The Bounded Limitlessness of Digital Gender–Sexual Violations: The Implications for Women and Gender–Sexual Relations

“Built-in” Intersectional Gendered Power Relations

Digital technologies are far from neutral in terms of power: they embody intersectional gendered power relations already “built-in” to their structures, functions, and deployments. More specifically, the roots of some platforms are in men's abuse of women. For example, Oliver (2016, pp. 8–9) reminds us that social media technology was borne out of sexist attitudes and practices toward women on college campuses. Mark Zuckerberg invented Facebook “to post pictures of girls for his college friends to rate and berate” when he was in a fraternity; Evan Siegel, the inventor of Snapchat, sent messages “referring to women as ‘bitches,’ ‘sororisluts,’ to be ‘peed on’ and discussed getting girls drunk to have sex with them”; and Sean Rad and Justin Mateen, founders of Tinder that was introduced on colleges campuses, were involved in a sexual harassment complaint in which Mateen was accused of sending the President of Marketing “sexist messages calling her ‘slut’, ‘gold digger’ and a ‘whore.’”

Moreover, we can also understand the use of digital technologies to perpetrate DGSV as “a question of distribution of material resources” and a way of excluding women from the tech sector (Siapera, 2019, p. 22). Siapera (2019, p. 21) argues that, just as witch-hunting helped restructure society from feudalism to industrial capitalism, so too online misogyny serves to exclude women “from accessing and controlling the means of production and from socio-economic participation in the emerging new formation … techno-capitalism.” Digital technologies, or indeed, technologies in general, are not developed in a vacuum but reflect and reproduce the social, structural, and cultural power dynamics of the society from which they emanate (Perez, 2019); thus, there is scope to develop digital technologies with in-built protection against exploitation for DGSV (Floridi et al., 2020).

DGSV and altering perceptions

Like physical interactions, those in digital spaces influence how people think about the past, present, and future. Attempts to alter perceptions of past events, aiming to influence current and future perceptions and behaviors, are nothing new. For example, blaming victim-survivors of sexual violations—“I blame therefore it was”—is a well-established perpetrator strategy. Harsey and Freyd (2023, p. 1) refer to this as the DARVO strategy of “deny, attack, reverse victim and offender … denying their involvement in wrongdoing, attack[ing] their victims’ credibility, and argu[ing] that they are the real victims.” Digital technologies, however, provide limitless opportunities for perpetrators (and others) to alter perceptions by manipulating digital material en masse to (un)known others in a multitude of spaces and times. This DARVO strategy was successfully employed by former US President Trump, in relation to charges of sexual assault brought against him (which were upheld) (McGreal, 2023) as well as in relation to Johnny Depp's defense of Amber Heard's accusations.

Two years before the 2022 Depp–Heard defamation trial, the judge in the Depp–News Group Newspapers Ltd defamation trial ruled that there was sufficient evidence for 12 of the 14 allegations published by News Group Newspapers Ltd, that Depp had acted violently toward his former wife (UK Courts and Tribunals Judiciary, 2021). However, before the judge had declared the 2022 trial verdict, there was an exponential increase in gifs, memes, and other social media posts and comments of the trial depicting Depp sympathetically and Heard unsympathetically, and in the number of people across the globe declaring Heard guilty of lying about her experiences and of perpetrating violence (Brockbank, 2022). In this case, the DARVO strategy altered perceptions of the past (Depp and Heard's behavior toward each other) to influence future events (the 2022 trial verdict), and extended the space in which the trial was discussed, to the virtual as well as the global world. Following the 2022 trial, there has been a rise of revisionist, misogynistic, and homosocial digital materials—such as #FalseAccusationsRuinLive; #MenToo; #savemen; #GenderBiasedLaws; and #MenAreVictimsToo—aimed at altering perceptions and undermining victim-survivor accounts of sexual violations, and the credibility of women in general. This is also a well-documented strategy of men's groups such as TheRedPill and Men Going Their Own Way (Hoffman et al., 2020; Sugiura, 2021).

