It’s truly astounding, as we move ever closer to convincing deep fakes and government employed facial recognition technology, that there are still folks out there taking found photographs and erecting a whole fictional life around them; building up audiences, engaging with followers, and endlessly trolling for dick on Rentmen or Grindr. One imagines that they could evade detection on twitter or IG for a time, but envisioning the door-opening scenario when they turn up at a sex appointment and aren’t Pierre Fitch or Bravo Delta is eternally comical to me.
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At the root of this behavior it is easy to project or predict deep insecurity with the way someone looks, or discomfort and shame with how they have been received by others in the past. But, tragic as those circumstances can seem, they are hardly justification for stealing the life of someone else and masquerading around publicly as some third, composite person, built of the catfisher’s brain and someone else’s purloined face/ass/penis.
As a professional escort and companion, I am particularly curious about what transpires when someone using stolen images to advertise their beauty or sexual “prowess” (read: penis size), eventually convinces someone to hire them and is forced to, if not immediately, surely eventually explain why they aren’t the person in those photographs. The more clever catfishers use Tumblr images of racially-similar, generically beautiful young men trying to look wistful and desirable in selfies or for photographers, artlessly crop out their heads and faces, and plonk them on to a once-verified Rentmen profile to create the full fantasy that they are these men and RM has authenticated it. That’s a major flaw with that platform specifically; once a user has passed their “verification” test, the profile remains listed as photo verified forever, regardless of how many photos of Pierre Fitch’s ass they upload later.
But it certainly doesn’t end with Rentmen. While I have had plenty of my own images stolen, edited, and posted to escort profiles all around the world, it’s still jarring and strange to find them in more mainstream situations. Earlier this week, I discovered a twitter account which had somehow amassed more than 10,000 followers (followers who believe they are watching a real human and who engage with him, asking questions about his life and his underwear choices), composed entirely of stolen images. While stolen images are no shock on Twitter, that he was using photos of my friends and people I know in real life – having cropped out their heads and faces – was particularly staggering to me. Even more so, apparently almost 30 people I personally follow on twitter ALSO thought this was a real guy.
Digging into the account’s 4+ year, multi-thousand tweet history, I found photos of friends, people I knew from Tumblr, pornstars, models, people from furniture catalogs, underwear ads, and beyond. All unwittingly drafted into this bizarre marionette show by an unseen puppeteer who would speak for them, and answer follower questions about where “he” bought that underwear and how oh-so-horny he is, day after day.
And then I found my own body – headless, naturally – stitched into this gross canvas of fraud, with a caption about “his” underwear choices for that day and I didn’t know what to think.
It’s one thing to see another person’s hard work (at the gym, during the photoshoot, wherever) purloined in this manner. But I was suddenly struck by how this cowardly fabricator had taken my whole story from me and put it there before his audience as his own. Everything that had led me to that point, every pushup or squat that shaped my body, everything I’d ever eaten, all the relationships I’d had that had influenced me in some manner or another, and even the accidental airport meeting of the photographer who shot it were present in that single still image. At least a little bit. Because in the instant that that photo was snapped, that was who I was. It was a photograph of me; a singular second of my story to that point. And yet, without a thought for the erasure of that story that he would commit, this timid trickster took me and forced himself into my story; into my skin. And instead of who I am, my body became “Works as a photograper [sic] for companies, commercial pics etc. BI i guess…” Albin Boot. I didn’t get the dignity of being grafted onto someone literate enough to spell their own alleged profession correctly.
And from my shoddily cropped-out face spilled banal, clumsily chosen words about underwear and horniness.
Men who share their bodies and their sexuality on the Internet seem, to a casual observer, as though they must absorb a constant stream of validation and compliments and sponsorships and blowjobs and retweets that make every facet of that kind of exposure infinitely worth it. But the dark side of it is that people shame and shun them, criticize every real or imagined flaw, and laugh when they fall down. There are whole websites built around this idea of ridiculing those who are daring or foolish enough to put themselves out there, especially when it’s in a sexual manner, and then reveling in their failures, arrests, and sometimes even their deaths.
All of this to say nothing of the impact of their out-ness on their personal or professional lives now and later on.
When you post an image without attribution, that is theft. No matter how common the practice or how regular and easy it is to do; you have stolen that image (not the 1’s and 0’s that compose the digital file themselves, but that singular moment in someone else’s narrative), and you have used it to your own end.
But when you take someone’s image and clumsily push and shove your way into their body to wear their skin so that others will follow or accept you when your own skin is too repugnant, you have arguably committed something grander than theft. You have taken that person’s autonomy and choice from them and have begun forcing them to say your words and live your lies.
And because twitter, in particular, is a wasteland of abuse, white supremacy, content violations, and copyright infringement, there is little recourse I or any of the men, whose genitals and bodies appear in this shitty pantomime, have.
I don’t know what you get out of this, Albin. I don’t know if you feel some endorphin rush or sense of acceptance at likes and retweets of the visages of men you must believe are better than you really are. But I hope, inside, that it feels hollow and false to you like it should. That you know the truth and you keep doing it day after day after day because you think maybe this next one will finally feel different. Will finally make you worthy somehow, in a way that your own face and penis will never make you feel.
You are tiny.
Tyler Dårlig Ulv is an Ontario-based blogger and professional companion. He has worked for Rentboy.com, Manhunt, and contributed to publications like Queerty and Thought Catalog. You can follow him on Twitter and Instagram, or find out more about his work at his website and blog. Tyler lives full time in Toronto.
He spelled his profession correctly. He’s s photog-raper.