Italian
A Facebook group with thousands of members reduces wives to objects of exchange, often without their knowledge. A phenomenon that reveals the persistence of patriarchy in the digital age.
ITALY. The case of the Facebook group My Wife—over 32,000 members exchanging intimate photos of their wives and partners, often without consent—is only the tip of the iceberg of a reality that speaks more about us as a society than about the internet itself. It is not so much yet another distortion of an under-regulated social network, but rather the stark representation of a way of looking at women that remains deeply ingrained: bodies to be displayed, catalogued, consumed. Wives who, without knowing it, become objects of trade in a virtual marketplace that resembles a medieval fair—only multiplied infinitely by algorithms.
Here lies the most painful contradiction: women who in families, in everyday life, take on roles of care, of work, of relationships, who build communities—and who at the same time, without their knowledge, are reduced to trophies shown to strangers, as if they were captured prey. A gesture that may seem like a “joke” to those who engage in it, but in reality reveals the still-living face of patriarchy: that toxic idea that a wife belongs to her husband and not to herself.
The internet does not create this problem, it amplifies it. There is nothing “new” about gender-based violence: what changes is the scale, the visibility, the ability to erase with a click the distinction between public and private. Stolen intimacy becomes mass entertainment; consent is not even considered a variable. The male community that forms around these digital spaces finds validation and reinforcement, exchanging approval and comments as if they were talking about a new car model or a supermarket deal.
In this sense, My Wife is not an anomaly, but a wake-up call. It forces us to ask not only where platforms fail, but above all where we fail as a culture. Because as long as the female body remains symbolic property, as long as male desire can be turned into a right of exposure, as long as the wife is still perceived as “mine” before being “herself,” these spaces will continue to proliferate, online and offline.
It is not enough to be outraged by yet another social media scandal. We need a more radical gaze: to recognize that the battle for women’s dignity is not fought only in laws or in platform regulations, but in everyday mentalities, in power relations inside homes, in the language that normalizes possession. Because in the end, patriarchy works like this: it disguises itself as habit, as play, as irony—and in the meantime turns love into a showcase, intimacy into a marketplace, wives into merchandise.
