How my Dick Pic Came Back to Haunt Me
By Benjamin Wilson
It's hard to stop myself from trolling hook-up apps on a rowdy night out at Arq, one of Sydney's most popular gay nightclubs. While dancing to the pop synths and breathy tones of an endless Britney Spears mash-up, I feel obliged to hit it baby one more time. 'It' of course being Grindr.
Flicking through fifty or so profiles, I can see who else at Arq is also hunting for a hook-up. Grindr was created to make finding sex easy, which is why it can be addictive. The app displays a sea of headless torsos and pics of men in dick-stickers (a term my mum uses for speedos that are three sizes too small).
One night, I lingered on the profile of a handsome twenty-something French guy named Felix*. He was only 30 meters away and "looking for sex right now" according to his profile. I sent him the stock standard “Hey, hru?”, and after a couple more vodka cranberries I found myself stumbling into his private room at a CBD backpacker’s hostel - how romantic?!
Fast-forward to the end of our drunken tryst, our post-orgasmic, semi-comatose brains decided it was a good idea to exchange Snapchat usernames. I guess this was the perfect way to say “let’s keep in touch” without the commitment of a Facebook add or an Instagram follow request.
Against my better judgement, over the next few days we traded a torrent of cheeky (pun ABSOLUTELY intended) photos typically reserved for the ‘My Eyes Only Section’ of Snapchat.
And this isn’t unusual for me. After hooking up with a guy I typically struggle with a myriad of self-effacing thoughts. You know those judgements that run through your mind following a one-night stand...
“I hope he didn’t notice the stretch marks on my hips.” “I forgot to trim my pubes.”
“He probably didn’t enjoy it as much as I did.”
“I should’ve practiced my orgasm face in the mirror.”
Those kinds of thoughts. Yes they're dumb, but they're real. By sending Felix carefully contrived dick and butt pics, I gained temporary reprieve from this onslaught of unhealthy self-deprecation. Sending nudes was my way of saying "Look at me, I’m sexy, I swear!"
To my surprise, Felix told me he was impressed by my Saturday night performance that I’d felt so insecure about - AMAZING!
In fact, he was so impressed that he gave my Snapchat username to a number of other gay men staying at his hostel, who then proceeded to add me on the app and pester me for nudes as well - NOT SO AMAZING!
The line between what was public and what was private had been more than blurred. While I might reasonably expect he would show his friends my profile in a cocky or boasting way as many men do when they’ve scored the night before, I’d never consented to him giving out my Snapchat. And I certainly wasn’t a service that he could freely recommend to the next guy I was to sleep or exchange pics with. When did Snapchat become the new Yelp Review for sexual partners?
A quick revision of my Snapchat privacy settings and a week-long hiatus from all social-networking apps was all it took to make the thirsty French backpackers disappear. Thank fuck. But the fear that Felix had probably shown his friends my nudes wasn’t something I could so easily shake off.
The sound of my favourite teacher lecturing my year nine photography class about the dangers of sexting rang in my ears. She had even put warnings about the dangers and legal ramifications of sexting on her classroom door. I realised that I should’ve listened to Ms Surany’s advice back in Art Room 2, as a few months after my backpacker banging, my dick pic finally came back to haunt me.
Let me set the scene.
Manning the registers at my local bottle shop on a Sunday night, bored out of my brains, I heard the familiar brrrrrp that signalled a new Grindr notification. A message from an anonymous profile loomed in my inbox.
"Sup BWS boy," the message read.
Hmmm. I was more than vexed. I didn't know who this user was, but they clearly knew me, or at least where I worked. I felt curious, but uneasy too. Obviously this guy had seen my Grindr profile and recognised me at work. Maybe I had served him earlier in the day when they came in to buy a six-pack. Maybe he had seen me through the store window as he grabbed a coffee next door. Maybe he was another employee. That’s the scary thing about Grindr - sometimes you never know who is messaging you, when they could know exactly who and where you are.
Flustered by their brash greeting, I nervously texted back “Aha not much,” before taking a screenshot of the conversation. I could feel my face start to flush red as I asked a customer for their loyalty card, waiting for Mr Anonymous to respond to me. Unable to wait, I sent him another message asking if he was someone I knew. Brrrrrp. Another notification.
"Nah," he shot back. I nervously chewed the insides of my cheeks, a habit I've had since childhood.“
Oh shit sorry. Who dis?” I replied. I don’t know why I was apologising, or why I hadn’t hit the block button already. Maybe I was holding out hope that Mr Anonymous was an attractive tanned surfer with long blonde tresses. So far I’d only seen an image of an indistinguishable beard that he used for his profile picture.
Many men-seeking-men for sexual encounters appreciate discreteness on Grindr, and are more inclined to remain anonymous on their profiles compared to other apps like Tinder. But I never received a face pic.
“Slut lol,” was the response I received instead.
Mr Anonymous then followed up by sending a screenshot of one of the nude images I had sent to Felix. This guy literally sent me my own nude instead of his face picture. And I had no idea who he was or how he got my photo.
For the rest of my shift I manically paced the shiraz aisle, dumbfounded by the realisation that the pictures I had consented to sharing to Felix had been distributed to another random man - sans drunken hook-up. A random man who not only knew where I worked, but was willing to go out of his way to slut-shame and intimidate me, all while denying me the right to know who he was.
I finally blocked the profile after a few more minutes, having decided that any type of engagement with this person might only entice them to harass me more.
