It’s the middle of the day. In a storage unit-come-media studio on London’s outskirts, Laura Whitmore is watching two people having sex. Very energetic sex.
“Feels wrong looking directly at it,” she says. “I can’t believe I stood there and watched that.”
All in the name of research. For in Whitmore’s new ITVX series, Laura Whitmore Investigates, she’s turning her camera on some pretty eye-opening subjects – namely, rough sex, incels and cyber-stalking, and what they say about modern society.
With an episode dedicated to each subject, it’s a deep dive into some of the most upsetting stuff on the internet. And as you might expect, it’s a harrowing watch – not least because of the way these trends disproportionately affect women. In a world where Andrew Tate’s videos are watched by primary school-age pupils, and the ‘Fifty Shades Defence’ is used by men to justify killing their partners during sex (arguing the death was as a ‘sex game gone wrong’), violence against women seems to be everywhere.
“The last couple of years have been the scariest time that I can remember to be a woman,” Whitmore says. “I myself have never been more afraid of walking home alone.” What we’re shown here makes it hard to disagree.
It’s tricky to pinpoint the most shocking part of the first two episodes. Is it watching blurred porn of women being strangled, listening to their wheezing gasps over Whitmore’s laptop speakers? Or is it Whitmore’s conversation with the family of Chloe Miazek, who was strangled during sex with a man she met on a night out in Edinburgh? The perpetrator denied murder and was allowed to plead guilty to culpable homicide (the Scottish equivalent of manslaughter), while Miazek was pillioried in the media. Seeing Whitmore and Chloe’s father cry together brought tears to my eyes; as did Whitmore’s confession that she called her own father afterwards: “I just felt like I wanted to call my own dad after that... this is hard.”
Though at this point she’s probably better known for her stint on Love Island (the famous water bottle does actually make an appearance here) than for hard-hitting journalism, Whitmore is an engaging host: a sympathetic and determined interviewer, who seems genuinely fascinated by the subjects she’s tackling. As she says, “I want to understand. Why do you think like this, why do you believe this? Why do you hate us?”
She’s also game for anything. Over the course of two episodes, we watch her take part in a spanking class, attend a studio for ‘adult content creators’ (hence the graphic sex) and interview not one, but three incels. These interviews are tense (as Whitmore herself admits, she’s nervous about doing them) but provide nuanced and chilling insights about the community she’s investigating. One appears in a skull mask to chat about women, and ends up admitting he was neglected during his childhood; one lives with his sister and confesses he only told his family the truth about the videos he posted “three, four days ago.” “They were OK, they were chill,” he adds. “They sort of understood it.” Really?
Watching Whitmore grill these people is a fascinating exercise, not least her last interviewee, who explains what it means to be in a relationship after having spent years hating women for rejecting him. “Even though you [now] have this intimacy, it doesn’t fix all the things that are still wrong with your life,” he says, adding the main reason he agreed to the interview was to show his fellow incels that “things can turn around. It can get dark, but it will get light again.”
These people do, in the main, come across as genuinely lonely (suicide, we learn, is a massive problem among these men), but it’s hard to deny the correlation between the rise of incel culture – a culture that glorifies mass shooters like Elliot Rodger – and incidents of violence against women.
Over the course of the first two episodes, Whitmore jets back and forth between the UK and America, splicing her interviews together with TV footage and clips of her sharing what she’s learned along the way. This, bizarrely, takes the form of her talking into a microphone while sitting at a kitchen table, as if she’s recording a podcast.
That slightly weird niggle aside, this is an effective, and worrying, examination of what’s lurking in the substrata of the internet. And it feels like a warning shot across the bows: this problem isn’t going away any time soon, and it’s increasingly bleeding into the real world.
As Whitmore says, “we need to be shouting about this. We need to be talking about this, because it isn’t just a dark corner of the internet, it’s real life.” Powerful stuff: TV like this should be required viewing for everybody.
