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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Politics
Anna Moore

‘I don’t date at all now’: one woman’s journey into the darkest corners of the manosphere

Jess Davies.
‘I wanted to show the reality of what men are doing’ … Jess Davies. Photograph: Francesca Jones/The Guardian

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.

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