A woman asked her husband to pose as a woman online to discovered the gulf in how different genders are treated – and he was bombarded with sexual messages within seconds.

Feminist speaker Jessica Eaton, from Staffordshire, wanted her husband Alex to discover what it’s like to use the internet as a woman.

She had him log into the same chat room with a male profile and a female profile – and the difference was startling.

The male profile received no messages, while the supposed 18-year-old woman’s profile was bombarded with sexual images within seconds.

Her husband said: “This is horrible.”

Jessica described her experiment on Twitter, saying Alex received “hundreds” of messages, and many people responded that they wanted to test it out for themselves.

Jessica tweeted: "Just did a social experiment with my husband to teach him what being a female online is like.

"I got him to enter a generic non sexual forum as an 18-year-old male with boring chat name and guess what? Nothing happened."

After logging in as a woman, she said: “Within seconds he had eight inbox messages from men and the first one he opened was a full picture of a guy's d***."

Within half an hour, the fake profile had been contacted by 40 different accounts. At one point the messages were being received so often that his phone crashed.

Details of the experiment were favourited or retweeted more than 1,000 times – with one user replying: “I am not surprised by the result of your experiment - any idea how to fix this? It’s revolting."