The limitless opportunities to alter perceptions may increase victim-survivors’ concerns about having their stories believed, doubted, or dismissed (Epstein & Goodman, 2018). And, with digital materials always present for anyone at any time to view (Penny, 2013), victim-survivors may have to live with the ghosts of the past as “part of the present atmosphere of everyday life” (Henze-Pedersen, 2022, p. 194). Fake and doctored videos and other technologically constructed realities could emerge ad infinitum, so, for the victim-survivor, there is potentially no end to the abuse, no point at which they can be satisfied there will not be more videos, comments, and new realities emerging, because the material survives beyond any action taken against it by platforms. This sense of limitlessness may cast a shadow over the victim-survivor's life and create the need for perpetual vigilance (McGlynn, 2022).

Physical bodies

The relationship between technologies and men's sexual violations of women's bodies has a long history from the body used as a technology to inflict physical assault, and verbal abuse, to watching, stalking, leveraging situations, applying pressure, and other forms of control, often combined with other purpose or nonpurpose built technologies (Harris, 2020). The impact on victim-survivors can be physical, psychological, and emotional. Many victim-survivors report experiencing longer-term impacts from psychological and emotional violations as a result of lowered self-confidence and self-esteem, and damage to their reputation and social relationships (Stark, 2007). The psychological and emotional harms from DGSV may be more diffused, and limitless, partly because of victim-survivors’ uncertainties about how their images are being violated, by whom, who has seen them, and what the possible social implications are.

Moreover, the dissemination of DGSV means that the representation of the victim-survivor and her reputation can be besmirched in the eyes of limitless viewers. For example, a deepfake depicting her engaging in sexual acts could be circulated to limitless people (including those she knows and those she does not know) who are likely to believe that she engaged in those acts. If she did not want to be depicted in this way, it is likely highly damaging both to her own self-identity and to her reputation. Fallis (2019, p. 625) refers to this as an epistemic threat: “The main epistemic threat is that deepfakes can easily lead people to acquire false beliefs. That is, people might take deepfakes to be genuine videos and believe that what they depict actually occurred.” Even if the victim-survivor thinks viewers will not believe the video is of her body, being depicted in a deepfake can give the sense that she and her body are being considered in sexualized ways, that she is being objectified by limitless viewers. Thus, the damage to the victim-survivor's person and reputation, whether they are high-profile public individuals or not, is intensified by these advanced technologies.

Detached and altered bodies

Unlike with physical fleshy bodies, sexual violations of bodies in digital spaces are limitless. Digital technologies allow perpetrators to move from passive viewers to active participants and creators of digital bodies, through the manipulation of images to fulfill their sexual desires. Images of women's bodies can now be detached, undressed, altered (e.g., skin tone, body hair, contours, and body parts), made to perform a range of sexual acts that may or may not resemble physical world capabilities (e.g., phantasmic sex) (Matthews & Goodman, 2013), and have embodied experiences driven by the desires of perpetrators (e.g., enjoyment, pain) (De Ruiter, 2021). Those images may also take on further distorted forms (e.g., as aliens, animals) (PornHub, 2023), and even images of deceased bodies can be resurrected and reimagined in the creation of “post-mortem avatars, deepfakes, replicas, holographs, or chatbots” (Harbinja et al., 2023, p. 1). Those images can be traded, exchanged, and reimagined in limitless nonlinear, or spatio-temporal-related ways, providing perpetrators with limitless possibilities to experience sensuality, enchantment, domination, and experimentation with almost anyone, “real” or imagined (Obrador-Pons, 2007). In contrast to 2D sexualized images that still limit perpetrators’ desires to some degree by rendering women “docile and lifeless” (Harrison, 2000, p. 489), 3D digital image technologies provide perpetrators with additional limitless opportunities to create women's feelings and sensual dispositions as a reflection of the perpetrators’ own desires (Obrador-Pons, 2007).

