The scale of the problem is substantial. According to the United Nations, roughly 90 percent of recipients of unsolicited genital images are women, and surveys in the United States and the United Kingdom indicate that about half of adult women have received such images. In Spain, between 20 and 75 percent of women aged 18 to 65 reported experiencing these incidents, describing feelings of humiliation, offense, or intimidation. Beyond the immediate discomfort, prior research has linked repeated exposure to cyber-sexual harassment to anxiety, depression, body shame, low self-esteem, eating disorders, alcohol abuse, and social isolation. Yet despite the prevalence and documented harms, relatively little was known about the cognitive and emotional processes that shape how women respond to these incidents in the moment—and whether their own attitudes might color those responses.

The research team, led by Rocío Vizcaíno-Cuenca together with Hugo Carretero-Dios and Mónica Romero-Sánchez, framed the study within the concept of (cyber)rape culture: a societal-level phenomenon that legitimizes and trivializes sexual harm in digital environments through victim-blaming, trolling, and sexist discourse. While this culture operates structurally, the researchers hypothesized that its core assumptions are internalized at the individual level as myths about cyber-sexual violence—descriptive and prescriptive beliefs about the nature, causes, and consequences of online sexual aggression, and about the responsibilities of victims and perpetrators. Drawing on sexual script theory and attribution theory, they predicted that women who endorse these myths would interpret ambiguous online situations in ways that normalize the behavior, particularly when contextual cues such as prior flirtation appear to signal implicit consent.

To ground the experiment in real experiences, the team first conducted a qualitative pilot study with 92 women aged 18 to 46 who had received unsolicited genital images. The results mapped the terrain of the phenomenon. Most women—55.4 percent—received the images from unknown men, and Instagram was by far the most common platform, cited by 44.6 percent of participants, followed by WhatsApp at 18.5 percent. Crucially, nearly half of the women (47.8 percent) received the image with no prior interaction whatsoever, and 41.3 percent received it during conversations that were entirely non-sexual. Almost a quarter reported that the image came bundled with other forms of cyber-sexual violence, suggesting a pattern of harassment rather than isolated events. Emotionally, the dominant responses were rejection or displeasure (58.8 percent) and disgust (43.1 percent), with smaller proportions reporting fear, anxiety, anger, and confusion; 17.6 percent explicitly described the experience as assaultive and humiliating. Strikingly, 67.4 percent of women took no action at all afterward—a pattern the researchers attribute to helplessness, normalization of the behavior, or uncertainty about how to respond.

The main experiment then isolated the roles of situational context and individual belief. Each of 218 Spanish women, recruited through social media platforms, was randomly assigned to read one of three hypothetical chat conversations. In the “interest” condition, both a woman and a man expressed mutual sexual interest before the man sent an unsolicited genital image; in the “no interest” condition, only the man expressed interest before sending the image; and in the control condition, participants read a conversation containing no incident at all. Before reading the scenarios, participants completed the 10-item Acceptance of Myths about Cyber-Sexual Violence Against Women (AMCYS) Scale, a validated instrument measuring agreement with statements such as “Instead of worrying about women who receive a genital image, society should pay more attention to the real victims of sexual assault.” Afterward, they rated how positively or negatively they evaluated the scenario and reported their emotional state using validated mood scales covering anxiety, anger-hostility, sadness, happiness, and feelings of power.

The experimental results were unambiguous in their main pattern. Exposure to an unsolicited genital image—regardless of whether the woman had expressed sexual interest—made women evaluate the situation far less positively and report significantly more anxiety, anger-hostility, and sadness, along with less happiness and fewer feelings of power, compared with the control condition. The effect sizes were large: for instance, the difference in anger-hostility between the control and no-interest conditions corresponded to a Cohen’s d of 2.87, and the difference in feelings of power reached d = 1.96. Notably, the presence of prior mutual sexual interest did little to soften the blow. Anxiety, sadness, happiness, and power did not differ significantly between the interest and no-interest conditions, and while anger was slightly lower when mutual interest had been expressed, the difference was modest. In other words, “liking you” did not mean wanting the image—a finding that directly challenges narratives justifying unsolicited genital images by pointing to a woman’s prior behavior.

The more provocative findings emerged from the interaction with myth endorsement. Women who scored higher on the AMCYS scale evaluated the unsolicited genital image more positively than women who scored lower—but only in the interest condition, where the scenario implied the woman had shown sexual interest. This relationship was statistically significant (b = 0.36, p < .001) in the interest condition, marginal in the no-interest condition, and absent in the control condition. Moderated mediation analyses with 10,000 bootstrap resamples then revealed that myth endorsement influenced emotional reactions indirectly, through its effect on evaluation: among women with stronger myth acceptance in the interest condition, the more positive evaluation of the incident was associated with lower anxiety (indirect effect index = −0.54), lower anger-hostility (−0.75), lower sadness (−0.40), higher happiness (0.40), and greater feelings of power (0.44), all with confidence intervals excluding zero. The researchers describe this as a short-term emotional buffering effect: myths appear to shield some women from immediate distress by reframing the incident as flattering or consensual.

The team places this buffering effect within attribution theory, which holds that people interpret ambiguous situations through preexisting belief structures. When a genital image arrives in the middle of a flirty exchange, a woman who believes that expressions of sexual interest signal consent to any sexual content may classify the incident as desirable attention rather than violation, thereby avoiding the negative emotions that such classification would trigger. Similar patterns have been documented for offline street harassment, where women with more sexist attitudes evaluated catcalls more positively and felt better as a result. The authors also cite classic work showing that women who reject rape myths report lower positive feelings after reading a rape testimony than women who endorse those myths—evidence that belief systems can function as short-term psychological protection at the cost of long-term vulnerability.

But the researchers are emphatic that the buffering effect should not be read as evidence that the behavior is harmless. On the contrary, they argue, these softened reactions may reflect internalized sexist norms—what some scholars call mystic femininity, the expectation that women present themselves as sexually receptive online—that obscure the coercive nature of the act and foster self-blame among women who believe they “provoked” the sender. Earlier work by the same group found that women who experience cyber-sexual violence and endorse cyber-sexual violence myths show worse long-term emotional outcomes, and that online reactions to victims frequently involve minimization and victim-blaming. A woman who repeatedly rationalizes unwanted images as compliments may, over time, accumulate the same psychological costs documented in the broader literature on technology-facilitated sexual violence, while remaining less likely to recognize the behavior as violence, less likely to report it, and potentially more vulnerable to escalation.

The study carries clear practical implications. The authors argue that interventions should target myths about cyber-sexual violence among both women and the general population, so that women are not pressured into normalizing behaviors that, in the long run, harm people of all genders. They also acknowledge limitations that shape how far the findings travel. The scenarios used were hypothetical, and while scenario-based methods approximate real-world responses well, self-reported feelings about imagined situations cannot fully capture the experience of receiving such an image in real life. The sample was a convenience sample of Spanish social media users, the design examined only heterosexual interactions, and the cross-sectional experiment cannot establish causal trajectories over time. The authors call for replication in other countries, studies including sexual minorities, longitudinal designs tracking how myth endorsement develops, and future work using immersive technologies such as virtual reality to probe both emotional and behavioral responses, including confrontation, blocking, and reporting.

For now, the core message stands: women overwhelmingly experience unsolicited genital images as aversive, even in contexts of mutual flirtation, and the women who report feeling good about such incidents are likely not experiencing genuine enjoyment but the distorting glow of internalized myths. Understanding that distinction, the researchers contend, is essential both for supporting victims and for dismantling the (cyber)rape culture that makes these images feel, to some, like something other than what they are.