Thankfully, I haven't had a like encounter since. I still don't know how this user had procured my photo. Had Felix distributed my pictures on a random website somewhere out there in the ether, or maybe he had just passed them on to a couple of mates. Maybe they were traded on an online forum. While I hope the latter isn't the case, it's a brutal reality I've started to wrap my head around - although part of me hopes I never have to know the answer.
This is my own experience as a victim of image-based abuse, and even more unfortunately, it's a common one in the queer community, given recent findings from a study conducted by RMIT University found that lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) participants were more likely to experience image-based abuse victimisation. Screenshotting nudes is something I am even guilty of, and I acknowledge that until I was a victim, I wasn’t able to grasp how my actions could impact the people who trusted me to be discrete.
Dr Nicola Henry, an Associate Professor and Principal Research Fellow in the Social Global Studies Centre at RMIT University, was part of the team that published these findings.
“We’ve certainly found in our survey research that LGB people were more likely to experience image-based abuse victimisation,” Henry said. “We also examined perpetration and found that LGB participants were more likely than heterosexual participants to engage in at least one form of image-based abuse.”
This includes the taking of nude or sexual images without consent, the distribution or sharing of nude or sexual images without consent and also threats to share or distribute nude or sexual images.
Fucking brilliant. As a gay male I’m more inclined than my heterosexual peers to both victimise others, and be a victim myself, of image-based abuse. Isn’t that just crazy?!
Despite this finding, media reports surrounding ‘revenge porn’ (a term Dr Henry says fails to capture the range of different motivations of image-based abuse) regularly overlook LGB experiences. Instead they exclusively focus on a heteronormative ‘male perpetrator and female victim’ narrative.
The exclusion of queer people from discussions about the diversity of impacts of image-based abuse has not only left victims such as myself feeling our experiences aren’t valid, but it’s also allowed our community to disengage from the conversation and not confront the rampant abuse we’re committing online.
As a gay man, I want to know: Why am I more likely to be a victim or perpetrator of image-based sexual abuse in comparison to one of my heterosexual friends? And why has our community allowed that to happen? But I don’t believe these questions have ever been genuinely asked. I want to know why ‘revenge porn’ is framed as an issue solely relating to the humiliation of an ex-girlfriend by a male, when we know that this narrative does not represent the complexity of perpetrator motivations that exist in the queer community.
I also want to know why in all of the social circles I run in that include LGB people, that I’ve never heard someone initiate this conversation, or had the courage to initiate it myself. Why are we happy to let this continue? Why has image-based sexual abuse been normalised?
Is it because sending nudes has become synonymous with saying “Hello” on Grindr? Well, it’s possible.
Unfortunately, when it comes to identifying the common experiences that make gay men more likely to perpetuate image-based abuse, Dr Henry says more research needs to be done.
“We don’t have a huge amount of insight at this particular point in time into the context or the nuances around what’s actually happening for LGBTQ people in the community,” she said.
Dr Henry did however point to online dating as a potential precursor to non-consensual sharing of nude images. Although, she also stressed how difficult it is “to accurately explain the high perpetration rate among LGB participants” as online-daters and non-online daters experienced similar rates of image-based abuse perpetration.
“In our study we find that lesbian, gay and bisexual participants are more likely to engage in online dating and sexual selfie-taking behaviours,” she said.
“There has been some international research that points to gay and bisexual men on online dating sites being more likely to use nude photographs for their user profiles. So this could possibly be an explanation for the higher rates of non-consensual sharing of those images but we don’t know whether that’s accurate.”
The inability of the current data-set to extrapolate the causal factors behind the rate of image-based abuse in LGB communities tells me that this conversation is currently not loud enough. That this conversation needs to be co-opted by the queer community who are currently too silent, just as I have been. I’m careful not to point the finger at others, because I know that my online behaviours - including screenshotting nudes and showing them to others without permission - has certainly contributed to the toxic relationship our community now has with image-based abuse.
What’s even more unsettling is that RMIT’s research found that four or five respondents agreed image-based abuse should be a crime, yet 70 per cent of respondents agreed with the statement that “people should know better than to take nude selfies in the first place even if they never send them to anyone”.
This warped rationalisation process, whereby taking a nude image of yourself provides justification for others to abuse you, is illogical. A renewed conversation around consent and victim-blaming - that accounts for the different ways LGB individuals relate to each other online - is vital.
And Dr Henry suggests changes like this begin with education.
“I think it’s important that we have good educational programs in schools and universities and our community more broadly that tackles this issue, that moves away from victim blaming,” she said.
“[T]here’s a lot of advice directed to young women about... ‘Don’t take images of yourself in the first place’, and to young men as well. But I think the message should be ‘don’t share a nude or sexual image if you don’t have consent’, and that’s what the educational programs need to be focused on.”
Consenting to sharing an image with one other person does not make you responsible if that image gets out online. The shame needs to shift away from victims and back on to perpetrators - that way they might actually change their behaviour.
My hope for the future is that this conversation continues in a way that includes, uplifts and supports the queer community, because we should always strive to do better when it comes to protecting each other. Our community has always been at the forefront of social and cultural change, and the issue of image-based abuse should not be any different.
Reports about image-based abuse can be made to the E-Safety Commissioner under the Enhancing Online Safety Act 2015 at https://www.esafety.gov.au/
*Name has been changed for publication.