Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls.
Schools and lawmakers are grappling with how to address a new form of peer-on-peer image-based sexual abuse that disproportionately targets girls.
If a boy fantasises sexually about a girl, is that harmful to her? If he tells his friends about it? No, this is not harmful - these actions do not affect her in any way. What affects the girl is how the boys might then treat her differently than they would do someone they don’t find sexually attractive.
The solution, in both cases, has to be to address the harmful behaviour. The only arguments for criminalising deepfakes themselves are also arguments for criminalising sexual fantasies. that is why people are talking about thought crime, because once you criminalise things that are harmless on their own, but which might down the line lead to directly harmful behaviour, there is no other distinction.
Both of these, for example, apply just as readily to discussing a shared sexual fantasy about someone who didn’t agree to it.
No distinction, that is, other than this is new and icky. I don’t want government policy to be dictated by fear of the new and by what people find icky, though. I do lots of stuff people find icky.
No an image that is shared and distributed is not the same as a fantasy in someone’s head. That is deranged. Should CSAM also be legal because making it illegal is like criminalizing the fantasies of pedophiles? Absolutely insane logical framework you have there.
This isnt fantasy. It is content. It is media. It is material. It is produced without the consent of the girls and women being sexualized and it commodifies their existence, literally transforming the idea of them into sexual media consumed for the gratification of boys and men.
It is genuinely incredible to me that you could be so unempathetic, so impassive, so detached from the real world and the consequences of this, that you could even make this comparison. You have seemingly no idea what youre talking about if you believe that pornography is the same thing as mental fantasies.
And even in the case of mental fantasies, are those all good? Is it really a good thing that boys see the mere existence of the girls around them as inherently some kind of sexual availability?
When someone makes child porn they put a child in a sexual situation - which is something that we have amassed a pile of evidence is extremely harmful to the child.
For all you have said - “without the consent” - “being sexualised” - “commodifies their existence” - you haven’t told us what the harm is. If you think those things are in and of themselves harmful then I need to know more about what you mean because:
I am not unempathetic, but I attribute the blame for what makes me feel bad about the situation is that girls are being made to feel bad and ashamed not that a particular technology is now being used in one step of that.
I am just genuinely speechless than you seemingly do not understand how sickening and invasive it is for your peers to create and share sexual content of you without your consent. Yes its extremely harmful. Its not a matter of feeling ashamed, its a matter of literally feeling like your value to the world is dictated by your role in the sexualities of heterosexual boys and men. It is feeling like your own body doesnt belong to you but can be freely claimed by others. It is losing trust in all your male friends and peers, because it feels like without you knowing they’ve already decided that you’re a sexual experience for them.
We do know the harm of this kind of sexualization. Women and girls have been talking about it for generations. This isnt new, just a new streamlined way to spread it. It should be illegal. It should be against the law to turn someone’s images into AI generated pornography. It should also be illegal to share those images with others.
Are you OK with sexually explicit photos of children taken without their knowledge? They’re not being actively put in a sexual situation if you’re snapping photos with a hidden camera in a locker room, for example. You ok with that?
The harm is: