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Notes -
New York Times’ The Daily podcast ran an episode Real Teenagers, Fake Nudes: The Rise of Deepfakes in American Schools. The premise is contained in the title — AI image generation apps can remove the clothing from photos, and teenage boys are using these en masse to make faked nude images of their classmates.
The overt message that the NYT hits repeatedly in the piece is that the girls in question are victims and that the boys have committed a crime. It’s stated repeated, implicitly and explicitly, without any justification. At one point a police officer opines that the images are CSAM (child sexual abuse material). (By the way, never trust a police officer to tell you the law; it’s not their area of expertise.)
No, no, just all of it no. There’s no crime here. There are no victims. There’s no CSAM, because the images are not of children (notably the AI models are trained on nude adults), nor did any sexual abuse occur in its production.
This is the moral equivalent of weirdos 40 years ago who would cut the heads off photos and paste them on pornographic images. Creepy? Yes! Deserving of social shunning? You betcha! But not a crime. Everyone in these girls’ lives who is catastrophizing this is doing them psychological harm.
Whether or not they’re victims in a strict legal sense the girls are clearly victims here.
More generally I feel like men wildly underestimate how bad it can feel to be the object of unwanted, intrusive sexual desire/advances due to “men be horny” type attitudes. I spent most of my life rolling my eyes and thinking “how bad can it be to be DESIRED” but over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong. And this was the mildest stuff imaginable. Having my peers make (even fake) nudes of me would be insanely, ridiculously disturbing and cause legitimate anguish.
I will say upfront that I don't know the details of your situation, so I could be way off base here, but I'm reminded of Dawkins's Dear Muslima:
People desire other people. Some people will desire other people who don't want to be desired. Coordination is a really hard problem. It's not always as easy as one thinks to let it be known what they want and don't want, especially when people really do tend to change their minds when new opportunities are presented to them, and shit tests abound. And generally (though not in your case) it's a problem that causes men to have to be the ones to have to put themselves out there and take the initiative. Just be glad that we live in a society where the norms are such that you won't be physically hurt and you have the freedom to say no.
This argument proves way too much. Yes, there is female genital mutilation in other societies and it’s abhorrent. That doesn’t give American high school boys, or socially maladjusted or inept men in general, free rein to harass women.
Well, Dawkins's point is that feminists ranting about how women are made to feel uncomfortable by men asking for coffee is trivial, and that if feminists really want to help women, there are actual third world problems they should be dealing with, not first world problems. My point is that being made to feel guilty or awkward over difficult situations is likewise trivial first world problems, and somewhat of a natural extension of participating in a society composed of layers of social customs built on top of animal instincts. Having to deal with other people is basically just a part of life, and so is having awkward social interactions.
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