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Notes -
Niche Hobby Drama alert
In the sport of Brazilian Jiujitsu, there's been a recent drama in which a popular grappler called Jay Rodriguez has been kicked out of the B-Team (Most popular team in the sport despite not tending to actually win things) due to sexual impropriety. The original message said that he'd obtained illicit images of female training partners.
This was revealed a few days ago, and it has since been revealed that the alleged impropriety is that Jay Rod's Girlfriend discovered that he had been deepfaking nudes of female competitors he'd met on the mats. She then exposed this to the team upon finding out, but it's acted as a bit of a touchpoint for drama in the sport as a result. The original message made it sound like he'd been taking creepshots or sharing actual nudes. It's additionally attracted drama as the mouthpiece/defacto leader of the B Team is Craig Jones, who is by far the most charismatic person in the sport but also has a long history of putting out content which could be considered a bit sexually untowards. He had the famous intergender match last year against Gabi Garcia, has done a lot of travel blogging with ladyboys, massages and other broadly risque subjects and is generally a 'loose unit'. Now he's taking the moral high ground against Jay, which has created some controversy.
Personally I think that it's reasonable to kick Rod out once the deepfaking became public knowledge, but also the comms were handled poorly. BJJ sex scandals are more common than you'd expect, but typically tend to be more of the 'Brazilians versus the age of consent' age-old rivalry than something with such a modern tinge.
Creation/Possession of Deepfakes as a scandal is kind of interesting to me.
On a basic level, this reads to me as the epitome of a victimless crime. If the existence of the images is not revealed, then no harm can possibly result. And we can presume no rules were really breached to create them, if the guy WASN'T taking creepshots and just pulled images posted to social media to feed the generator. And there's (currently) no evidence that producing them makes it likely the 'perp' will try any further inappropriate behavior.
Its obvious that producing the deepfakes is labelled as "creepy"; but why precisely?
On the spectrum of ways to sexualize a person this seems maybe slightly 'worse' than vividly imagining them naked but on the same order of magnitude of pasting a cutout of their head onto a nudie mag or maybe doing some extra work and photoshopping their face onto an existing nude photo. Maybe also worse than finding a pornstar that is a close enough doppelganger that you can squint a bit and make it work.
Also add in the fact that he HAS (had?) a girlfriend so he's not a complete loser, even ignoring he's a talented martial artist with a decent social media following (169k instagram followers is impressive by normal standards, no?). This isn't your stereotypical incel who disgusts women by his mere presence and mannerisms.
Socially, well yeah I can understand why this hurts his status... but again, would it be 'better' if his porn habits/browser history leaked and it was just standard fare or maybe niche fetish material? Certainly embarrassing but I think most onlookers would just kind of nod and say "to each their own" and pretend they didn't see it (unless they need to roast him later). Its the deepfaking in particular that makes him mildly radioactive.
Best I can muster is that it does display some bad judgment to keep files proving you masturbate to your 'colleagues' sitting around. "We need to boot you now on the offchance there's a worse skeleton hiding in your closet, if you're stupid enough to have this one." Definitely an HR risk in that sense.
But if I were to guess as the real reason it led to immediate ostracization, its simply that its 'hoe-scaring' behavior and the other guys are unwilling to stand up for him if it will reduce their appeal to women in general, and women interested BJJ in particular. Yes, I can see it would be 'bad' to have this guy present if other women were noticeably uncomfortable with it. But its not because he actually poses any real threat to them, its more that he's breached the general rule that the one and only way its 'acceptable' to see a woman naked is with her explicit consent, and then, only WHILE that consent is being given, and not a second longer. If that's the implicit or explicit social rule, then spying/peeping tom behavior, creepshotting, aggressively soliciting nudes, AND deepfaking are all approximately the same level of bad. Oh, and defending someone who did any such behavior also tars you with the brush.
I guess I'll leave it on this question: assuming it is 'wrong' to make deepfakes of women you know, what could possibly be the proper punishment/restitution/retribution to make things right again? I'll immediately grant "delete any and all copies of the images." But if the 'damage' is all emotional/psychological there's not much one can do other than let time heal the 'wound.'
And to be clear there are certainly things one could do with deepfakes that I think unambiguously cross lines of decency and morality, such as:
Sending the deepfakes to the intended subject knowing it will cause distress.
Publishing or distributing them, especially if you imply that they are genuine.
Attempting blackmail, whether it succeeds or not.
Impersonating the subject, obviously.
And hell, I'd even say accepting money to produce them at someone else's bequest is suspect, even if you don't keep them.
These are mostly covered under existing legal concepts like defamation or harassment.
From my experience talking with women about it, many hate men vividly imagining them naked just the same, they just can't do anything about it. If a mindreader was created tomorrow, I'm pretty sure a group would get together to lobby to outlaw sexual fantasies about a person without their consent the day after.
Add the risk of circulation (even by accident!) and the implied threat from the possibility of people mistakenly believing it to be real, it's obvious why the women react so badly.
I mean that gives the game away.
Those ones hate men perceiving them in ways they don't consent to. Across the board.
They'd object if the guy was imagining them in their underwear or a bikini. They'd object if he was imagining them wearing a sundress and looking at them with loving desire.
If its a man they DO want fantasizing about them, they'd just as soon want to project the fantasy images into his mind to get his attention.
We sort of know this because as soon as phones were able to send photos, attractive guys started getting lewd and nude photos sent to them, often unsolicited! Same deal.
So there's your question, should we be taking efforts to control men's thought processes and how they use their own computer hardware in order to accommodate/protect women's feelings?
They'd object if the guy simply looked at them and appreciated their appearance as it was and they found him unattractive. This is all the same kind of thing and should be given zero weight in any sort of law or rule system that isn't supposed to be dealing with relationships between men and women.
Not disagreeing, and indeed I don't think any legal processes have been invoked here.
But how much should women's feelings be accommodated in these sorts of informal social conflicts? As much as we don't want explicit written rules there's a void left when the
The situation's "severity" seems to me that if he and his organization had stood his ground, said "look I'm deleting everything and I'll take a social media hiatus, but nobody has been hurt and the team is more important" they'd probably have come through alright.
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Many women have their self-worth tied up almost entirely in how other people view them. They are self-centered enough to believe that they should be in full control of how others perceive them and that anyone who is perceiving them in a way they don't approve of should be punished. They think people shouldn't be allowed to fantasize about them sexually without them being in control--and thus able to exploit--those fantasies. Men, and society in general, should ignore their whining and tell them to get over themselves.
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This, additionally creating deepfakes is not the same as vividly imagining someone naked, otherwise men wouldn't take the effort to create them.
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