Women as disposable flesh. The new frontier of patriarchy is digital.

The street was not enough. The home was not enough. Intimate relationships, workplaces, the daily paths walked under the constant fear of being followed, harassed, beaten, raped, killed… none of it was enough.

Now we know that even the digital space is no longer safe. Our online lives, which should be extensions of freedom and possibility, have become the new territory of patriarchal conquest. Photos of women stolen without consent, posted by husbands, boyfriends, colleagues, even relatives. Images piled up on platforms functioning as slaughterhouses, catalogues of flesh covered with drooling, violent, degrading comments.

And we are not talking about “bored teenagers” or “marginal groups.” Among those fueling these spaces were men in positions of authority and responsibility: police officers, lawyers, doctors. Men who in everyday life are perceived as guarantors of security, legality, health. The contradiction is not accidental. It reveals a system where gender violence is not an exception but a tolerated social rule, not hidden and even normalized.

Those who reduce this to “just pornography” or “online jokes” miss the point. It is not pornography. It is not eroticism. It is not desire. It is control. It is symbolic annihilation. It is the exercise of power. It is proof of how little women’s consent still matters in our societies.

Many men define themselves as heterosexual because they are attracted to women. But what they truly love is the male pack. They love talking to each other, trading fragments of female bodies like trophies, consolidating their sense of power through shared contempt. It is a system of mutual recognition, a ritual of belonging. In the end, it is about homophilia and even heterosexual desire bent to strengthen bonds between men rather than to respect women. Women, in this dynamic, are never subjects: they are instruments of male bonding, objects through which virility and dominance are confirmed.

And so the urgent question arises: does women’s freedom over their own image truly exist? Can we control how we are seen, represented, remembered? Can we exist as full persons, beyond the body?

Because the violence does not lie only in sharing without consent. It also lies in separating the body from the person. In reducing a photograph to mere flesh, everything that woman was and is is erased — her history, her feelings, her emotions, her relationships. It is a second violence, more subtle and devastating, because it turns the person into a manipulated memory object.

Here emerges another paradox. Many of those images were not stolen from strangers, but shared by men who were husbands, boyfriends, friends. Men bound by supposed love and affection. Which forces a harsher question: how many men truly know what it means to love another person? If love is also protection, care, recognition, how can we call it love when the woman one claims to love is thrown to the digital pack?

Some compare these practices to platforms like OnlyFans, claiming “it’s basically the same thing.” It is not. Because the difference is not the body shown, but the power to choose. One thing is deciding to expose one’s image, to make it a source of income or self-representation. Another is suffering its theft, its manipulation, its use without consent. Confusing these planes erases the line between freedom and abuse, between autonomy and violence.

The truth is that patriarchy constantly regenerates itself, colonizing every new space. First the body. Then the street. Then the home. Now the digital. It is a mechanism of appropriation that leaves no room to breathe, turning every place into a potential danger, every context into vulnerability.

Faced with this, society cannot afford to minimize. We cannot accept violence as something limited to the “physical world,” as if online violence were not real. Because it is real. It has devastating psychological consequences. It has tangible social effects. It destroys reputations, relationships, lives.

And so it must be said clearly: women are not disposable flesh. Not in physical spaces, not in digital ones. We need stronger laws and concrete tools to prosecute those who spread images without consent. But above all, we need a cultural shift that stops treating women as available bodies and finally begins to recognize them as full, complex, free subjects.

Until that happens, no freedom will be real. Not even the freedom of a face in a photograph. Not even the freedom of a memory.