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Unfortunately, the New Year opened with several disillusioning incidents worldwide, and one of them unfolded at Izmir University of Economics, where a website circulated female students’ photographs and identification numbers without consent and subjected them to public voting under categories such as “most beautiful” and “ugliest.”
Furthermore, the data used on the site did not belong only to current students but extended to women who had been enrolled at the university since the early 2000s, meaning that names, photographs, and student numbers of both students and alumni were exposed without consent, long after many of them had left the institution.
The site did not exist in isolation or pass unnoticed, but was accessed, shared, and actively engaged with before complaints and public reactions forced it into view. The website’s format could not have been accidental or quickly improvised, as it was clearly built around ranking and comparison, turning ordinary student images into material for collective judgment.
Only after widespread backlash was the site taken offline and an apology published, a sequence that mirrors how similar incidents are often handled once they become impossible to ignore. Yet the removal of the content does not undo the conditions that made such an act conceivable in the first place.
What this episode reflects is the outcome of a culture in which women are treated as objects to be evaluated, ordered, and consumed, and in which harm is acknowledged only after visibility and outrage make denial and reputational damage impossible to ignore.
Ranking is often defended as opinion, preference, or harmless comparison, yet this defense collapses the moment ranking is understood not as expression but as structure.
To rank is not merely to state what one likes or dislikes, but to impose an order that assigns value, visibility, and legitimacy, while simultaneously producing inferiority and disposability. In the case of women, ranking has never operated in a neutral vacuum, because women’s bodies and appearances have long been treated as public terrain, open to assessment, commentary, and control.
What makes ranking particularly insidious is that it disguises power as participation. Voting mechanisms, lists, and categories invite collective involvement while diffusing responsibility, allowing individuals to claim detachment from the harm they help produce.
When women are placed into hierarchies such as “most beautiful” or “ugliest,” the act does not simply reflect existing opinions but actively manufactures social meaning, teaching both participants and observers who is worthy of admiration, who can be mocked without consequence, and whose discomfort is acceptable collateral. The violence of ranking lies precisely in this process, because it converts human subjects into comparative units and transforms judgment into a shared social practice.
This logic also explains why ranking is so easily normalized. Unlike overt harassment, ranking often presents itself as playful, ironic, or consensual, even when consent is entirely absent. The format itself masks harm by shifting attention away from impact and toward abstraction, numbers, and outcomes.
Once a person becomes a score, a place on a list, or an option to be clicked, their agency recedes and their humanity becomes negotiable. Ranking does not require explicit hostility to function; it only requires a cultural environment in which women’s evaluation is assumed to be acceptable.
Crucially, ranking does not end with those placed at the bottom of the list, as even those positioned at the top are reduced to compliance with a standard they did not choose and cannot control, reinforcing the idea that women’s value is conditional and revocable.
In this sense, ranking operates as a disciplinary tool rather than a moment of expression, shaping behaviour, self-perception, and silence long after the list disappears. Understanding ranking as violence, therefore, requires abandoning the comfort of intention and confronting the reality of what such practices do, how they circulate, and why they continue to find social permission so easily.
What gives incidents like the one at Izmir University of Economics their staying power is not their novelty, but their repetition.
Similar structures have surfaced in different countries, institutional settings, and age groups, often following the same trajectory: circulation without immediate resistance, delayed outrage, institutional statements, and eventual removal, all while the underlying logic remains intact.
In 2024, a student corps affiliated with Utrecht University faced public backlash after a digital list circulated internally that ranked and commented on female students. The list was not initially treated as a serious violation but as an internal matter, only becoming publicly acknowledged once it reached wider attention and criticism made silence untenable. The eventual apology focused on regret and learning, yet the episode revealed how easily ranking women can be normalized within supposedly progressive academic environments until visibility forces accountability.
That same year, authorities in Queensland, Australia, investigated an Instagram account that ranked female secondary school students, many of them minors, based on appearance. The format differed, the platform was more familiar, and the legal stakes were higher. Still, the mechanism was the same as young women were reduced to entries in a list, evaluated collectively, and exposed to harm long before intervention took place.
In Taiwan, a website known as "Uniform Map" systematically collected and categorized photographs of female students without consent, presenting them as searchable and comparable content. Investigations followed only after sustained public pressure, reinforcing the pattern in which harm becomes actionable not when it occurs, but when it becomes impossible to ignore.
Taken together, these examples resist any attempt to frame the Izmir incident as culturally specific, technologically exceptional, or the result of individual bad actors. What repeats across these cases is not simply the misuse of images or data, but the persistence of a social permission that allows women to be ranked, evaluated, and consumed as content before their harm is recognised as harm at all.
