In a post-revenge porn world.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: As the FCC cracks down on revenge porn, certain men would inevitably feel compelled to find other avenues to non-consensually sexualize women.
Enter DoppelBangHer, a Reddit community geared specifically towards helping members find pornographic actresses who look like women they know in their real day-to-day lives.
The subreddit works in a dubiously straightforward manner — a user posts a photo of a typically very young looking woman and then calls upon the hive mind, and as Salon calls it, to determine who her closest lookalike is within the adult film industry.
Now, this isn’t an entirely lawless enterprise. The mods warn, “Do not submit pictures for the purpose of identifying someone, if you need to know the name of a particular porn star, try /r/tipofmypenis.” Which is just a hilarious sentence that could exist only on Reddit. They also advise, somewhat surprisingly, “Please be aware of how someone might feel about finding their picture here. Yes, I am trying to guilt you as the results of which are usually unpleasant.”
Unpleasant might be one way to describe the 2013 scenario where a teen found out her photo had been posted on the website. According to Gawker, her impeccable response was to post, “She looks pretty identical to this girl! ;)” under a pseudonym and provide a link leading to a photo of herself holding up a sign that read, “YOU’RE DISGUSTING.”
Per Salon, there are requests for the pornographic doppelgangers of random celebrities, like Amber Lancaster from “The Price Is Right” and Daniela Ruah from “NCIS:LA,” but the most common request is for some version of “this girl I know.”
The subreddit contains numerous queries about co-workers, ex-girlfriends, neighbors, teachers, and most popular of all, college classmates, according to Salon. Some men even post photos of women with whom they actually share a close friendship.
One individual posted of a photo of his best friend since elementary school and got the response: “Being friends since elementary you shouldn’t go about jerking your d–k to her this way why do you grow a pair and tell her you like her.”