“And this is why we close our DMs” reads the description of the Deranged DMs podcast. Hosted by two big internet personalities—Abelina Sabrina, who goes by Sabrina, and Gabi Belle—it explores the weird and disgusting depths of direct messages that women receive from gross men.
Each week, they have a guest on the show, who is usually also big on social media, and they discuss what that person has received. From unsolicited dick pics to long paragraphs, it’s honestly scary.
In one episode, in which Sam Temple of The H3 Podcast was a guest, they discussed how all three of them got an unsolicited picture from the same guy. “He was hitting the whole friend group,” Sam suggested, to which Sabrina responded, “[He thought] this was a numbers game. One of them is bound to respond.”
In the same episode, they also discussed the responses that they’ve received when posting pictures that aren’t completely conservative. “This is just your standard anytime you, a woman, you know, posts a picture of themselves is just kind of ‘this is the vibe.’ I literally couldn’t be covering more skin,” Temple said, then seemed to second guess herself and said, “I mean, maybe perhaps my shoulders.”
Though they don’t often go too deep into darker matters when it comes to a certain group of men, especially online, they do sometimes mention it, and even as a woman myself, to hear the way they seemingly brush it off and don’t seem so concerned is, itself, concerning. But, then again, they are women who put themselves on the internet and have large followings, so unfortunately, it’s no surprise that they receive some of the messages they do.
A recent study by UN Women found that 38% of women under 35, surveyed across 51 countries, had, at some point, experienced sexual harassment online. “Only 1 in 4 reported it to the relevant authorities and nearly 9 in 10 opted to limit their online activity, thereby increasing the gender digital divide.”
In another installment of the podcast, which featured Amanda Golka, who goes by the online alias Swell Entertainment, they discussed deepfakes—where video of a person’s face or body is altered digitally, through machine learning technology, and is often used negatively to spread false information or for pornography—and how Gabi had to have 92 fake nude images of herself taken down.
“I don’t post very revealing content at all or any type of thing like that [but] don’t you worry because people will still sexualize you whether you like it or not,” she said.
Sabrina explained that she had started making her own NSFW content after she was made aware of people doing it without her consent, so that she could control what people accessed and how they did so.
(featured image: Deranged DMs)
