Tag: safety

What motivates men to send unsolicited nudes?

By Daviemoo

As a man- and a gay man at that- some behaviour that other men display mystifies me. I need to clarify before I get into this piece that sending nudes is fine, if consensual. Things that imply consent like trading alts or sexting and discussing it change the paradigm of sending naked pictures- but there are some things people do which utterly confuse me, and I’ve read myriad articles about these behaviours trying to see if other people understand it better than me- it’s led to more confusion than anything.

Having read several articles and spoken extensively to friends, both male and female, straight and gay, about this topic it often elicits weird and varied responses.

As a whole, my female friends (either trans or cis) do not like, want, or appreciate unsolicited nudes. The responses are usually that it’s strange, alarming, coercive… I’ve never actually had a female friend tell me they want to receive nudes unless it’s someone they already like and have discussed explicitly (ironic phrasing) with the person beforehand. My male friends however… gay or straight they seem to enjoy the idea of unprompted nudes. I’ve asked why, and the responses ranged from “dunno, I just think it’s fit” to “it shows they like you”. It seems to be a fundamental difference in how people think, and I’m not sure if its sociological or biological- but it’s interesting and disturbing in equal measure.

For my own personal experiences using apps like grindr etc, you’re told it’s “part of it” which I honestly can’t help but see as a sad indictment of the mindset of a lot of men who are sexually attracted to men. If people do find trading nudes enjoyable that’s fine – I do too- but sending unprompted explicit pictures as a hello is deeply wrong in my eyes. Even if you’re on grindr for sex, who says that you want to see everyone naked? Or receive explicit voice clips etc?
The men who defend these practices seem not to realise how very predatory their behaviour can seem. Would you approach a stranger you found attractive in a bar and immediately show them your naked body without their consent? Why do you think it’s appropriate to do because it’s on an app instead of in person?

Often those who question these things are the ones who are castigated or shouted down: it’s expected that some men can, and will, behave in this way and with impunity for it. “It’s not serious, it’s not a big deal, it’s for a laugh, you can just ignore it”. It’s always the person receiving the unwanted messages who needs to calm down or moderate their behaviour- not the sender.

Some have stated that they feel these behaviours have worsened because of, or during, the lockdowns during the pandemic.

Men have spent a lot of time away from women, and have almost lost any semblance of respect for women that they had in the face of endlessly talking to other men on the internet about female mythologies- plus the #NotAllMen backlash from the horrific murder (at the hands of a police man) of Sarah Everard seemed to push misogyny to the surface, a piffling defence that not every man commits heinous crimes- but exposing, simultaneously, that any critique of men which personalised towards the every day man, enraged any men who felt personally attacked- which coincidentally covered a lot of men, who suddenly felt exposed and aggrieved for being called out on negative behaviour. The explosion of outright hostility from men all over the internet who felt like they shouldn’t be questioned and should be given carte blanche seemed to cover the fine point that many of the men who do these terrible things, from harassing women over the internet to brutal sexual crimes, were given carte blanche- and now that card was no longer blanche -French for white- it was now the rusty brown of the blood of women murdered for saying no, for walking away, for the crime of being desirable or just being there at the wrong moment.

In my own humble opinion, this behaviour’s continual fostering and tolerance in society is indicative of why we see and experience so much sexual impropriety- from being touched without consent in bars to full, gritty and horrific cases of sexual assault, to men declaring women their property. At no point are men – regardless of sexuality – taught to value the feelings of those they’re speaking to as equal to their own: to pause and consider how unprompted sexually explicit imagery may make people feel, regardless of their own views on receiving them.

I’ve tried to put myself into the mindset of those who send unprompted explicit photos and it’s a strange mindset to be in- is it that sending photos is the sexual thrill, regardless of the reaction? Is the potential of a negative reaction arousing? Do they genuinely expect a positive reaction? Is it a brag? Is it a power move? All these things occcur to me and yet I’m never sure if I’m close to the answer or wildly off base. I can’t help but feel that different people do it for different reasons because it’s so widespread.

I’ve also discussed this with a close group of friends, and one of them said he’d asked a friend who does it “why do you send them unprompted”- the person he asked apparently was shocked that it might offend or upset people- he was convinced it was a nice way to tell a woman he thought they were attractive.

The issue I think that society misses is that every enabled transgression against other people’s sensibilities can potentially be a building block to embolden more damaging behaviour- and society fails to address men’s propensity for thinking of these things as non-serious, indeed, emboldens it and, as such fosters worse behaviour to occur. After all, if men can and do joke about everything from sending unwanted nudes to sexual assault, it lessens the severity- it’s the reason that minorities do not appreciate jokes at our expense- because making someone or something serious an abstract joke emboldens people’s flippancy towards it.

