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 get called a conspiracist for linking the actual reports and investigations into this, but this was by design.
Almost every authoritarian/fascist uprising on record has started with the indoctrination and isolation of young, sexually insecure, lonely men who feel disenfranchised with the system because they’re depressed, horny and have mixed-up ideas how to be liked by others. It’s incredibly easy to peel off a massive chunk of this population and get them to start blaming the government, society broadly, science, knowledge, literally anything but their own need to improve their social skills and gain some emotional intelligence.
These are our dumbest, angriest, loudest men, and thus become the major influencing factor on their peers, online and off. They set the tone and everyone else just kind of goes along with it, or leaves them to grow and gain power in peace.
This shit is why I think regular therapy sessions should be a mandatory part of high school for everyone. Kids need better tools to deal with the shit they’re going through.
A few old-fashioned morons go a parent-teacher meeting and scream “We never had all this psychotherapy bullshit when I was a kid!” And everyone mummers to each other that yeah, we can’t impose our reason-based evaluation of reality on someone else’s ignorance, that wouldn’t be American!
Then their kid goes back to school the next day and continues to inflict a lifes with of trauma on their peers.