’s football team saw it – and one showed someone who knew Davies’s nan, so that’s how her family found out.
Her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, takes a deep dive into the negatives. It covers Davies’s experiences in the digital world – that includes cyberflashing such as all those unsolicited dick pics – as well as the widespread use of her images on pornography sites, escort services, dating apps, sex chats (“Ready for Rape? Role play now!” with her picture alongside it). However, the book also shines a light on the dark online men’s spaces, what they’re saying, the “games” they’re playing. “I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing,” says Davies. “People will say: ‘It’s not all men’ and no, it isn’t, but it also isn’t a small number of weirdos on the dark web in their mum’s basements. These are forums with millions of members on mainstream sites such as Reddit, Discord and 4chan. These are men writing about their wives, their mums, their mate’s daughter, exchanging images, sharing women’s names, socials and contact details, and no one – not one man – is calling them out. They’re patting each other on the back.”
When I said it’s “bound to pop up” I was talking specifically about the online communities mentioned. I don’t disagree that there are systemic problems but I think that they were focusing on a specific and small subset of a larger problem.
I might be wrong about this, correct me if that’s so. but because most men aren’t rapists, yet a surprisingly high number of women get sexually assaulted/raped, It seems like the problem is not that most men are predators, but that our society is letting the minority that are get away with it repeatedly.
It’s much muddier than that. Most cases of rape are someone the victim trusted. And most of those cases don’t ever get reported to authorities. So there are many men may have taken advantage of a woman, and that woman see’s him as an abuser, but nearly nobody in that mans life even knows about this. The victim may stay silent for any number of reasons. There are almost definitely cases like that involving men you know, but are unaware of what they did. As for the solution to these cases? Societal norms need to change. Consent needs to be required every time no matter what. There should never be pressure for sex, and peers should not encourage pressuring a woman into sex. Instead, the man will say the person stepping in is “cock blocking” when in reality they’re defending someone who doesn’t want to have sex with them. Men will back up other men in an attempt to help their bro “get their dick wet”. They will get women drunk in hopes they will have reduced inhibitions, or perhaps so drunk they don’t even remember the night. This is not as simple as “lock up the bad guys” when very few cases of rape involve being snatched up off the street.
Gotcha, I misunderstood what you were saying. I do still disagree that groups like that are bound to pop up, at least not as much as they are right now. I think womanizing groups are far more common than dedicated racist groups online. Racism has taken a massive downward trend over the last hundred years. Of course, it is not fixed, very far from it. But I also think it is undeniable that racism is less of a problem than it was 50 years ago. That is the kind of societal change we want. If the internet were around 50 years ago, the insane number of group chats dedicated to racism would have been far larger than they are now. Bringing awareness to these issues, and especially men standing up to other men, is what will help bring a decline to the number of vocal sexist pigs and their echo chambers.