You've Been Fraped
Violating the Avatar
The saving grace of the internet and its shortcomings is its separation from the corporeal. We know that from their youth, girls online are objectified, are bullied, are sexualised, are harassed, are stalked. We know about the mass-grooming taking place on Omegle and similar sites, and we know about revenge porn. As their trauma grows immutable and their relationship to sex bruised and battered, at least the girls’ bodies remain intact. You can’t be raped over the internet.
In recent years, although we remain privy to the social realities of a growing culture of misogyny online, we forget our fraught history of attempts to reconcile authenticity with sexuality, and both of these with the online world. These critical relationships recede into a fleshy mass of overstimulation, no longer tied to one another. Discussions on online authenticity continue, and despite sporadic flashes of astuteness, these tend to be largely repetitive and impotent. The psychological, and occasionally the psychosexual, are privileged at the apex of this discourse, leaving little room for poignant analyses of rape culture.
Bodies – particularly female bodies – are increasingly perceived as little more than visual virtual commodities. That’s not your body, it’s your avatar, infinitely customisable, eternal and unharmable online. Impossible to violate.
Although the body is now neglected in current online discourse, it was central to that of early social media. Rotting away in a forgotten Urban Dictionary entry is ‘frape,’ the outdated slang term short for ‘Facebook rape.’ The concept is simple: leave your Facebook account logged into somebody else’s device, and wait for them to tamper with your account. They’ll alter your relationship status, change your profile picture, leave offensive comments in your name. And so on and so forth. Consider yourself victimised.
In many ways, of course, it is a mockery. But it is telling that what has now become a commonplace hijacking of identity was once conflated with rape and its profound and immeasurable violence of the flouting of bodily autonomy. To non-consensually penetrate a person’s selfhood was the same as to enter their body with force.
A little before the ubiquity of Facebook, nineteen-year-old Jennifer Kaye Ringley, self-proclaimed ‘lifecaster’ emerges in 1996, better known as the world’s first camgirl. In Ringley’s day, the camgirl was not the inherently pornographic phenomenon it has become known as today. She set up a camera at her desk, streaming 24/7, transmitting one image per minute of her small life, and called it Jennicam. She did homework, read, stared into space. She lived her life, and she broadcast it all as it happened. In retrospect we can call it performance art.
In the name of authenticity, the camera was omnipresent. It was never turned off, never moved. One can imagine how Jennicam’s infamy exploded after one fateful night with her boyfriend.
It wasn’t intentionally explicit or lewd – it was intentionally real. She was unapologetically nude online, masturbated, had sex. It constituted a single fraction of her life, and, as such, a fraction of her content, humanising her, humanising sex, humanising the internet. But no amount of philosophising can change the fact that Jennicam is forever immortalised in the history of online phenomena because of the sexual content she livestreamed.
On New Years’ Eve of 2004 Jennifer Kaye Ringley logged off permanently.
The mantle of jennicam.org has since been taken up by a de facto pornographic service. It pays homage to Ringley’s innovation, staying true to the livestreaming element. Sometimes, though, if you catch a performer at the right moment, you may be so lucky as to catch a glimpse of a more innocent and true demonstration of the human experience. A girl with crimson hair who thinks nobody is watching. She perches on the edge of her bed, clutching a water bottle with a straw, waiting for somebody, anybody, to click on her livestream. Tinny pop music plays from her phone. She looks at herself through the camera and sings along.
Online, we like to place things into two camps: that which is sexual, and that which is not. Attempting the impossible, Jennicam sought to reconcile the two. The body and the image of the body, united at last. It’s hard to know what to do with such a legacy, one so complex and yet so mired in cultural shame of sex. So, like frape, we forgot her.
That which we have so hastily swallowed comes to a head now. Our failure to recognise the online body as a tangible appendage of the ‘real’ body comes crawling up our throats.
Enter Neil Gaiman. Unfolding online from the middle of 2024 is the sickening outing of the prolific and esteemed author of Sandman, Coraline, Good Omens, Stardust, more, as a serial rapist. At the start of this year, Lila Shapiro published the sprawling landmark exposé ‘There Is No Safe Word’ detailing the depraved manipulation and abuse to which he subjected his victims. Gaiman (at the time of writing) continues to refuse comment.
In discussions with the men in my life, the response was, resoundingly, “He wrote weird loser books for weird loser teens – why should I care?” Surely the takedown of one more prominent writer is nothing beside the reams of paper it takes to contain the names of those men who have already fallen. If we were not already deafened by such cases as the coverage of Heard and Depp, we must be deaf now. We should have come to expect it. But in a post-#MeToo world, Gaiman fought dirty, and, more importantly, he fought with a cutting edge.
As a man known for his online presence and interaction with fans, particularly over Tumblr and ‘X’, it is only fitting that the case is largely playing out online. Initial allegations were published via podcast. Voicemails were leaked over ‘X’. Perhaps most troubling of all, though, was Gaiman’s weaponisation of internet propaganda.
Logging into Tumblr in August of 2024 – the time of the initial allegations – one would be assailed by sponsored adverts plastered with Gaiman’s face. “Unveiling Neil Gaiman,” they proclaimed. “Discover the truth beyond the allegations and get to know the real Neil Gaiman.”
More and more, the battle against rape is one fought online, and more and more, the battle is lost. In this battle, nothing is disallowed and everything is at stake. The battlefield is slippery, your sword is slippery, and so is your opponent’s body, and so is your body, except your body can’t be slippery because your body doesn’t really exist. How can the harm exist if your body doesn’t?
That’s not your body, it’s your avatar. That’s not your body. It’s my body – I can slip inside it so easily. And if you were to scream – which you can’t, because you have no face, and everybody else is screaming anyway – what would you say? What would you tell people? Stop shouting. Shut up. Your body isn’t in pain because it isn’t yours anyway, because you don’t have one anyway. It makes no sense. You can’t be raped over the internet.