If deepfake porn teaches us anything, it’s that women’s sexual consent is seen as optional

TW: This article references sexual assault and deepfake porn exploitation.

I sat in heavy silence, scrolling through hundreds of requests from men all asking each other for the same thing: to help them make deepfake porn. I was researching this new technology for a BBC Three documentary and uncovered an endless stream of women’s images seemingly all stolen from their social media accounts and posted in forums alongside the men’s desires; ‘Would anyone be so kind and nudeshop this girl from my town’, ‘Someone can fake c*m or swap my mother’, ‘Can you try this milf 41 and her daughter 18 please’. 

One post simply requested ‘F*cked on her back please’ alongside an image of a woman fully clothed, holding a baby. This technology was no longer being used for a fun, five seconds of entertainment that saw us swap our mates’ heads into a Miley Cyrus music video. This was sexual exploitation, on a terrifying scale. Deepfake porn became a viral topic of conversation recently after Twitch streamer Brandon Ewing, who also goes as ‘Atroic’ online was caught accessing and later admitted to buying and watching non-consensual deepfake porn of his fellow, female twitch streamers. 

One of the women featured on the subscription website who had been deepfaked was Blaire, a streamer who goes by the name QT Cinderella. When I spoke with Blaire about her experience and how it made her feel to see herself in sexually explicit content without her consent. She shared how being deepfaked and the misogyny towards her online has made her contemplate coming offline altogether.

“You lose faith in humanity when you’ve been on the internet for so long. It’s been really sad to see some people’s opinions on it. I think regardless like, it’s your face but maybe it wasn’t our bodies but you’re making money off of my face without consent or you’re sexualising me for literally existing.”

“It’s really sad when people say like ‘Oh it’s not your body why do you care?’ I think that’s what a lot of people online were saying and I almost had the same opinion before I saw the photos but I felt a psychological shift […] I assure you that once it happens to you or maybe someone in your life where this is happening against their will, you might be able to have a better grasp of how it really impacts you in a way you can’t control’”

 While the content may not be ‘real’, the trauma responses and psychological effects it has on those who are victims of deepfake porn very much exists in the real world.

While the content may not be ‘real’, the trauma responses and psychological effects it has on those who are victims of deepfake porn very much exist in the real world. Blaire shared how she and other women who had been targeted in the twitch scandal compared being deepfaked to being sexually assaulted, with one woman feeling so much shame around her body that she couldn’t look in a mirror.

“One of the girls admitted to me that she couldn’t shower for days after this because she just felt so gross; she didn’t wanna see her body, she was doing anything to avoid looking at her body and the first time that she showered and she took her clothes off, and she walked past the mirror in the bathroom she just sobbed. 

“I was sexually assaulted as a child, and the same feeling is there; it’s like once you’ve experienced something like that, you just know, you know the feeling like the back of your hand every single time you’ve been taken advantage of by a man in a sexual way. That feeling creeps back into your heart and it was so similar of that feeling the first time I saw that photo. You sit there for a second and you almost gaslight yourself like, is this real? Did I do this? Because it is so convincing, and there’s this weird sense of violation that you feel after a grown man tells you not to tell anybody right? It’s that same level of guilt, that same level of feeling used. You’ve just been used by another guy against your will, and what can you do about it?”