The outcomes for women are not only limitless possibilities to be subjected to surveillance and loss of privacy and personal freedoms, but also to become separated from their bodies and from themselves, to be simulated and represented by (un)known others and violated in limitless ways. For example, when an image of one's face is supplanted onto a representation of another person's body and that body is digitally manipulated to engage in sex acts and/or to express emotions of pleasure or pain, the experience of abuse might be confusingly disembodied. Whose body is being abused? To what extent does the body—or the face—reflect or represent the person? Even if the victim-survivor recognizes that it is not her body engaging in those sexual acts, she may feel harm to her bodily identity; she might feel shame, embarrassment, and self-consciousness, all of which may resonate with oppressive cultural norms about women's bodies that lead to high rates of women's dissatisfaction with their bodies. McGlynn et al. (2021, p. 550) report that victim-survivors’ experiences of image-based abuse “was embodied – experienced in and through their bodies, altering their sense of bodily integrity, and their corporeal, social and sexual subjectivity.” The victim-survivor might (or might not) be confident that the body depicted is not hers but other viewers are unlikely to make that distinction and so are likely to have the false belief that it was, in fact, the victim-survivor who engaged in those sexual acts. Thus, the violation even if it is inflicted on a detached, altered body, can be experienced in complex and intense ways.

Men's sexual desires and fantasies across borders

At the heart of DGSV are men's attempts to exert power and control over women in digital contexts across borders, or trans(national) patriarchies (Hall et al., 2023). Power and control are disproportionately accrued to men through the gender stereotyping of digital technologies that conflate men and masculinities with technologies (Salter, 2018). Bray (2014, p. 370) notes that this “translates into everyday experiences of gender, historical narratives, employment practices, education, the design of new technologies, and the distribution of power across a global society in which technology is seen as the driving force of progress.” This has given rise to new forms of competition between men at macro-, meso-, and microlevels, not just to gain power and control through technological mastery, but also newer forms of power and control over women's bodies (Berdahl et al., 2018).

The limitless opportunities for DGSV allow men to reimage their sexual relations with women through voyeurism or to engage with a represented or simulated ‘real’ or imagined woman of their choice in order to fulfill their own sexual desires and fantasies. This not only amplifies the sexual commodification of women's bodies but does so in previously unimaginable ways.

Such developments are no doubt connected to wider tensions in gender–sexual relations whereby influencers such as Tate encourage boys and young men to aspire to the misogynistic treatment of women. A recent YouGov poll (Smith, 2023) found that, while only 6% of Britons have a positive view of him, 26% of 18–29-year-old men hold favorable views of him, compared to 7% of women of the same age. These tensions in gender–sexual relations also manifest in differences in young men’s and women's political affiliations. For example, Cooper and Campell's (2023, p. 17) analysis of voting patterns and polls in the United Kingdom shows that

[i]n their attitudes to both economics and society, young women are significantly more progressive than young men.” In fact “a startling finding from [their] research is that on the question of giving equal opportunities to women, young men are less liberal than older men.

Limitlessness provides further, amplified opportunities to (re)enforce and normalize harmful gender–sexual stereotypes about sex, intimacy, sexual acts, and men's perceptions of entitlement to do as they wish to women's bodies. It also provides newer possibilities to distort, violate, and control women's bodies and their sexual desires, through men projecting their sexual desires onto women's digitalized bodies, presenting and framing their own desires as ‘what women want’ (SumOfUs, 2022). This not only has impacts on women in digital spaces but in the physical world too. For example, a recent US survey (Herbenick et al., 2020) found that 21% of the 18–60-year-old women sampled reported being choked during sex, having their face ejaculated upon (32%), and being subjected to aggressive fellatio (34%), with 20% of men admitting to choking their sexual partner. The authors found a statistically significant association between these behaviors and the use of pornography and linked the rise to the increasing prevalence of sexual choking in various forms of pornography. In another study (Herbenick et al., 2021), 58% of female college students reported being choked during sex, and although they found it alarming, some said they also found it exciting. Thus, DGSV can change gender–sexual relationships and dynamics in the physical world too, with newer forms of sexual violation becoming normalized for both men and women further entrenching the sexual commodification and “pornografication” (Attwood, 2009), or “ mainstreamification” of women's bodies for men's sexual consumption (Brown, 1981; Empel, 2011). As digital technologies further converge toward the metaverse (Mystakidis, 2022), newer more immersive, opportunities for DGSV are likely to emerge, further blurring the physical/digital and gender–sexual relations and dynamics and contributing to the sense of limitless DGSV.

