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 can’t be bothered to read the paper, but here are some evergreens that make this result hard to interpret:
- The sample includes women from all ages and boomer Karens would not report abuse
- On the other hand, being bi or lesbian has only been accepted by society since the last 10-20 years. Don’t believe me? Just watch some 90s sitcom like Friends.
- Being bi or lesbian still comes together with a special type of discrimination that a straight woman most likely will never experience; hence, straight women are potentially less sensitized to abuse / might have a different bar for what they consider abuse
- Putting together these very different groups of people with very different experiences on what is “normal” will result in them having a very different sensitivity towards what they would consider abuse
- In other words a young, bi/lesbian woman is probably more likely to report abuse than an old straight woman, an old lesbian woman who is just happy might never engage with researchers because of the past societal stigma that makes her keep her life private
Of course we don’t know any of that, but these psychological studies are difficult to conduct because in theory you’d have to account for these effects and in practice that might be impossible. But again, I haven’t bothered to read the whole thing just to prove a point.
Well, you’re really just throwing out what-ifs. But you happened to chance on one theory that some researchers think could partially explain the discrepancy:
Being bi or lesbian still comes together with a special type of discrimination that a straight woman most likely will never experience;
Being oppressed causes stress, stress causes lack of control. The idea is it’s a similar driver to why poorer couples have higher rates of abuse.
That’s probably not the SOLE cause, but it’s likely a factor.
I think it’s good that you’re trying to back your claims by sources / papers but your response tells me that you’re not trained (yet) in reading papers critically. Those are just some random question that came up from the top of my head and that any scientist would ask if someone were to present the findings of this study at a conference. This kind of rigor, to not blindly accept results but to critically evaluate them and poke holes in the arguments is what makes academia academia. I’m kind of surprised that you throw around papers and then get offended if people don’t blindly accept whatever you say, it’s kind of an interesting appeal to authority fallacy.
The numbers are pretty much a consensus among researchers. If you disagree, then the burden is on YOU to do a deep, critical analysis. I’m just reporting the conclusions of others, not doing any critical analysis. If those conclusions make you feel uncomfortable, maybe you should explore that feeling more. Although if you want to do a critical analysis, I’d welcome it.
