A note before I start, because I would much rather write about this myself than sit around waiting to have it written about me.
Recently, I had to look at a picture of myself that I never sat for, one somebody had built without ever once asking me … I am undressed in it, lying in a park I have never set foot in, and the whole thing is a moment that simply never happened. The picture itself is not really what has stayed with me, though … it is the time I spent sitting in front of it that I keep returning to.
The first thing it did was confuse me, properly confuse me, and I sat staring for far longer than I would care to admit, with this strange off-balance feeling creeping up the back of my neck, because it looked like me and it absolutely was not me, and my mind could not get the two halves of that to meet. What arrived first was not horror at all, it was something closer to vertigo, the floor tilting very slightly underneath a thing my own eyes were insisting upon and my knowledge was flatly refusing.
The dread came along next, and it arrived in a sort of order … where is it, who has already seen it, is it sitting somewhere I will never manage to claw it back from … and then the worse question underneath all of those, which was whether somebody might actually believe it. Not believe me, because I knew the truth of it perfectly well … the stranger on the other side of a screen, the one with no reason in the world to look twice.
After all of that, and absurdly so, came the embarrassment … immediate, hot, entirely unearned, given that I had done precisely nothing. None of it makes the slightest sense, of course, because shame never waits around to discover whether the thing that set it off was even real … it simply turns up, makes itself comfortable, and leaves you mortified by a fiction that somebody else wrote about you. I would be lying if I told you I sailed serenely through that part, because I did not. This is the part where I cried, where I went into autistic meltdown and where I thought my life was ruined … because now out there was a fake picture of me
The One Good Thing About Being Wired Like This
My brain, at this point, did the thing it has always done, the thing I have leaned on for my entire career … it started quietly pulling the picture apart without my even asking it to, not feeling its way towards a verdict the way fear does, but checking, the way I have spent years training it to … that detail is inconsistent, that one is wrong, that one there cannot possibly be right, one observation laid on top of another until what I was holding stopped being a fear and became a finding, sitting flat and certain in front of me: this is not you.
The moment it stopped being something I merely hoped and turned into something I had actually proved, the whole experience changed temperature, and a rather useful bit of distance opened up between me and the image. People are fond of calling that autistic detachment, usually as though it were a flaw in want of managing, though it was nothing of the sort that day … with the truth properly nailed down, the very same wiring handed me enough room to deal with the thing rather than go under it. The picture stopped being me-humiliated and became simply an object, something built, irritating and entirely dealable-with, and I cannot tell you how much easier that one shift has made everything that has come since.
A Soft, Daft Fear (Owning It Anyway)
There is one fear I will happily admit to that has nothing forensic about it whatsoever, since pretending I am above it would only be another sort of lie … I am still rather quietly hoping prince charming might ask me out one day, and some small anxious corner of me went straight to wondering what he would make of it if he saw it, and worse, whether he might believe it. The rest of me, thankfully, had its answer ready … if he believed it, then he was never the prince charming to begin with, because half the entire job of the right person is that he would take one look and know it wasn’t me before I had got a single word out, and not because he had gone away and read the metadata. Should he ever need a forensic report to tell me apart from a forgery, then he has rather done me a favour, and saved us both a good deal of time.
The Part That Actually Bothers Me
What unsettles me most sits a great deal wider than the one person who did it, and it is how very ordinary the move is, and how astonishingly fast it gets made. The instant a man feels he is losing ground with a woman, he tends to step straight past the actual disagreement and reach instead for whatever will make her smaller. The shape of it rarely changes from one woman to the next, and it tends to come out of the same drawer every single time:
- The fabricated image, the leaked or threatened photo, the account set up in her name … anything at all that turns her body into the argument, so that her actual work never has to be answered.
- The comment about her appearance, dropped in precisely where a real rebuttal should have gone, because it is so much easier to rate a woman than it is to reply to her.
- The insult got up to look like a joke, carefully built so that if she objects to it she becomes the woman who “can’t take a bit of banter.”
- The quieter campaign that never quite shows its face … the word in the right ear, the reputation chipped at slowly, the steady suggestion that she is difficult, or hysterical, or simply too much.
What sits behind every one of those is, I suspect, one and the same impulse, dressed up a little differently each time … the discomfort of a man who would rather a woman were humiliated than allowed to be right, who takes being challenged by her as a kind of injury, and who reaches for her body because it is the oldest and cheapest lever there is, and because pulling it has so rarely cost him anything.