Intensifications of surveillance

The limitless forms of and opportunities to commit DGSV also significantly intensify digital surveillance. Writing about “surveillance capitalism,” Zuboff (2019) details how technology has been hijacked by the economic imperative to create a global means of behavior modification; data about our every move, interest, concern, routine, and connection are collected in order to extract economic profit. Similarly, in what she terms “surveillance patriarchy,” women and girls are monitored, and their body parts are evaluated, mocked, insulted, objectified, and used for sexual gratification as a means of reinforcing, reasserting, and enhancing male dominance. Johnson and Wayland (2010, cited in Hargreaves, 2018, p. 23) describe surveillance as

a set of practices that gather and collect data about individuals or entities, with or without their knowledge or consent, for purposes of an analysis which sorts those individuals or entities on the basis of their behavior or characteristics.

The purpose of surveillance is to gather such information in order to influence people's behavior or characteristics.

While “surveillance is generally used to identify a systematic and focused manner of observing” (Dubrofsky & Magnet, 2015, p. 3), the term is also applicable to the actions of individuals or groups of men who engage in such activity voluntarily rather than on behalf of institutions by, for example, creating and sharing sexualized images of women. Such actions impact not only the women whose images are taken, created, and/or shared but all women who risk being violated and thus change their behaviors accordingly. Both the individual and the wider social harms result from the process of internalized surveillance. Mulvey's (1989) “male gaze” and Foucault's (1975) “panopticon” alert us to processes of internalized discipline whereby women engage in self-surveillance. Hargreaves (2018, p. 179) refers to this as “a new, digital male gaze” whereby women become increasingly conscious of the possibility of surreptitious scrutiny through, for example, “being upskirted” and adapt their behavior and/or appearance to protect themselves.

Digitalized images of women's bodies (or body parts) provide the currency of “surveillance patriarchy” or what Toye (2007) refers to as the “patriarchal panopticon.” These representations of real or simulated women and girls’ naked or clothed bodies, engaging in simulated sexual acts, are disseminated and recreated by individuals and groups of men who use digital technologies, as well as social media and websites, to share images. The platforms and social media companies that allow the posting, sharing, and consumption of such images are also key agents in this surveillance patriarchy. Surveillance of women's bodies then is conducted both by institutions and organizations, on the one hand, and by nonaffiliated individuals and groups, on the other, acting in a voluntary, unofficial capacity. These developments can be seen as an extension of longer-established sexist media images impacting on VAW, rape myths, and abusive behavior, which is the subject of long-established literature and debate (e.g., Boyle, 2005; Fox et al., 2013).

Surveillance is also a key feature of intimate partner abuse and advanced technologies aid perpetrators who seek to monitor their (ex)partners. Indeed advanced technologies such as the IoT technologies in smart objects, houses, and other buildings provide extended, limitless opportunities for perpetrators to surveil (ex)partners as part of a strategy of coercive control. A survey by Women's Aid (2022) found that as well as controlling women's access to technologies, perpetrators also used them to monitor women and a quarter of respondents reported perpetrators using smart devices to “gaslight” them. The perpetrator’s actions included, for example, using location tracking apps to monitor women and using smart devices to listen to or record them. A feature of intimate partner abuse can be the extensive control perpetrators exert over their (ex)partners; this control can feel limitless when advanced technologies give abusers digital access to every aspect of women's lives, from bank accounts, social media accounts, computers, laptops, and other devices, to household arrangements, for example, controlling when the lights and heating go on or off. Afrouz (2023, p. 919) describes the “sense of omnipresence [that] led victims to feel that abusers controlled every aspect of their lives”; the use of advanced technologies to surveil women after separation also “lessened victims’ hope to disconnect themselves from abusers.”

The limitless possibilities for surveillance, whether framed as admiration (e.g., “upskirting”) (author cite), specifically intended to harm (e.g., “revenge porn”) (author cite), or as part of intimate partner violence have similar outcomes for women. They produce seemingly limitless disempowering restrictions on their privacy and personal freedoms, not only for those women who experience these forms of DGSV but for all women who fear such violations.