Hell is empty, and all the devils are on Depop. Long have second-hand clothes-selling apps and websites played host to the worst human impulses, stuffed to the gills with scammers, cheapskates and cheeky upsellers shifting Primark tank tops for £20. It is the land of huns: the lingua franca is median-average babery, punctuated by kisses, heart emojis and weapons-grade passive aggression. It can get nasty, as any devotee of the Instagram account DM Drama knows: few are above snapping “not being funny but you’re a tramp”, and death threats, trolls and amateur bakers abound. So far, so familiar.
But there is another contingent. A friend — a prolific Vinted seller who makes a considerable side income there, and so is accustomed to the usual cranks — reports that something has changed in recent months. She’s been getting messages from a new sort of prospective buyer, one with encrypted names and faceless profiles. One that requires lots of provenance, lots of pictures: how many times have you worn this? Have you washed it? I don’t mind if not, actually I prefer it. One who makes strange requests, hunting for mirror selfies of skimpy Nike Pro shorts; one who asks how “good” items smell. That’s right: the pornsick men have arrived.
Paraphilia seeping into mainstream internet culture is nothing new. Wherever there are feet, knickers or even mirrors, fetishists will follow; mostly, people (men) with these predilections are viewed with wry mockery, seen as quirky, basement-bound inevitabilities contained within a generally harmless digital subculture. Some women have long profited from these men’s requests: I have read confession threads from those who sell counterfeit “used underwear” (I will keep the pungent, pantry-sourced concoction one woman used on the gusset a trade secret). Their operations involve production lines of bulk-bought cheap lace thongs flogged at $50 a pop, sent off to a hive of priapic patrons whose purchasing power, and willingness to spend on getting off, sees them through university.
This sort of transaction is the acceptable face of prostitution: remote, semi-anonymous and putatively safe. Selling pants online crystallises the new pornography/prostitution nexus: here, the canny content creators of OnlyFans trade in fantasies rather than services, with physical totems offered as added extras. You may recall “gamer girl” influencer Belle Delphine’s bathwater stunt, in which the 19-year-old offered the jars for $30 each; they quickly sold out, and she made $90,000. That was in 2019; at the time, it provoked outrage — a young woman monetising the infinite horniness of internet nerds was an uncomfortable spectacle. In the years since, OnlyFans and its depressing philosophy has exploded: sex-selling has become casualised, with managing a fetish account becoming about as remarkable as having any other social-media platform. It is no longer shocking, shameful or embarrassing to be in the dirty knickers game; on the contrary, liberal feminism deems you empowered and entrepreneurial for hawking pants to pervs. Clearly, this is a tragedy which dupes women into their own oppression — but is there something else at play?
I am a porn doomer. Pornography has always existed and will always exist — but something has shifted in its ubiquity and extremity. Its proliferation is making men weirder, training them to desire and demand the satisfaction of offputting paraphilias (such is the arms-race model of algorithms) and making them much worse in bed. It is causing them to expect extreme acts of pain or humiliation; it is normalising the entitlement to degrade women in ways which, a mere decade or two ago, would have seen them dumped and blocked. Perhaps worst of all, it dissolves the very necessary boundaries between the sexual and the non-sexual — boundaries created not by feminism but by older social codes of propriety — in the name of self-expression. Liberal feminism and the pornography lobby (funny how those two are so often in cahoots) both tout identity and desire as the inviolable markers of being “free”: denial of impulse, sacrifice, restraint and rationality are the enemies of each. So it is that if a man shouldn’t be shamed for drooling over Evri orders of soiled underwear, a woman shouldn’t be shamed for posting them. Here’s why they should be shamed.
Mainstream feminism over the past few decades has flogged to death the concept of “objectification”; this rich conceptual seam has been overmined to the point where we no longer consider the connotations of becoming an object, of being reduced to body parts like those of animals sold at market. The purchasing of trinkets from sexy girls online — buying their pants, their sweaty tops, their shoes — is an interesting literalisation of this concept: a buying of bodies at one remove, a 21st-century echo of a much older, grimmer trade.
The boundaries of public, sexless and restrained versus intimate, erotic and impulsive are crumbling. Men asking unknowing young women on Depop and Vinted for sexual content and objects — also known as “fetish mining” — represents this process of social breakdown: such behaviour can only emerge from a sexual culture which preaches that we are all, always, entitled to arousal. Because of the saturation of internet culture in pornography, other more covert, extreme or high-risk subjects of arousal gain cachet; masquerading as common-or-garden Vinted users buys access to women’s wardrobes, glimpses of their bedrooms in mirrors, even scents of their bodies. Here women will treat you nicely, with the camaraderie of a nightclub toilet, unsuspecting of your secret intentions. It might seem bizarre that considering the availability of pornography, men are still doing this: but the risk and the sense of violation is precisely the point.
“It might seem bizarre that considering the availability of pornography, men are still doing this: but the risk and the sense of violation is precisely the point.”
The writer Brook Urick recently appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast; she had both been a “sugarbaby” and had worked for the sugardaddy dating website Seeking Arrangements. Clearly, there is a greater degree of mutuality in such an arrangement than in unsolicited sexual messages on a clothes-selling platform; nevertheless a revelation from that episode had broader resonances here. Urick suggested that the male users exploited young women’s naïveté about the sex industry: many believed in the website’s self-promoted status as a dating platform and not a prostitution site, and many were convinced that they would not have to sleep with or even touch the older men who hired them — and that they’d be whisked away to Aruba or Cabo to boot. They believed in marketing which told them they could get something for nothing. Many were, inevitably, convinced to negotiate on these boundaries; many were fleeced, some were raped. The point, Urick said, was the deception: the men enjoyed not just the company of attractive young women but the attrition of their boundaries. The girls, many of them “nice” college students — not the wily, experienced prostitutes also available to the men — were more attractive prospects because they were vulnerable to beguilement: half of the gratification lay in their naïveté. Now look to the villains of Vinted. They mine at risk of recriminations or being reported for the same reason: the discomfort, the sense of transgression and risk, the snare. Availability breeds boredom, so true transgression comes at a premium.
As ever, the midwives of this predicament are our tech overlords, who have little incentive to implement proper safeguarding. At the breakneck pace of porn advancement — inevitably among the first industries to be enhanced by AI, VR and other new technologies — wanting to whiff smelly socks seems almost quaint, old-timey. It seems to belong to a less sinister and more predictable low-tech sexual era, the horrors of which have long been surpassed: I suspect it is for this same reason that the singer Chappell Roan appeared on Ru Paul’s Drag Race last week dressed as a blow-up doll. What was viewed decades ago as manifestly anti-feminist and humiliating becomes a joke in the present world of hyperrealistic silicone models and deepfakes. But this is about more than clothes, more than bodies, more even than the problem of the sex trade: it is about the premium placed on violation, and the way liberalism has reframed coercion as self-expression. Pornography and fetish culture have been around forever: what is new is how they ooze into the everyday, becoming inescapable if you simply happen to be a woman. What these grotty messages amount to is a bigger moral question for our time, one that feminism must stand up to: why must I participate in your fantasy?
