On an Act of Digital Violence
CONTENT WARNING: This piece involves fairly detailed discussions of sex and sexual harassment.
Yesterday evening — as of the day that I am writing this — I started talking to a girl named Amber on the lesbian dating app Her. We quickly hit it off. In her pictures she was stunning, with brown hair and a wide grin. In her profile image she wore a red t-shirt with a feminist slogan, “behind every woman there’s a shit tonne of other dope ass women’. Kind of liberal I suppose, but in talking to her I could tell that she was eager to learn more about a clearer feminist politics, so I forgave her for it. She asked to see some of my writing, and said that she liked it. We talked about cooking. I said I wanted to cook vegan food for her (one of her first messages was asking me if I was vegan, I said I was vegetarian but wanted to eat vegan as often as possible).
She was genuine.
We began to flirt.
Then, we began to sext. It happened slowly enough that I didn’t notice any shift in the conversation’s tone, one that was certainly there. The dynamic of the talk shifted into one with a BDSM slant. She said I was her slut.
She began to tell me how dominant she was, what she wanted to do to me, asked for nudes as part of this. It was 2am. I said I wasn’t comfortable doing that, I had dysphoria. She said that was okay but was clearly disappointed, then followed that up with a picture. I sent one image, you couldn’t see my face. She began to say that she understood how I felt but that I shouldn’t be afraid of my body. “I sometimes think I might be a guy,” she said. I was tired, I said I’d talk to her more about that in the morning but if she needed someone to discuss that sort of feeling then I was very happy to.
Just as I was about to fall asleep my phone began to scream at me. More messages. “I’ve found your facebook. You’re Alison Rumfitt, aren’t you? I’m going to send screenshots of our conversations and the picture you sent to all of your friends list.”
I quickly set my privacy to be more secure, but Amber might already have my friends list open on a laptop.
I begged her not to. She told me she wanted me to send her a video of me begging her, crying, calling myself disgusting. Then she might not spread the screenshots.
This is obviously recent, but I’ve been writing to understand traumatic experiences as long as I have been writing. There’s something sort of horrifying about the function of identity in this scenario. Amber was a hot girl the same age as me that I was sexting with, but she wasn’t. In the admittance that she thought she might be a boy, the man or boy behind Amber almost became too bravado. It’s like he was showing off. I know you. I know your empathy. When I didn’t engage properly with that I was punished.
This whole scenario was violent, I don’t think I need to argue that to the reader. But it was also, despite happening almost entirely over digital means, an intensely physical experience. The softly applied pressure to take a nude image of oneself is physical. To do so, I had to sit up out of bed and turn on my bedroom light. Outside, I could hear the noises of a tawny owl. I’ve never heard that here before. I could also hear what might have been foxes fucking, or cats. Some kind of incessant howling. I had to look at my own body, experience it. Is it safe to admit, even if I perceived somehow that I was being pressured into this, and that this was an unnatural experience, that I liked it? It was erotic. Awfully so. It stopped being erotic once the danger became clear, but the actual way that this person talked had not really changed. Maybe that was one of the scarier parts of the whole thing, that I had been getting off to this until I very suddenly wasn’t.
I tried to send a video of me begging him to not distribute those images, but Her doesn’t allow the sending of videos. He, because this was a man, gave me a phone number to send it to via Whatsapp. When I typed in the number I realised that I had it saved as a contact already, someone called ‘Millie’ who I had also met over a dating app, but who had stopped replying to me quite quickly. I sent the video but the internet in my house is unreliable. I told him this. He said he was losing patience. But I could call him, and beg down the phone to him.
So I did. Lying there in the orange light of a single bulb burning, hiding beneath a bundle of sheets. I was desperate. He answered the call. I heard him speak. His voice could have belonged to any boy from my secondary school. Affected, overly-masculine British South Coast city accent. I used to talk like that. He didn’t sound old enough to be doing this, he might have been sixteen. But he was also confident. “Beg. Tell me you’re a disgusting slut.” She said I was her slut. And I did.
‘Amber’ was constructed very carefully. It almost felt like she was made point-by-point as honeypot for someone like me. She felt so intensely real. Even now she has ceased (either the account blocked me, or deleted itself), she still feels like someone I was exceedingly close to last night, both in emotion and in actuality — the profile read that she was 4 kilometers from me. If she had asked, I might have left the house to go to hers for a hook-up. The violence could so easily have spilled over into bright red, real-life, something-in-the-headlines. But as it stands it also feels like a 3am nightmare. If there’s conclusions to be found in a messy, fresh trauma, it is that the way we move and date online is as precarious as anything else is for queer people. It is that there is a boy sat in his room most nights playing the part of a lesbian so well that he might as well really be one. Maybe this is someone dealing with some kind of deep dysphoria. Not to pull the ‘homophobe is gay, transphobe is trans’ card, and not to excuse anything that he did, but I feel like you can only act the part of a gay woman so long before you begin to become closer to that than to anything else that you are. Like a reflection of the self that becomes startlingly real, stepping out of the mirror or the clear pool of water into the real world, presenting an existential threat the existence of the original self. I should know. When I was sixteen I lived through a traumatic experience that destroyed the nerdy-boy persona I had. For roughly a year I tried to piece together a personality. The one I ended up with began to edge towards being a woman. I began to play the part of one. And the end result of that was becoming one. This is a uniquely personal experience to me, there are as many experiences of trans girlhood as there are trans girls. But for me the creation of the parallel image lead inevitably to my own destruction, or transformation, or whatever metaphorical word we want to use.
I keep thinking about the moment where this boy’s persona slipped, and he said ‘I sometimes think I might be a guy.’ Sometimes. Everyone feels like they might be things sometimes. Even awful boys hiding behind multiple fake accounts made out of stolen pictures. He never asked for money from me, or more pictures. He just wanted me to tell him that I was disgusting, and he wanted to hear me cry.
I shared screenshots of the ‘Amber’ account on Twitter, warning any people in the Brighton area. One user, a lesbian with one mutual follower between her and me, replied. She said, “I’d have sent her nudes too.”