Abuses
Sexual, societal, patriarchal
I didn’t know what to call this post, it covers lots of different problems.
https://www.thecut.com/article/emily-ratajkowski-owning-my-image-essay.html
Reading this does make you think the world has gone a bit mad.
“I was in fact being sued, this time for posting a photo of myself on Instagram that had been taken by a paparazzo. I learned the next day from my own lawyer that despite being the unwilling subject of the photograph, I could not control what happened to it. She explained that the attorney behind the suit had been serially filing cases like these, so many that the court had labeled him a “copyright troll.” “They want $150,000 in damages for your ‘use’ of the image,” she told me, sighing heavily.”
“The gallerist said we might want to take a look at its upcoming show of Richard Prince’s “Instagram Paintings.” The “paintings” were actually just images of Instagram posts, on which the artist had commented from his account, printed on oversize canvases. There was one of me in black-and-white: a nude photograph of my body in profile, seated with my head in my hands, my eyes narrowed and beckoning, an image that was taken for the cover of a magazine.
Everyone, especially my boyfriend, made me feel like I should be honored to have been included in the series. Richard Prince is an important artist, and the implication was that I should feel grateful to him for deeming my image worthy of a painting. How validating. And a part of me was honored. I’d studied art at UCLA and could appreciate Prince’s Warholian take on Instagram. Still, I make my living off posing for photographs, and it felt strange that a big-time, fancy artist worth a lot more money than I am should be able to snatch one of my Instagram posts and sell it as his own.”
“a photographer named Jonathan Leder would pick me up and reimburse me for my fare. We’d shoot in Woodstock, for some arty magazine I’d never heard of called Darius, and I’d spend the night at his place, she said. This was something the industry calls an unpaid editorial, meaning it would be printed in the magazine and the “exposure” would be my reward.”
***
“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.”
‘“Davies doesn’t have to look very hard to find activity that should disturb anyone: nudify requests where AI apps are used to create fake nude images (“nudify my sister/cousin/mum/dead wife”); the collector culture – “One thread, for example, where someone requests images of girls from Birmingham or my home town Aberystwyth, gets hundreds of thousands of views because men from those places click on them,” she says. “Someone would say: ‘Has anyone got X from Plymouth?’ And men would reply: ‘Yes, I’ve got her, have you got Y?’ For me, that really hit home. These are men in our daily lives who we see every single day, whether it’s in the shops or at the school gate, or in our homes.”
‘Davies saw things she almost wishes she hadn’t. A game called “Risk”, for example, which has various versions but the premise is that someone posts a woman’s picture and if someone else “catches” it – by responding within five minutes – the original poster has to give him the woman’s full name and socials. One man was “risking” pictures of his mate’s wife and daughter. When asked how his own wife would react if she knew, he replied: “Divorce, no questions asked. She’s a bit of a prude. The risk makes it hotter somehow.”
No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World by Jess Davies