FEATURE:
A Book That Everyone Needs to Read…
PHOTO CREDIT: Zoe McConell
Inside Jess Davies’s No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World
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OVER the past few weeks…
I have been buying and reading some really interesting books from brilliant women. Women’s rights activists, campaigners and feminists, I have read The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan, The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice by Shon Faye, Ctrl, Hate, Delete: The New Anti-Feminist Backlash and How We Fight It by Cécile Simmons, Misognynation and Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates (I have ordered her new book, The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny), What About Men? and More Than a Woman by Caitlin Moran, My Body by Emily Ratajkowski, The Guilty Feminist by Deborah Frances-White, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot by Mikki Kendall, and On Women by Susan Sontag. Every book I have read (or am currently reading) has moved and affected me in different ways. Often, what these women have written makes for shocking and eye-opening reading! Even if the book is a few years old (or older), a lot of what they are writing about regarding inequality, abuse against women and the domination of misogyny is relevant right now. When they write about their personal experiences and how they have been affected by sexism and misogyny, it is honestly so incredibly jaw-dropping and angering! What they (and so many women) have endured. Not to try and convert men out there who would not consider themselves to be feminists. I would urge you to go to your local bookstore and find the Feminist/Gender Studies section and invest in a book. And then two. And then another! The more informed and educated we are, the more allies that will create. The bigger, deeper and more united the conversation. Hopefully, and sooner rather than later, some of these issues will either disappear or lessen. I don’t think we will (sadly) ever seen an end to misogyny and abuse against women. However, we are in an incredibly dangerous and scary time where incel influencers are revered and seen as gods by young men. Where misogyny and violence against women is rising, and the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth (President Donald Trump in the U.S.) is a sex offender and misogynist – and gleefully has stripped women of their rights and body autonomy.
My most recent purchase is a book by Jess Davies I think everyone – and I literally mean every human being who has the means to buy it – should read. I could say that about so many other books but, not having even got to the end and been completely stunned, this is a book that should be on every shelf. I am going to end with some words on how No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World has inspired me and impacted me more heavily and instantly than any other I have read in the past few weeks – or years for that matter. Before that, go and follow Jess Davies on Twitter and Instagram (her TikTok account has been removed without explanation, but we all hope that it is rightly restored very soon!). I am going to move to a recent interview from Jess Davies that was conducted by The Guardian, where she talks about her new book and experiences regarding the online world (and the manosphere). How misogyny, unsolicited d*ck pics and exploitation has affected her. I will go more into that and how Davies’s word and recollections moved me. In 2021, she spoke with the BBC about how she is sent hundreds of cyberflashing images from men:
“A social media influencer said she had been the victim of cyber-flashing for the past 10 years.
Podcaster Jess Davies, from Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan, said she had received hundreds of unsolicited obscene images.
Calls are growing for cyber-flashing to become a crime as part of measures to toughen laws on online safety.
The UK government said its plans would "force social media companies to stamp out online abuse".
Jess, who has 151,000 followers on Instagram, said she has become almost "numb" to the images she is sent, adding: "What's illegal offline should be illegal online."
"I am probably cyber-flashed every month, maybe more, depends really on what I share.
"This has been going on for 10 years. I've probably received literally hundreds of these images. The kind of stuff I get is close-up shots, or of them performing a sex act.
"When I receive the images it makes you feel a bit dirty and you start thinking, 'why me? Why have they sent them to me, is it something I've done'?"
Jess Davies has joined the calls for cyber-flashing to be added to the UK government's draft Online Safety Bill
She fears it has become "normalised" online, compared to what is tolerated in public.
"If you had thousands of men flashing you in the street, that's illegal, and that would be a huge problem and a huge conversation, so why are we accepting it online?”.
