InkBlog

TW: sexual harassment. 

Influencer Liv Humby creates content for women. Her Instagram is a space that aims to “empower and uplift”. Through showing her own ‘imperfect’ (by society's standards) body, her aim online has always been to “reflect real women.”

“I do this because I wish my 13-year-old self had seen that,” she tells GLAMOUR UK. “I have the most incredible community of women as my audience who are here to raise each other up. To me it's the same vibe as you'd get on my girls Whatsapp group, it's like i'm chatting to my friends everyday.”

The problem is, for all its positives, and for all the women Liv's content helps, there is a dark side to this inclusive, upbeat corner of the internet, one that became glaringly obvious to Liv after watching Emily Atack's BBC documentary, Asking For It?

“I felt really overwhelmed with emotions and quite teary watching the documentary, because it made me see messages and comments for what they are, sexual harassment,” she explains. "I think before the documentary I'd always brushed them off as part of the job, but the documentary made me understand this is not ok. 

“I'd have no tolerance for this abuse on the streets so the online world should be no different,” she adds. 

Liv cannot control who sees her content online and her popularity means that she often ends up on the app's ‘for you page’ (fyp) where male users are more likely to find her images and videos. “I get explicit messages and comments from men telling what they'd like to do to me sexually, or what they are doing to themselves when they watch me,” she says. “I also get asked to do sex work and they point out my flaws, pull my body apart for it's 'best and worst' features, telling me only if I changed X then i'd be Y for them, and the worst part is probably the images they send because they can't be unseen and leave an imprint on your mind.”

In the documentary, Emily shares her own, shocking story of online abuse and discusses the urgent need for the Online Safety Bill - which includes protections against cyberflashing and deepfakes and is on its way through parliament in a bid to change the murky laws around the way perpetrators can be prosecuted for digital crimes - to help protect people, and especially women and girls on the internet. And after watching, Liv decided to create a post of a different kind to do her own bit in raising awareness of this systemic issue that plagues many female content creators. 

The post, made up of a series of images and text, reads: "It's been an emotional week to be online. This week Emily Atack shared in a documentary on the BBC the constant harassment she gets online. In a bid to change the law of the Online Safety Act… When I watched the docu in made  me realise that the daily comments and DMs I receive are, in fact, sexual harassment. I should be able to exist online, with a body, that also features in my content.

“… Unsolicited d!ck [sic] pics, explicit descriptions of what these people want to do to me and hateful messages when I do speak up, I am supposedly ‘asking for it’. I am a person. I am not an object. I am not only a body, my body is not here to please men.”

You can read the full post below, but Liv ended the image thread with the poignant words: “This is not ok. We do not feel safe here. We are not safe here. Something has to change.”

And a scroll online is proof that many women online felt their eyes were opened by Emily's documentary, triggering them to reframe the predatory behaviour of men online as sexual harassment rather than ‘part and parcel of social media’. 

“I'd always been aware of [these messages], they’re hard to ignore. When I have done Q&A's on Instagram, I often get asked about them by my audience and would think to myself, I have to take the rough with the smooth and I can't control that my content is being seen by these people but as long as I know i'm doing good and posting with the best intentions that's all I can do,” Liv tells me. “But now I have a new perspective and I see that this isn't the rough and smooth, this is simply something that shouldn't be allowed - by law. I also think I was embarrassed to admit to myself that it was happening, there is often some shame wrapped up in attracting this kind of unwanted attention.”

And she isn't alone. “I have spoken to so many content creators who have noticed such a change in recent years and it’s only getting worse.” The question is though, what is causing this increase in volume of online sexual harassment? How are these swathes of men suddenly finding content like Liv's? “The only conclusion we have is that we're getting thrown into a new algorithm that we didn't ask to be in. I have also had women contact me who aren't content creators and are simply using social media apps for their day to day lives who are experiencing this problem too, which proves how bad the scale of the issue is and that it needs to be addressed. ”

When I ask her what she feels needs to be done to help women feel safer online, her answer is clear: “We need to make this behaviour a crime and socially unacceptable because currently there are no consequences to these peoples actions and therefore they have free reign to do and say whatever they want without repercussions.”

The powerful tech companies making these apps need to be held to account for their role in allowing this to continue, and many content creator like Liv don't currently feel that apps like Instagram play an active enough role in trying to keep its female users safe. “Users should be identifiable with ID and removed or banned from the app if they don’t adhere to the platforms rules,” she says. “If they can make the technology to put a notification on an instagram story every time we say or write the word vaccination then they can be doing a lot more to keep women safe online and free of harassment and I hope we see this become a priority for them in the future. With the rise of incel culture and figures like Andrew Tate becoming increasingly idolised by many, it's more important than ever that women’s safety on and offline becomes a priority.”

Ultimately though, Liv is defiant, she refuses to stop creating the content that she knows helps so many women like her and that, in turn, offers her a community where she feels understood. “The self-acceptance journey I have been on has led to me feeling good in my own skin and I feel so proud that I finally have the confidence to share my body online to show other normal women that all bodies are normal bodies. It was a real moment of acceptance for me to be able to do this amongst the sea of perfectly smooth ‘insta bodies’ on Instagram,” she says, and even the darkest of DMs can’t dim that light. 

You can watch Emily Atack: Asking For It? via the BBC here, and you can Liv on Instagram here. 

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