The geography changes, the platforms shift, but this logic remains remarkably stable.
For those of us born in the mid- to late-1990s, the response to incidents like this is often marked by a weary sense of recognition rather than surprise, because we were raised within a narrative that framed risk as something girls were expected to manage individually.
As children and teenagers, we were repeatedly exposed to public warnings, news segments, and widely circulated online videos explaining why women should be careful, why certain images should never be shared, and why visibility itself was dangerous. The lesson was not that subtle: girls were taught to be responsible for their ever-so-fragile "reputations," while safety was rarely addressed as a collective or structural concern. Harm was presented as the foreseeable outcome of personal failure, and protection was framed as restraint rather than shared responsibility.
What those warnings consistently avoided was any serious examination of why women’s images were so readily treated as public material in the first place. Responsibility was placed almost entirely on the potential victim, while the structures that enabled exposure, circulation, and judgment were left intact. The underlying assumption was that visibility itself was dangerous for women, rather than that a culture existed in which women’s visibility was routinely exploited.
This framing trained an entire generation to internalize surveillance, anticipate judgment, and preemptively adjust behavior to minimize harm that was never of their making.
The Izmir case exposes the limits of this logic with uncomfortable clarity. The women targeted were not sharing intimate images, seeking attention, or violating any implicit rules of digital modesty; ordinary student photographs and basic institutional data were enough. The harm did not emerge from excess but from existence within a system that treats women as content by default.
In this context, telling women to be more careful is not merely inadequate but actively misleading, because it suggests that safety is achievable through self-discipline rather than collective accountability.
This is why the emphasis on self-policing has always functioned as a form of containment rather than protection. By encouraging women to manage risk quietly and individually, institutions and societies avoid confronting the practices that repeatedly produce harm. Silence becomes evidence of success, while exposure is framed as failure, and the result is a culture in which women are expected to absorb the costs of participation in public life by adapting themselves to an environment that remains fundamentally unchanged.
After the site was taken offline, a message attributed to its creator was published, in which they apologized for any harm caused, claimed that the intention had been to draw attention to a cybersecurity vulnerability.
They asked those affected for forgiveness and kindness, stating that they had never intended to disturb or offend anyone and that all files had been deleted. The apology framed the incident as unintentional, technical, and educational, shifting emphasis away from the act itself and toward the creator’s stated motives.
What is striking in this framing is how comfortably it assumes that ranking and exposing women might reasonably be considered non-offensive, as though harm only exists where intention is malicious or explicitly acknowledged. It is equally revealing how easily attention is redirected toward the university’s cybersecurity vulnerabilities, as if the primary issue were unauthorized access rather than the deliberate construction of a system designed to evaluate, rank, and consume women as content.
Yet this narrowing collapses under even minimal scrutiny as the site did not function in isolation, nor was it sustained by a single individual acting alone. Thousands of students reportedly accessed the site, voted, and participated in the process long before it was taken down.
This raises a more difficult and uncomfortable question that apologies and technical explanations tend to avoid: if the violation was so evident once it was publicly named, why was the site not shut down immediately, and why did it require widespread outrage for the harm to be recognized as harm at all?
This pattern is not unique to this case since responsibility is often individualized only after exposure becomes unavoidable, while the broader ecosystem that enables circulation, participation, and delay remains largely unquestioned. Attention narrows to the wording of an apology, the intentions of a creator, or the mechanics of access, while the collective permission that allows such practices to exist in the first place is left intact.
A website built on ranking women does not survive without an audience willing to click, vote, and share, nor does it persist without institutional hesitation that treats harm as negotiable until reputational risk intervenes.
If incidents like this continue to be framed as unfortunate deviations rather than predictable outcomes, then the responses that follow will remain cosmetic. Takedowns, apologies, and internal reviews may be necessary, but they are not sufficient, because they intervene only after damage has already been done.
Accountability cannot begin and end with removal; it should address the conditions that allow women’s evaluation and exposure to be treated as acceptable until it becomes publicly embarrassing.
Most importantly, accountability demands a refusal to normalize. It requires abandoning the language that frames ranking as humor, exposure as inevitability, and outrage as overreaction. Until the evaluation of women’s bodies and identities is understood not as a matter of taste or curiosity but as a form of harm embedded in social practice, each new incident will continue to follow the same cycle of circulation, denial, and belated concern.
The question is no longer whether such acts can be prevented, but whether there is a genuine willingness to dismantle the social permissions that allow them to recur.
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