Jess Davies’s 2022 documentary, Deepfake Porn: Could You Be Next?, was used to lobby the U.K. Government to criminalise sexually explicit deepfakes in the Online Safety Act. She uses her social media presence to call out misogynistic attitudes, raise awareness of inequalities and campaign against image-based sexual abuse. Also go and watch the 2021 documentary, When Nudes Are Stolen. In addition to being this amazing talent, Davies is someone who has reached and helped so many girls and young women who have been victims of cyberflashing, deep fake videos, misogyny and abuse. A truly amazing person, I would urge everyone reading to order No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World (you can also get the audiobook version via Audible):
“Are women asking for it because of their outfits, routes home, profile pictures or social media posts? Or can we finally admit that there might be something wrong with masculinity in the digital world?
The rising popularity of misogynistic content and toxic masculinity influencers combined with a lack of regulation within social media has created a perfect storm. Our increasingly online world has opened women and young girls up to a whole new level of violence that follows them into their homes, schools and workplaces.
In No One Wants to See Your D*ck, women's rights campaigner Jess Davies reveals the shocking realities of this epidemic and what we can do to stop it. Covering everything from cyberflashing and deepfakes to the manosphere and catfishing, Jess offers practical advice and accessible language to help you understand what is happening online, what to do if you become a victim of it and why drastic change is needed now. Urgent and eye-opening, this is a vital toolkit for understanding and putting an end to violence against women”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Jess Davies
That title is very apt! These images that women like Davies sent are unsolicited. The kind of these men that sent them. Thinking she would be appreciated or aroused by them! It truly is the case that no woman wants to see them. These are distributing, disgusting, abusive and relentless. With social media companies not clamping down or doing enough to ensure that these photos (and videos) are banned and those who send them have their accounts removed, it means there is this epidemic. One that is not only affecting women: it is reaching girls who are so young and are subjected to these graphic and obscene images. It should be something our Government is tackling as a priority. However, there is hardly any real progress. However, until fairly recently, it wasn’t illegal to create deepfake videos. In 2024, it was announced that it would be. Legislation introduced that meant cyberflashing and revenge porn – that Davies rightly says is a problematic term that should be called ‘image-based sexual abuse -, would be illegal. However, in 2025, there is this tidal wave of deepfakes and cyberflashing. How many of the men creating and posting this content are charged and imprisoned?! I am going to move to a recent interview from The Guardian, where Anna Moore spoke with Jess Davies. There are segments I want to include. Despite everything Davies has faced - and continues to face -, she has cause for optimism and hope that things will change:
“Jess Davies was a 15-year-old schoolgirl, sitting in an art lesson, absorbed in her fairytale project about a princess and a postman, when her Nokia phone began to vibrate with messages. “Nice pictures,” read one. “I didn’t think you were that type of girl,” said another.
To this day, she remembers the racing thoughts, the instant nausea, the hairs prickling up on her legs, the sweaty palms. She had shared a photograph of herself in her underwear with a boy she trusted and, very soon, it had been sent around the school and across her small home town, Aberystwyth, Wales. She became a local celebrity for all the wrong reasons. Younger kids would approach her laughing and ask for a hug. Members of the men’s football team saw it – and one showed someone who knew Davies’s nan, so that’s how her family found out.
Only now can Davies, the 32-year-old presenter, influencer and women’s rights campaigner, see all this for what it was. It happened in the 00s, when she was a girl – she still loved High School Musical and Hannah Montana – with a woman’s body, navigating new feelings and the male gaze. “I had boobs when I was 10 so from then on, there were comments. You quickly learn that this is the lens you’re seen through. This is who you are now.” The boy who betrayed her trust, the men in the football team, everyone who shared that picture faced no scrutiny. “I was the one shamed,” she says, “I was the first person I knew of that this had happened to, so there was no blueprint to follow. I was mortified. My response was: ‘OK, this is it. I have to try to own this as it’s not going away.’” She chose to laugh it off and front it out. By 18, while at university, she was working as a glamour model for lads’ mags. “It’s wild how one thing can change your life trajectory,” she says. “Without that image going round my school, would I have ever felt confident to go on a modelling shoot? There was already so much stigma attached to me, I thought: ‘Why not try to embrace it and be confident in my body?’” She’s quiet for a moment. “I think that’s been a plus and a negative.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Francesca Jones/The Guardian
Her book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, takes a deep dive into the negatives. It covers Davies’s experiences in the digital world – that includes cyberflashing such as all those unsolicited dick pics – as well as the widespread use of her images on pornography sites, escort services, dating apps, sex chats (“Ready for Rape? Role play now!” with her picture alongside it). However, the book also shines a light on the dark online men’s spaces, what they’re saying, the “games” they’re playing. “I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing,” says Davies. “People will say: ‘It’s not all men’ and no, it isn’t, but it also isn’t a small number of weirdos on the dark web in their mum’s basements. These are forums with millions of members on mainstream sites such as Reddit, Discord and 4chan. These are men writing about their wives, their mums, their mate’s daughter, exchanging images, sharing women’s names, socials and contact details, and no one – not one man – is calling them out. They’re patting each other on the back.”
