If you grew up in the Nineties and Noughties, prank shows were a cultural touchpoint; Ashton Kutcher’s Punk’d was top viewing and, incidentally, before Punk’d there was ‘Harrassment’, a show Kutcher had been working on that was cancelled due to him being sued for traumatising residents at a Hard Rock Cafe during a stunt.
Jackass took the genre much further, cementing the daredevil bad boy image of the Noughties through a series of wild, dangerous and gruesome stunts and pranks. The reality ‘prank’ genre casts a pretty long shadow, and reactionary-based entertainment has never really died, but shapeshifted. Want to see a dangerous prank? Or watch a normie be confused, nervous, freak out or even explode with anger? Just scroll TikTok!
A culture of institutionalised surveillance combined with the explosion of video-first platforms means voyeurism on social media has become completely normalised. Users can now justify filming whatever they please before posting it online simply because it falls under the umbrella of ‘creating content’, and since there are few agreed moral perimeters when it comes to filming strangers, a sort of society-wide assumed consent has been adopted.
If you were in public, you’re up for public consumption. One scroll through your foryou page and it really feels like everyone is filming whoever the hell they want, doing whatever they’re doing (or whatever they’ve coerced them into doing).
“I've always advocated for kindness and really want this all to stop.”
At the start of the year, a Melburnian woman, who was non-consensually filmed for a viral ‘random act of kindness’ Tiktok which condescendingly described her as a “elderly woman” with a “heartbreaking tale,” spoke out about being set up, calling it dehumanising; “it’s the patronising assumption that … older women will be thrilled by some random stranger giving them flowers”, she explained, “I feel like clickbait”.
This year, a mummy Tik Toker came under fire for convincing her sons (for a “prank’! Don’t worry!) that they had a third brother who had tragically died, and if you’ve been online at all recently you know that filming unhoused people has become a morbid trend too. Often these individuals are encouraged to tell their – often traumatic – back stories and are offered an amount of money that will elicit a strong reaction. Is this because someone wants to help, or in the hope that the video does numbers and secures the creator some social media caché? I think we know the answer.
In these instances it really feels like any alleged positive material impact is coming a hard second to the creator's gain, and it’s sure as hell the case that negative impacts on the subject are rarely considered. In case i’m not being abundantly clear: I think using someone as a prop for content, especially when there is an overt power dynamic, is not just unkind, I think it’s exploitative. It sucks.
As a gender equality activist, one particular theme of Tiktok ‘prank’ has been served to me over and over again; men harassing women for likes. I’ve seen these guys pretending to grope and slap women’s bums (pretending to sexual assault someone! Cool!) which, in one video, resulted in a women accidentally throwing her phone of a bridge in shock, as well as guys hitting on – and trying to kiss – women in the street who look visibly uncomfortable and are either backing away or nervously laughing it off which, if you’re a woman, you’ll know is a muscle memory attempt as deescalation and getting away quickly.
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Some videos feature men secretly changing around things in the house as a form of ‘prank’. In one video, a man proudly shows off how he disconnected the TV, took the batteries out of the air conditioning unit and turned off the water. He then proceeds to pretend that he is ‘fixing’ each thing, saying, “I'll see what we can do.” While pretending to use tools to fix the issues, he asks his wife for “beer and chips”. Later, he films as his wife gives him a back rub for all of his “hard work”.
As one Twitter user noted, the video is a prime example of gaslighting. “Fun fact: the term ‘Gaslighting’ comes from the 1944 movie Gaslight in which a woman's husband messes with the gas lamps around the house to make her think she's losing her mind so he can manipulate her,” she writes. “This man is quite literally Gaslighting his wife, and yall think it's funny......ok”
Despite being found guilty of sexually assaulting multiple women, he continues to victim-blame his accusers and shrug off accountability.
These videos are deeply uncomfortable to watch and they have a consequence that surpasses the impact they have on the female subjects; for decades writers, scholars, activists and advocates have working to forced society to see sexual harassment and assault as what it is; serious. They have been peeling back the patriarchal re-brand that minimises these acts, and continues to do so by labeling them ‘just a joke!”. This is an effective mechanism of patriarchy. Premeditated rebranding of the impacts of misogyny means being able to deny the definition of it when it is levelled at you, or spoken about as a problem in general.
For years, those of us who have been on the receiving end of sexual assault have had it described to us as “a prank” (a word used to describe upskirting to me by a well-known female TV host during my first TV appearance) or “a laugh” “a bit of fun” “a joke”, and that rebranding has aimed to quieten us. Now that narrative prevails with this new get-out-of-jail-free-card of “it’s just for a video!”. Some of the men doing the harassing on camera also appear to use this excuse in some of the videos in order to justify their actions, but in the words of Keke Palmer: I’m sorry to this man, but filming something doesn’t negate the reality of what it is. In fact, this may comes as a surprise but the presence of a camera doesn’t make sexual harassment a joke or prank, it makes it sexual harassment that has been filmed. It simply offers evidence of your misogyny. The problem we have is that the majority of men creating this type of ‘content’ either don’t care how they appear, genuinely don’t see what their doing as harassment, or don’t think about impact but instead about it being a valuable way to build influence in the eyes of other men. If these men who are harassing women for likes are this comfortable demonstrating their misogyny to the world, then what are they like in private?
The reality is, a society that normalises invading women’s space is one where these videos are seen as entertaining instead of unsettling, but in a hyper-contentified society, our obligation is not to throw in the towel but to ensure we don’t become desensitised to harassment just because we see it in new, insidious or digestible guises. Maybe, by being vigilant to the shape-shifting of the mechanisms of misogyny, we can use these realities to help us have conversations. Maybe these video filming people are a useful starting point to introduce conversations about consent in the household? Perhaps, we can disrupt framing of sexual harassment as a prank and a joke by having conversations with the people in our life about these trends? When something is this frustrating but we don’t have control over it, we can always use it to facilitate conversations. And conversations are how culture changes.
The Support Contact Details You Need To Know
Find your local SARC via the NHS
Find your local Rape and Sexual Referral centres via the NHS
Rape Crisis
Free National Helpline:
0808 802 9999 - Open (12-2.30 & 7-9.30)
Live Chat Available
Victim Support
Support line:
Free National Helpline:
08 08 16 89 111 (24 hrs a day)
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Rape and sexual assault
The Survivors Trust
Free National Helpline:
0808 801 0818
Mon - Fri 10am – 8:30pm
Sat 10am – 12:30pm, 1:30pm – 4:30pm and 6pm – 8:30pm
Sun 1:30pm – 4:30pm and 6pm – 8:30pm
24 hr answer machine
Survivors UK – Male Rape and Sexual Abuse Support
Live Online Chat
Chat Via Text on – 020 3322 1860
Chat via WhatsApp on – 074 9181 6064
Galop – LGBT survivor support
Sexual Violence Casework and Support Service
020 7704 2040
(ask to speak to someone from the Sexual Violence Support Service)
E: referrals@galop.org.uk