Many men read writing like this and immediately become defensive and it’s this oversensitivity to critique that must be stopped. If these things apply to you – if you send unwanted pictures, just don’t. If you make off colour jokes about sexual harassment – stop. Nobody is asking for you to cut off a toe, it’s a simple reframing of your own comforts to match those around you- and it’s past time that men feel that their entitlement outweighs other people’s comfort and safety.

I urge you to realise that if this applies to you it’s not to say you’re a horrific person: I do feel that a lot of men are victims of a society that fails to impress on them moral decency, and that gives them- us, I should say, a skewed concept of our importance to others. If you grow up believing showing someone a picture of your penis is a reward or a compliment, clearly you have a misplaced sense of right and wrong. Society is failing women every day by not looking urgently at how to address these issues- but it’s also failing men by allowing deep, dangerous holes in moral fabric to percolate and worsen. Of course it’s down to individual choice as to whether you act on these urges which are wrong and in some cases verge on harassment. But I do feel that society needs to take ownership of it’s endorsement of these behaviours, stop, and urgently push men to reflect on how they behave.

Regardless of sexuality- until society admits that a false economy of men’s behaviour being tolerable when it isn’t, and until as a society we commit to doing better, men will continue to be viewed with well earned suspicion.

The Citizens of the UK- or how we became the kindling to restart the fire of a pandemic Economy

By Daviemoo

As Crime Sinister Boris Johnson is set to reopen the country with zero restrictions on the 19th, a quick reminder that a vast chunk of England seem absolutely fine with walking gently into mass hospitalisations, long covid cases galore and, indeed, the needless deaths of our loved ones.

I don’t like the conservatives.

You might have picked up on this simply by standing near me for more than 10 minutes, watching my internet videos or reading this blog- or simply sensing that I possess a moral compass that I actively try to align to true north when I can.

I haven’t liked them for a very long time, and frankly it started out as a grumbling resentment that the party of “family values” so openly touted a distaste for me and people like me simply based on my sexuality which still persists to this day with the animated ancient mummy herself Baroness Nicholson leading the charge.

But over the years this grew from a distaste to a naked hatred- not necessarily of conservative voters though I do find conversation with right wing voters entertaining because the pretzels they can knot themselves in to escape the reality of voting for bigotry is truly impressive- like watching one of those people that can fold themselves up to fit in a box.

Am I saying that all bigots are right wing? No… having stepped further and further left I do sometimes worry that some of my fellow far left folk fall prey to a different type of bigotry, one that assumes that we’ve always been how we are- “sensitive souls”, those who care about the people around us enough to hear them out and try to accommodate them. The fact that the left sometimes continue to condemn people even when they apologise openly for their behaviour confounds me- though I often find it right to do so when the apology is contrite and focuses more on the feelings of the accused, rather than sorrow for the harm their actions caused.

Nevertheless I do feel an open dislike for conservative voters to be quite apt at the moment, as we’re watching England in particular careen towards what I and others like me see as an abject humanitarian disaster. Below is a graph that shows the figures in England on lockdown day 2020- vs the repeated fuckups of a government run by a shaven orangutang in an ill fitting suit, vs now.

Source: google data on COVID cases in the UK

I’ve listened with numb horror to every bit of news coming from Downing Street for several weeks, sure that it was more right wing pomp, the showmanship of a man convinced that if he acts rough and tough despite looking like a dishevelled fop, people will laud him as a tough, decisive leader when we know- from the literal mouth of his previous adviser and sundry leaks- that he is incapable of doing the job which the tories wangled him into.

But no. Here we are, heading into literal disaster, a worst case scenario so unutterably dire that I cannot process it- and still bay the tory voters, “we just need to get on with our lives”.

Were this not a matter of life and death for others and, who knows, maybe even myself – I’d sit back and watch as these people lose their grandmothers, wives, cousins- and suddenly realise that maybe charging naked into a bush fire isn’t quite the brave notion they think.

But I know many vulnerable people who will be paralysed with fear in their homes, unable to take vaccines, unable to visit shops during the day for fears of crowds of people so excited to return to normality that they’ll cheerfully sacrifice the over 1.5 million seriously disabled among us who, and I can’t believe I have to write this, also deserve to “return to normal”.

Of course I’m not foolish and I know that the internet is a vacuum and people will spout their nonsense there, only to toe the line when the chips are down – but the sheer number of people excited to reach “freedom day”, an odious term coined by the office of our lacklustre leader, feverish to ditch masks which are treated like the lead at the neck of a particularly ferocious dog, terrifies me.

