One woman is using Instagram to document a decade of online harassment

Despite the dark, explicitly obscene and downright threatening material in Matsumiya’s collection – several messages include references to rape and other forms of bodily harm – she approaches the screenshots on Instagram with humor.

But despite all these fascinating interests – all these unique components of her identity, the last 10 years have created a different label that she now wears and posts about on Instagram: perv magnet.

She told Dazed that she got her first creepy message in 2001 or 2002, when a man told her about his fantasy to be roasted alive and cannibalized by a woman. “It seems to attract an insane amount of unacceptable, predatory behavior….[And] it’s absolutely unacceptable to treat anyone this way”. “I’ve chose to post them all”.

Matsumiya received the messages on various social media platforms, namely Facebook, mySpace and Twitter, and in total there are over 1000 in the online archive.

Mia Matsumiya is a professional violinist. “I thought for sure that the messages were going to stop at a few point, but they’ve persisted to this day”. “So, they don’t really focus on the object of the comments as a real human being having real human reactions”, says Markman. And that’s exactly why it’s important that she’s taking a stand. These online haters should be exposed, and the more people who see what they’re doing to women, hopefully the more people will fight to end Internet violence for good.

Though Matsumiya said she is largely desensitized to the tenor of these messages, she became frightened when she discovered that one of the men who sent her frequent messages had been arrested for stalking another Asian woman.

“The biggest critics are the ones who believe that I’m bragging about how many “compliments” I receive”, Matsumiya told Dazed.

“I didn’t deserve to be treated this way and neither did other women”.

Since the inaugural @perv_magnet post went up four weeks ago, Matsumiya’s Instagram account has garnered over 26,000 followers. And she’s been getting unwanted sexual attention for just as long. I want my account to be a place where women can commiserate and men to just learn what women can experience online.