We’ve all had a bit of a run-in with a creepy person on a dating site. Presuming that we’re putting ourselves out there simply to have sex, these creeps will treat us to exactly the sort of catcalling and harassment that would certainly humiliate us if it was done in real life. Most of us will just block or report them, knowing that not much will be done about it.
But Anna Gensler isn’t most of us. The 23-year-old decided to get her revenge on these guys by drawing ‘sad naked’ pictures of them, captioning them with the gross pick-up line they used on her, uploading them to Instagram then sending the men a link to the post.
‘When someone does something I think is rude, I always want to give them a taste of their own medicine,’ she's explained to Slate. ‘I’m an artist, and I try to use art as my weapon, even though that sounds so lame. So I thought, “What is something I can do to make me feel the way that they’re making me feel?” Obviously, I couldn’t just send them back a sexy message, because they would love that. They would be like, “Yay, it worked!” So I just started doodling how I would imagine them naked … except sad-naked. It was the most immature thing I could think of, because their pickup lines are the most juvenile, basic things, but also still oddly offensive.’
In the interview, she explains that some of the men will reply to her with mean messages, others will block her and then some will say ‘smart things’, which begs the question: ‘But if you’re smart and seem like a normal person, why are you using opening lines like “I love butt sex”?’
We’re not sure how far we condone what she’s doing. It sounds very similar to revenge porn, because she’s using a naked image of these men to shame them and get revenge on them, and she is quite close to identifying them in the portraits.
However, here’s the big difference; revenge porn is when someone will take a video given with the participant’s consent, filmed while the subject is aware it’s been taken, with their full trust, then make it public. In this case, the sexual situation is quite obviously made up, and Anna never implied she was sexually interested in these men to the point where those sorts of opening gambits were warranted. Sure, she right-swiped them on Tinder, but a right swipe doesn’t really call for someone to tell you ‘your boobs are even nicer than my mom’s’, does it?
So maybe Anna's drawings can serve as a warning to the creepy people out there that their shit won’t be tolerated.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.