Firstly, a word on oppression- the reactionaries’ current favourite term.

If your oppression consists of the act of wearing a bit of material on your face so you can walk into asda for some custard creams and a pint of milk, or being asked to not breathe directly down the neck of the people in front of you at the pub- what a privileged, easy life you must lead.

The types who feel this is oppression are so quick to compare it to Nazi Germany which proves beyond doubt they’ve never actually read history books or accounts of what exactly it was like to live in Nazi Germany. To think that we walk amongst people so cosseted that they believe that mask wearing, an act that protects others more than yourself, is oppression, would be laughable if it were a pastiche- so ridiculous that you wouldn’t believe it.

I remember seeing this meme about six months into the pandemic and even though it made me laugh, it also made me sigh and understand that this was the “normal folk” I was expected to walk around with. It simply said something to the effect of “any zombie movies after this will be really unrealistic if a huge portion of us don’t go running towards the zombies to prove how undeadly they are”.

That meme has become a mental symbol of how I’ve coped for so long- making comedy out of the growing insanity of the country to get by, because to look at people’s behaviours factually I think i’d have snapped in May 2020.

Heading to disaster

I wake up every day, a little bit amazed that we’re allowing the tories to just blow the doors off the pandemic because “if not now, when?”- we were told so many times we had an amazing vaccine rollout- surely it does it an injustice to open before it’s finished? But people don’t care. A worrying portion of people somehow function in their daily lives whilst equating vaccines to poison, population control, tracking and an exhaustive list of other fundamental nonsense.

I can never imagine what it’s like to be someone so insane as to think that almost every scientist, doctor, nurse, politician and more, in the whole world, sat down and said “so we’re going to pretend that this virus exists/ so we’re making an evil vaccine- don’t tell anyone though, we’re making a new world order for *insert laughable reason here*”.

All of that- the disinformation that’s been allowed to spread, unscrupulous characters trying to shill their idiocy to a nation all too willing to believe the one person who says no when 99,999 other people say yes, a government headed up by a man who, we now know without a doubt said “let the bodies pile high in their thousands!” rather than facilitate a lockdown out of a fear of his friends’ pockets getting lighter, has led us to this moment. As we stand on the precipice of what I confidently believe will be a disaster for the people of the UK, I think I’m more offended for the people failed by the education we were given by a state in disrepair who believe the nonsense than I am by the man so callous as to push for it.

There seems to be a worrying amount of credence to the notion that Matt Han-dsoffmywifeyou-cock was removed from his role by angry tory backbenchers who knew he was throwing rope at an intern he hired with public funds, who then facilitated the installation of Sajid Javid who would be their mouthpiece for the end of lockdowns. The reason? Isn’t it always money? Need you ask.

I don’t have the spoons today to go into the Brexit reasoning behind reopening, plus I think that brexit is only a factor, not THE factor in reopening. Plus saying Brexit three times usually gets you mobbed by angry people who are genetically incapable of speaking in cogent arguments.

And now for some pretension!

I feel like Cassandra. If you don’t know who Cassandra is, here’s a little history on Greek tragedies for you.

Cassandra was a woman gifted by fate to see the future- but cursed to never be believed when she told people what she saw.

I imagine if Cassandra were here now she’d be screaming at the top of the shard, begging people to stand up against a government who seems to be falling just short of eugenics, as people point and laugh and call her crazy. But we don’t need Cassandra to spell this out to us- we have doctors, scientists, immunologists, people whose roles are to study pandemics past and advise us on how to get through it, telling us en masse that this is a bad idea.

Of course there’s conflicting opinions- people saying it will work – but we live in a world where Nazis still exist so to speak for the mental acuity of individual, educated people who speak out in favour of the erasure of measures, is not exactly ground breaking, nor does it mean that they are the pied pipers we should be following.

My concern comes for the people of the UK who may – I hope I’m wrong, I don’t want to see abject suffering and mass deaths of course and woe betide the tories if I lose someone I love- be facing a nightmare from which the escape will be long, arduous and filled with the suffering of those we care for most.

I repeat, I hope things work out okay- but if things do go wrong, I hope Johnson and the scum who enabled the disaster to unfold are hoisted high from their own petards and castigated by the masses they’re so willing to throw to the wolves, all in the name of the post-Brexit economy.

I suppose my main question is as simple as this: how and why are so many people absolutely fine with the possibility of getting sick themselves, of their families getting sick, of losing friends, loved ones?
The usual answer seems to be that “we’ve sacrificed so much”- begs the question why we’re so keen to sacrifice more.