Glamour also found evidence of seven celebrities, all young women, being victimised by semen images on TikTok. It’s no coincidence that young female celebrities are the targets of this abuse. Before it shut down, the most-watched video on ‘MrDeepFakes’, the most popular ‘porn’ site for explicit deepfakes, was of a teen Jenna Ortega. In 2022, while filming my BBC Three film ‘Deepfake Porn: Could you be next?’ I watched users in a Discord server gleefully count down the day Charli D’Amelio turned eighteen so that they could ‘legally’ create explicit deepfakes of her. Whether it’s semen ‘tributes’ or explicit deepfakes, young female celebrities are on the frontline of online misogyny.
But it isn’t only women in the public eye or those with a large following who are being targeted.
Tina Skye* is an ex-glamour model targeted by semen images early in her career.
“I first found out about ‘cum tributes’ not long after I’d started modelling”, she tells me. “I was about 19, and some random man tweeted a photo of a page he’d cut out from Nuts magazine featuring me. He’d slid it into a plastic wallet and ejaculated over it.”
She continues: “Since then, men have sent me photos of their iPad screensavers – images of me – that they’ve done the same thing to. It’s really, really grim.”
Skye remembers how blindsided she was at first:
“It honestly took me by surprise because I’d never seen or even heard of semen images before. I was so new to modelling, and it wasn’t something I imagined would happen, let alone something I was prepared to see. Maybe I was just young and naïve to the bad characters of this world.”
She pauses before adding deflatingly, “Depressingly, it doesn’t shock me anymore. But it’s still disturbing.”
In messaging boards dedicated to online misogyny, the tone around semen images shifts into something even darker. While some men cling to the delusion that these acts are a form of admiration, many openly revel in using ‘cum tributes’ to humiliate, harm and degrade women. For these men, it’s an act of dominance. It’s about taking women’s power and stripping them of their consent.
I scroll through some of the forums where the requests are chillingly blunt:
“DM FOR PRIVATE TRIB. GIRLFRIEND/WIFE/FAMILY MEMBERS”
“Sharing my gf. Tribs very welcome.”
“Trib my mum.”
A search for ‘cum tribute’ on 4chan’s archive returns over 10,000 results in under three seconds. What follows is an avalanche of pages filled with images of penises, semen and smiling, unsuspecting women whose photos have been hijacked by these men. One of the most common threads involves requests for tributes of family members: mothers, aunts, cousins, and overwhelming requests for sisters.
Each mention of ‘sister’ made the saliva gather at the back of my throat, my body physically choking on the men’s sick betrayal.
Some users boast about building “collections,” eager to gather as many tributes of their girlfriends as possible; their own twisted library of abuse. Others talk about wanting their ex-girlfriend to be “owned” by the internet, a term used in these spaces to describe the deliberate mass-spreading and doctoring of a woman’s image to destroy her digital footprint. They use ‘cum tributes’ as a weapon.
Professor Clare McGlynn, a world-leading expert in image-based abuse and one of Glamour’s campaign partners, shares her thoughts on this harm: