The message read: “I found you on a hairy pits site.” I sighed, both at the informality and the nature of this message from someone I didn’t know.
Sadly, it was not uncommon. Since I stopped shaving my body hair in 2020 – and quite happily celebrated that fact – I have received increasingly sexualised comments on Instagram. But something about this message felt different, so I duly replied and asked which site.
It was 4chan, the anonymous image-based forum we’ve grown to know as a home for many of the worst people on the internet.
It had a thread of pictures of underarm hair, and there I was. Users had lifted photos from my Instagram account, and the comments underneath them were appalling. I was disgusted. It wasn’t just because my photos were taken without permission or that people commented – it was that my photos were taken at all. I was bothered that people could do what they wanted with no comeback.
I didn’t know what to do. When you find your stolen pictures on message boards, where men leave comments saying that they are using them for sexual gratification, what power do you have to get them taken down?
That message came in October last year, and it wasn’t the first time I’d learned that my photos had been stolen. In 2021, I got a message on X (formerly Twitter), from a follower who told me that he’d seen them on a porn site and didn’t think I knew they were there. He was right. The follower sent me a link to where a user had uploaded multiple galleries of South Asian women; there were disgusting comments under them all.
I immediately took action. I contacted the porn site and told them the images were uploaded without consent and also sent them the comments alongside them. The images, comments and offending users were all, eventually, removed.
But it didn’t feel good. I felt no sense of justice. I was still troubled that any photo of me could be lifted by anyone at any time. If people could simply take an image from my Instagram, I do not doubt that using AI and deepfakes, my face would be plastered on videos of women performing sexual acts. I wouldn’t know where to find them or what to do with them, and that infuriates me. I feel as if these anonymous people have won my body and I have no claim over it.
The 4chan thread disappeared in November, after which I contacted the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH). I knew about them from their 2021 report, Hidden Hate, about Instagram’s failure to act on reported misogyny, which I took part in alongside Amber Heard, Rachel Riley, Bryony Gordon and Jamie Klingler. I needed CCDH’s expertise to understand what steps I could take to keep myself, and my photos, safe. I wanted to know that the internet could be a safe place for people like me.
A simple answer might have been to delete my social media, but I need it for work. I have a community through my magazine Burnt Roti; the queer speed-dating night I ran; and through my local family-friendly Pride event, Middlesex Pride. Social media is also an important space for me to reach people I want to help. It makes communication accessible to people who are unable to do so physically, which is vital in queer communities – we need to allow anonymity, and digital communication can allow that.
Unfortunately, social media has also given space to anonymous creeps – so much so that I’m currently going through my 20,000 Instagram followers and manually blocking as many as I possibly can. I don’t want so many followers. I want a genuine community of people who I know won’t take my photos and put them on a sleazy website.
As they support and advise me on what to do next, CCDH has become my safety net. I hope I can also work to make the internet a safer place for people to use. I can’t imagine what I’ll see next – well, I guess I can. But I wish I didn't have to.
