Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how digital platforms shape gendered selves while enabling sexual violence. Drawing on testimonies from Japan’s 2022 sexual violence survey, it shows how anonymity and mediated intimacy blur consent, reproducing gendered power and shifting encounters from connection to harm.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how digital platforms such as dating apps, social media, and gaming communities facilitate the crafting of new gendered selves while simultaneously exposing users to predatory behaviours. Online encounters have become integral to Japan’s everyday media landscape, and the stigma surrounding digital intimacy has diminished as many individuals seek genuine connection and recognition. However, despite their growing normalisation, digital spaces can also function as sites that enable and legitimise sexual violence.

Drawing on female victims’ testimonies from the 2022 nationwide survey on sexual violence, and informed by the framework of technology-facilitated violence (Powell and Henry 2017), the paper demonstrates how digital spaces are not neutral environments. Rather, they operate as extensions of the “real” world, reproducing gendered power relations through structural features such as anonymity, pseudonymity, and platform design. A further critical dimension is the role of text-based communication, which can intensify illusions of intimacy by allowing users to strategically manipulate emotional tone and self-presentation through curated language and emojis. This technologically mediated disembodiment of intimacy often blurs intentions and expectations, increasing the risk of misunderstanding or harm when interactions move offline. These dynamics are further reinforced by a widespread perception of a new rape myth, shared not only by victims but also by police and, in some cases, perpetrators, that online encounters are secondary, unreliable, or inherently “sketchy” compared to relationships formed through offline social networks. Such assumptions can discourage reporting and weaken legal and institutional intervention.

The central question is: How do digital forms of intimacy, particularly through social media, produce conditions in which ostensibly consensual interactions can shift into predatory behaviour? To address this question, the paper analyses testimonies from women who encountered perpetrators through social media platforms, dating apps, and gaming communities. These accounts reveal the ambivalent intersection of agency and vulnerability in digital spaces, where intimacy and self-presentation are continuously negotiated. Ultimately, the paper argues that digital encounters blur the boundary between empowerment and objectification, shaping a new discourse of gendered subjectivity in which women’s sexual desire and agency are frequently reframed or distorted through technological mediation.