It has taken years for Davies to shift the blame away from herself and on to them. For most of her adult life, she says, she carried shame and stigma around like a “weighted cross” on her back. “Every time I was taken advantage of, I kind of accepted it,” she says. “I thought: ‘Oh well, you’ve opened yourself up to this. What did you expect?’ Part of me believed that this is just how the world is, and this was all I was worth.” That message was delivered in so many ways. As a model, she tried setting boundaries, never shooting topless content. When she was once asked to pose in a mesh bodysuit, she agreed on the understanding that her nipples would be edited out. She was assured they would be. A month later, the pictures appeared in a Nuts magazine summer special, nipples very clearly on display, an image that was quickly scanned and shared on the internet. (Davies remembers crying in her mum’s arms as her standards collapsed in a “pathetic heap of lost hopes”.)
In some ways, she is hopeful now. There has been progress. She cites examples – the removal by Pornhub of 80% of its content after Mastercard and Visa severed links and blocked the use of its cards on the site following a New York Times investigation that accused it of being “infested” with child abuse and rape-related videos (Pornhub has denied the allegations); the Online Safety Act 2023, which is beginning to hold tech companies accountable for content. “Of course, there is so much more that needs doing, but we’re so close to change,” she says. “We’re at the beginning of creating laws and saying this isn’t OK. I think it’s partly why there is so much backlash in the manosphere. It’s like the jeopardy just before the happy ending in a Disney movie!”
Still, on a personal level, Davies is wary – and single. She has seen too much. “I don’t go on dating apps,” she says. “I don’t date at all. It’s a bit of a joke to my friends, but it’s ruined it for me. I’d like to find someone one day but how do you build that trust back? It’s hard to say: ‘Yes, I’m going to give someone else a chance’”.
No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World should be bought by everyone for a number of reasons. Cyberflashing, deepfakes and misogyny will or has impacted someone you know. Nearly every woman you know would have experienced some form of harassment or misogyny in their lifetime. Davies writes personally and beautifully. She is open, honest, moving, funny, sharp, compelling and brave. It is a book that I have been engrossed in and constantly have to stop reading because it creates such an emotional gut-punch! Reading her words and the statistics she brings in. Can this really be true?! It makes for often harrowing reading. However, I think the more people that read the book the better. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Davies writes how sexual harassment has become normalised. 97 per cent of young women, she makes clear, have experienced some form of sexual harassment. She writes how the Revenge Porn Helpline does “God’s work” and that every woman should memorise their number – which is 0345 6000 459. There are countless paragraphs and lines that jump out and lodge in the brain and heart. Davies provides tips to anyone whose intimate videos or pics have been leaked. “A 2024 study by Dublin City University’s anti-bullying centre tracked the content recommendations to accounts that were registered to teenage boys aged 16-18”. TikTok and YouTube Shorts. They found how all of these accounts were “found to have been fed masculinist, anti-feminist content within the first 23 minutes of the experiment”.
