AUTHOR Jess Davies was horrified when she learnt that her innocent selfies had been defiled by strangers online – here she reveals the horrifying extent of the new trend.
SITTING cross-legged on my bedsheets, my back ached after hours of being hunched over my laptop.
Roughly two hours earlier I had punched my name into Google and begun my monthly torture: scrolling through the search results in a dispiriting attempt to claw back control and recover some of my digital footprint.
Report the images, fill out a takedown request, repeat, with the vain hope that they would be removed from the adult site, but they rarely were.
I was 19 years old when my intimate images were mass-distributed online via porn sites, messaging forums, escorting pages and used as catfish bait by scammers.
My face, along with my body, had been swallowed up by cyber scavengers.
A novice to the digital world at the time, I had reluctantly consented to my selfie-style images being uploaded to a member’s subscription website which was run by an internal partnership set up through my modelling agency at the time.
The self-shot images were never something I was excited about sharing; if I refused to send them or shared them late, I would be fined, and the money would be docked from my pay. Not an ideal situation for a broke student to be in.
Within days, they were all over the internet. My DM’s filled up with men who shared sexual messages and their frustrations at being catfished by someone using my photos.
While I was desperately trying to get my images taken down from anywhere that would hear my pleas, elsewhere online men were busy snapping photos of themselves defacing my images with their semen.
Frantically scrolling through my name on the search engine, I spotted a new result, ‘Jess Davies C*M TRIBUTE’, that featured on a porn site.
Panic raced through my mind, I hadn’t seen those words used side-by-side before, but its implication was clear enough.
I clicked the link and saw my pouting face staring back at me, only a stranger had ejaculated on it.
A nauseous lump crawled up to my throat, my nervous system invaded with a wave of disgust and shame.
Who was this person? This man, who felt so entitled to my body that he filmed himself masturbating over it and shared it online to seek praise from others?
Research told me that these images and videos, exist as a sub-culture in online communities that often sexualise, degrade and humiliate women.
The use of the word ‘tribute’ – usually meaning a celebration or show of gratitude – adds insult to the women whose consent and bodily autonomy are stripped from them by these degrading acts.
While researching the forums of the manosphere – a virtual space that often promotes misogyny, anti-feminist rhetoric and harmful masculinity – for my book No One Wants To See Your D*ck: A handbook for survival in a digital world, I browsed through dozens of pages where men would share requests for other men to create ‘tributes’ of women they knew in real life.
From ex-girlfriends to current wives, cousins to biological sisters – there were always a lot of sisters – it seemed no woman was safe from the wickedness of the men they co-exist with.
For some men, sexual gratification seemed to be their goal, but for others I sensed a deep disdain towards the women whom they intended to degrade and humiliate with the help of their online community. A camaraderie built on these non-consensual ‘tributes’.
These images often appear alongside graphic sexual commentary about the women in the photo, along with other requests from users asking for help using AI technology to remove women’s clothes or insert them into graphic sex scenes without their consent.
Violation after violation unravels with the men’s deep-rooted misogyny.
It’s impossible to ignore the role that the advancement in technology has played in increasing the digital harms faced by women.
Originally these images required men to physically masturbate and document the end result.
Nowadays, some men skip the physical act altogether, prompting chatbots such as X’s Grok to churn out thousands of derogatory images each day using AI technology to emulate the act.
What once seemed a niche ‘trend’ in manosphere forums, semen images and videos have since gone mainstream.
GROK DEEPFAKES ‘AMOUNT TO CHILD ABUSE’
The social media firm X has been awash with nude and sordid pictures of real women and children created by the AI tool Grok.
In January Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said some of Grok’s deepfakes amounted to “child abuse”.
Ms Kendall assured MPs that it will become a criminal offence this week to make non-consensual intimate images online.
She slammed Mr Musk’s platform for failing to stamp out criminal imagery of “children as young as 11, including girls sexualised and toddlers”.
Regulator Ofcom is undertaking a swift investigation to see if X, formerly Twitter, has breached the Online Safety Act.
It has the power to fine the company up to £18million or 10 per cent of its turnover – or use a nuclear option of applying to the courts to block its use in Britain.
Ministers said in January they would “of course” consider banning X if Ofcom recommends it.
Last year, in an investigation for Glamour I discovered at least 50 women on TikTok who had been targeted by the grim practise, plus at least two minors.
One video featured two teenage girls in school uniforms, lip-syncing to a song in their classroom. The other was of a pre-pubescent girl dancing in her bedroom.
The video had been screen-recorded from the girls’ TikTok account by the perpetrator which showed her username; a depressing example of how these dangerous men are stealing innocent videos of children online to utilise their harm.
TikTok should have been protecting its young users on the platform; instead, the videos were being rewarded with thousands of views.
Accounts dedicated to this humiliating act garnered hundreds of followers and thousands of views, their content pushed through the platform’s algorithm.
Underneath the posts, the comments sections filled up with requests from other users for ‘tribute’ images of the women in their lives.
Classmates, friends, sisters. Again, so many sisters. Women who were most probably oblivious to their own digital exploitation unfolding on a mainstream site they could be scrolling on themselves.
While TikTok removed the videos and accounts I reported to them at the time, just this week I discovered more images on the platform, with one video using the public hashtags #cvmtribute, #tribute and #tribs gaining 62,000 views.
Elsewhere on X, a community group dedicated to the humiliating act has 36,000 members alone, with explicit posts shared to the group each day.
One post featured a female Olympian celebrating gold at the recent Winter Olympics- her heroic lifetime achievement now tainted with a stranger’s semen.
The sub-culture exists in the zeitgeist of a modern digital revolution and tech innovation fuelled by misogyny that stretches millennia, where women’s consent is not seen as required and unchecked deviant behaviours thrive.
Men are violating our bodies and defacing our images simply because they can. But that all may soon change.
The scale of this harm became impossible for those in power to ignore.
Following my Glamour investigation and months of campaigning alongside a group of experts, survivors and organisations including NotYourPorn, Jodie Campaigns and Professor Clare McGlynn the UK Government announced they are to criminalise semen images, including AI generated images, supporting an amendment to the Crime and Policing Bill tabled by Baroness Charlotte Owen.
Thirteen years after I first discovered an image of myself defaced by a stranger, and less than three months after a user on X had shared an AI doctored image to the same effect, the Government is taking action to ensure better protection for women online and reinstate the need for consent in digital spaces.
Violating a woman’s consent by defacing her likeness with a bodily fluid is a degrading act that serves to uphold harmful power dynamics and alters the way women get to exist online.
I’m proud of the work myself and other campaigners have done to combat these harmful subcultures- and to show young women that you don’t have to accept online misogyny as part of your reality.
My book No One Wants To See Your D*ck is available now in hardback, paperback, audible and kindle edition.
Fabulous has contacted TikTok and X for a comment.