Notice, too, that this is not remotely how these same men behave towards one another. A man who falls out with another man will argue with him, undercut him, go cold on him, perhaps cut him off entirely, yet he does not as a general rule fabricate a naked photograph of him and dangle it over his livelihood. The sexual humiliation, the reduction of an entire person down to a body to be ashamed of, is kept almost exclusively for women, which tells you fairly plainly that it was never really about the disagreement in the first place. None of it should be quietly accepted as the standing fee for being a woman who does visible work, or holds opinions, or merely exists somewhere a man would prefer she did not. It is not banter, it is not flattery gone slightly wrong, it is not a clumsy compliment … it is an attempt at control, and it deserves to be named as exactly that, every single time.
For the Record
In case this is beginning to read as though I am simply declaring it fake and asking you to take my word for it, let me walk you through the work, because the instant you stop treating an image like this as a weapon and start treating it as evidence, you find it has an enormous number of places where it can give itself away. These are the things you can genuinely examine:
- The body itself.
- A real body carries the small, specific evidence of a real life lived inside it, the moles and the scars and the marks that sit in their own particular places, and a fabricated one almost never gets every last one of them right. In my case this was the part that settled it completely, because whoever built this only ever had public images of me to work from, which means the tattoo I keep hidden, the one that does not appear in a single photograph anybody could ever find, is simply not there! They could not copy something they had never been allowed to see, and that one absence says more about their source material than anything else in the frame.
- The scenery.
- The world around the figure has to obey the very same rules the figure does, and a fabrication rarely manages that everywhere at once. You look at whether the light landing on the body matches the light in the setting, whether the shadows all fall the same way, whether the perspective of the background genuinely agrees with the perspective of the person who has been dropped into it, and whether edges and reflections behave the way real ones are obliged to.
- Signs of manipulation.
- A composite tends to leave seams once you look closely enough, in edges that are suspiciously clean or oddly soft, in skin texture that shifts where one source was blended into another, in little repeating patterns where something has been cloned, and in colour or grain that does not quite agree from one region to the next. A wholly generated image leaves its own fingerprints too, in hands, in teeth, in jewellery, in all the quiet places where fine detail tends to dissolve.
- The metadata.
- A genuine photograph carries a quiet paper trail behind it, information about the device that captured it, the settings it used, sometimes even the where and the when. A fabricated or edited image will often either have none of that, or carry the residue of the software used to assemble it, or tell a little story that flatly contradicts the one the picture is trying to sell you. It can be stripped out or faked, so it is never the entire answer on its own, yet it is very often a loose thread well worth pulling.
- Provenance.
- Where did the thing actually come from, who was the first to hold it, and how exactly did it travel to here … a real photograph tends to have a believable origin and a traceable journey, whereas a fabrication usually materialises out of nowhere with no honest account of how it ever came to exist.
I will not catalogue every flaw in my own particular forgery, because I have no intention of doing free quality control for someone trying to assemble a person who does not exist … the point worth keeping is that there are this many doors, and the fake only has to be caught out behind one of them, whereas I get to walk straight through all of them at once.
The lesson sitting underneath all of this is an old one, and it happens to be the very thing I have spent years teaching other people. A picture has never been a fact, it is a made thing, and anything that can be made can just as easily be made up, more easily now than at any point before and a good deal more convincingly. I stand in front of students and tell them not to trust an image at face value, to always ask what else might have produced it, and I never once expected to become my own worked example … if a forgery this carefully aimed at me comes apart under a careful look, then the convincing thing sitting on your own screen can come apart in just the same way, so do not believe what you see in front of you, and do get firmly into the habit of asking where it came from.
It has not, for the record, moved me so much as an inch. If the very best case anyone can muster against my work is a forgery, then there is no case at all, only a confession about the person who felt the need to make it, and I am still here, still doing the work, possibly a notch louder than before, with Smudge supervising throughout.
If you are a woman this has happened to, or it happens to you later because somebody mistook your kindness for a way in, or someone wants to make you backdown or leave, then please hear me when I say that it is not you … the shame that turned up was only ever sent to the wrong address, and you are quite entitled to set it down, to say out loud that this isn’t me, to mean it all the way through, and to carry on exactly as you were. Easier said than done, but you are the victim!
One last thing, because my best friend thinks it’s the most funny comment I’ve made this year …. You want to know the very first tell, the one that flagged itself before any of the clever forensic work even began? I looked at that body and some traitorous little corner of me thought, oh, that looks rather good. Reader, no woman alive has ever looked at a real, unedited photograph of herself and thought oooo I look fab … it simply does not happen. The moment I caught myself almost happy with how I looked, I knew it could not possibly be me. If anyone out there glances at it and briefly takes it for me, then I shall simply choose to receive that as a compliment, and we need never speak of it again!!!