Girls Navigating the Context of Unwanted Dick Pics: ‘Some Things Just Can’t Be Unseen’

Abstract

The terms cyberbullying and nudes, when used by young people, generally overlap to categorise a range of online harms. Yet, when unpacked with girls, their co-opting of these terms can minimize image-based sexual harassment. This paper draws upon findings from a participatory project exploring implicit interpretations of cyberbullying and nudes. I narrow in on the voices of girls, aged 13–15, as they report embodied discomfort and violation from [i] unwanted dick pics from peers and [ii] stranger cyberflashing. To analyse their experiences, I re-work Pierre Bourdieu’s toolkit to a gendered digital habitus with social fields in integrated offline–online contexts in which the unexpected viewing of dick pics leaks across. This reworking illustrates the tensions the girls experience. Resourcefully, the girls draw on embodied postfeminist dispositions to manage their discomfort and safety. I conclude that their normalisations may illustrate symbolic violence, as their postfeminist dispositions attune them to rationalize image-based sexual harassment as naturalised masculine actions. These responses ‘make sense’ to the girls, a position held in preference to the consequences of reporting image-based sexual harassment. Reporting could increase the risk of confrontation with the sender in offline fields and/or potentially result in loss of access, due to adult intervention, to devices and social media.