Rather than wait until I have read the whole book, I wanted to write about it now. An urgent recommendation for everyone. Massive credit to Jess Davies for recounting experiences that must be traumatic. Her words will doubtless resonate with many women. So many useful numbers, links and information for any women who have been affected by cyberflashing, deepfakes and misogyny (and various evils and vile elements of the manosphere). Although I have probably not done the book full justice, I was mesmerised and stunned by No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World. It is a remarkable read that is so timely and important. I am seeing Davies speak for The Trouble Club on 20th May. If you are a member or not, I would advise you buy a ticket and get to this event! Although I am not a member of The Conduit, Covent Garden, if you are, go and book a ticket to see Jess Davies speak with Dr Jackson Katz on the role men can play in tackling misogyny in everyday life (that takes place on 29th May). That is an event I would love to be at! On 14th May, she will be at Ethical Matters: Surviving the Manosphere. I am very tempted to get a ticket for this event as it is sure to be hugely engaging, informative and challenging:
“Presenter, campaigner and activist Jess Davies has questions. Are we still asking for it because of our outfits? Our routes home? Our profile picture? Our social media posts? Or can we finally admit that there might be something wrong with… men and masculinity? James Bloodworth delved into the array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the manosphere. With it he asks why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs it promotes and what can we do about it?
As the epidemic of male violence towards women and young girls reaches terrifying new heights through new and expanding technologies, women’s rights campaigner Jess Davies will help question society’s understanding – or lack of – when it comes to consent. With a toolkit to understand and tackle online misogyny, her book No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World will arm a new wave of internet sleuths to take down the manosphere, one unsolicited pic at a time.
Already there, James Bloodworth explores the uncertainties that life and masculinity has spawned in an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the manosphere, as men search for new forms of belonging. In the course of his journey he meets incels, enlists on a bootcamp for so-called ‘alpha males’, and speaks to modern day Hugh Hefners using social media to broadcast their jet set lifestyles to millions of followers. Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, fascinating international case studies, data, cultural analysis and history, his book Lost Boys: Undercover Adventures in Toxic Masculinity is a guide to the crisis in contemporary masculinity.
Join Jess and James at Conway Hall to discuss a world that is confusing for men and dangerous for women. How has this come about, how can women start to survive this, and how can we work together to make change?”
I am going to wrap up soon. Not only has No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World stopped me in my tracks and made me race to put this feature out. It has inspired me. Before talking about this, I do wonder if we will get an official Jess Davies website where we get links to her documentaries, articles and everything in one place. She is such an influential and multi-faceted broadcaster, writer and campaigner. I digress! For a long time now, I have been talking about either trying to start a charity or organisation concerning women’s rights and equality. As a music journalist, I often call myself a feminist writer, as I write about women more than anyone and often tackle subjects like gender equality and women’s rights. Reading Jess Davies’s book has stirred something inside of me. That desire to do something important; join people together – campaigners, activists and feminists – and make a difference. I know how hard it is to raise funds and get something sustainable together. I know of many women who are part of charities or are activists and have spent so much of their own money trying to get laws changed and created - but they have lost. I reached out to gender equality activist Gina Martin saying how much I loved the work she was doing and how inspired by her I was.
PHOTO CREDIT: Rhiannon Holland
These amazing women like Martin and Davis will help bring about permanent and positive change. However, I do think that there needs to be this unity. More male allyship. People talking about books like No One Wants to See Your D*ck: A Handbook for Survival in the Digital World. I am surprised how few reviews there are for the book so far. I hope that newspapers, websites and magazines read the book and explore this incredible book. It is such a powerful and important one that should be in everyone’s collection. It has affected me and I know it will cause reaction and, I hope, activation, in every person who reads it. I can see Jess Davies being invited on - I hope this will manifest something - Woman’s Hour and Off Air With Jane & Fi (I could also imagine she would be amazing on The Adam Buxton Podcast). I know Jess Davies is still most likely being sent cyberflashing images and receiving so much abuse and unwanted images. It is heartbreaking. It makes me respect her so much. That she is inundated with this (do you ever truly get numb to that?) and still is able to talk about it. I hope that this book makes men who are engaging in this rethink and change their ways. That the digital landscape does shift. That women (and girls) are treated with far greater respect. It is the very least they deserve and has been…
A long time coming.