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.”
I suspect there is some amount of survivorship bias type thing going on here. The type of men to hang out in such places are the type that enjoy it, and as such would never call out such behavior. The men that don’t enjoy such will tend not to come across such content in the first place.
So the first group just doesn’t care, the second doesn’t see it in the first place.
There is also probably some degree of the second group of men acknowledging that trying to call out such behavior won’t go very far. If you said “hey don’t share this woman’s pics” on 4chan, you’re going to immediately get laughed at, ignored, and probably called a bunch of slurs. And then they’ll keep on doing it because you told them not to. And that’s in no small part because these places are puedo anonymous.
Men can’t get away with such behavior as easily outside of the internet. Calling them out in real life is far more likely to go somewhere. However ther are caveats. Again comes the survivorship bias thing I mentioned. But worse, if done in real life and calling out that behavior backfires, it becomes a teaching moment. “Don’t tell other men to behave decent or they’ll ostracize and harass you”.
It’s a fucked up situation all around.
Let’s not forget that the people that call out said behavior get banned and their comments deleted… you can’t authentically claim nobody calls them out because you don’t actually know if anyone is or not… because ban.
I’ve called these assholes out on reddit to in the past. My reward was not only getting banned from their sub, but also getting auto-banned from a bunch of unrelated mainstream and progressive subs.
The idea that we can just go in and win an argument with these clowns is incredibly naive. I get the sense that the author didn’t actually try to do this herself. Social media is specifically built to push people into impenetrable bubbles because the algorithms intentionally favor combative tribalism, which drives up engagement.
But social media is only part of the problem. We have bigger issues related to how we think about men, and how we raise boys, that drive them into this mentality in the first place. Toxic masculinity is not new, it’s just been spread rapidly by technology.
I think so to. I’ve seen a lot of pornography and never encountered a community like that. I think the vast majority of dudes are just skimming the surface and never get into communities about it. Most of the guys i know would think doing so was weird. I had a couple dudes try to show me pictures their girlfriends sent them in the past but I did call them out for that.
I’ve come across them. But only on 4chan, which there is fuckall anyone can do about, short of breaking into their site.
I would hope the same of my friend group. I’ve tossed a lot of friendships in the trash because of their behavior. So those that remain are hopefully those that are actually good.
An apropos of that. I’m Chinese/Viet half-and-half and was born in the UK. I have friends in the UK that are half-Chinese and half-British (white/caucasian). I had no idea that there were so many “half-Chinese” specific groups online.
Also, I can’t remember but there was some business about having a Chinese dad was better than a Chinese mom (I could have them switched). However, it’s mainly boys/men with this problem and they’re having issues dating or with school and everything and blame it all on their Chinese parent. My friend tries to chime in to talk some sense into them but the self-victimization is really strong and he gets pushed out.
Yeah that touches on a related problem, the fact that we’ve designed society to be anti-social.
It’s incredibly hard to have a social life, and as a result people lash out. And they tend not to care about if the thing they lash out against is the correct thing to lash out against.
And it’s a self feeding cycle. Because men tend to lash out in the form of right wing populism, and any woman who knows anything will steer clear of that nonsense. So it feeds into itself.
In your case it’s self hatred racism, but it’s driven by the same forces.
I’m glad you pointed this out. I realized how isolating cars are after moving to a walkable neighborhood. I’m convinced walkable neighborhoods foster community.
I’m living in a city in England that’s very near the 15-minute city ideal. I know my neighbors from at least a dozen nearby households on my street and adjoining streets, mainly from the nearby park, the pub, cafes and dogwalking. I’m very near the point of getting rid of the car, since I only use it about once a week and could use public transit for those occasions (it’s not perfect, but also not bad and slowly improving).
Asian Mom White Dad is more likely to be seen as fetishized, or in a monetary relationship, especially if the man is older than the woman. White Mom Asian Dad is seen as a sign the man is rich or success to pull a white woman, especially if she is younger.
There are asymmetries like that in marriages between members of many groups. For example, Arab Dad, Anglo Mom is far more common than vice-versa. Same with Black American Dad, Asian Mom. And yeah, how those relationships are viewed includes a large measure of internalized colonialist grovelling.