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@Gillitrut @nomenym @faceh @HereAndGone2
I was following the discussion here on a recent scandal regarding AI-generated fake nudes with mild interest and went down into a bit of a rabbit hole in other earlier discussions that were linked. As a member of the he-man-woman-haters club and someone who used to follow Manosphere / Red Pill and dissident rightist sites, it appears to me that discussion on the wider context of this phenomenon is a bit lacking so I’ll offer a short overview myself.
It seems that there are multiple overlapping phenomena related to this issue:
#1 – High school boys creating fake nudes of their female classmates with or without AI and distributing them online among themselves; we can assume the individuals creating such content are a small minority and are usually of low social status, even practical outcasts otherwise
#2 – Some high school girls are sending real nudes of themselves to particular boys, which technically equals the production and distribution of child porn / CP; this is occurring in the larger context of a post-patriarchal, post-monogamist society where women are normally trying to out-slut one another in various ways to compete for the sexual attention of high-status men; sometimes such images get publicly distributed in the form of so-called revenge porn; obviously all of this is freaking out the adult women who are red-pilled enough to realize how self-defeating this entire sexual competition is
#1 and #2 are also occurring among college students and other adults but supposedly to a lesser degree, especially the fake nudes part; all this generates a relatively lower level of attention as the girls are all adults; it’s usually the revenge porn part that generates outrage, especially among feminists and their so-called male allies
#3 – there’s something that’s basically a subset of revenge porn, namely the private nudes of female celebrities getting publicized through hacking and content theft; fake nudes of them also obviously exist
#1, #2 and #3 are basically overlapping issues in the minds of normies, providing fodder for lipstick feminist and social conservative culture warriors.
We should look at the even wider social context of all this. What is the overall milieu that is shaping the attitudes of high school students?
#1 – Female sexuality itself has become a culture war issue in a particular way. What do I basically mean? Look at the usual preferences of anti-feminist toxic dudebros for a start: the women appearing in movies and video games to be smoking hot and scantily clad; their own girlfriends to be modest and demure in public but otherwise be their own personal sluts in private, while at the same time not even thinking about becoming OF/porn girls or “sex workers”. Culture-warring feminists look at all this with anger and naturally go on to loudly promote the exact opposite of all this by all means. This is basically a significant driver of the culture war altogether, and probably generates a level of resentment among young men towards feminists and feminist-adjacent women in general, a sort of resentment that never existed before feminism.
#2 – It has become completely normal for slop-creating female pop musicians, female celebrities altogether and female “influencers” to show their bare butts and thighs, cleavage, midriff etc. both online and offline; however, all of this is pointedly not done for the purposes that average men would prefer it all to have, namely a) providing simple entertainment / fanservice for dudebros and their male gaze without any feminist BS attached b) utilizing eroticism in order to attract high-value men into relationships with the promise of hot sex (which has basically been normal female behavior for thousands of years) c) showing off the goods as prostitutes if you are one. Instead, these women are normally open feminists, more or less loud ones, treating the “male gaze” and “unwanted attention” with disgust, loudly declaring that it’s not like they are trying to cater to icky men or anything, and are supposedly engaging in all this virtual whoring / thirst farming with a sort of weird irony in mind, where this is all simultaneously an act of female empowerment and a display of girlboss agency while at the same time some sort of critical commentary on the sad state of a shitty society that treats women like sex objects or whatever. Naturally, none of this is generating one ounce of male sympathy towards these women and their female fans.
#3 – Online porn has been normalized to such an extent that pretty much the only people receiving any unstated and limited social permission to complain about women engaging in it are the so-called sex negative feminists. Otherwise it’s all seen as another expression of female empowerment as long as the pretension is there that somehow none of it is done to please or benefit men. It has become an accepted social reality that average women will happily suck dick, swallow cum, do gangbangs online for the money, and it’s all normal, because it’s not like they are doing anything objectionable or whatever. We’re also seeing the spectacle of young women taking the usual route of doing hardcore porn, milking their career for all the money they can, then retiring and having some sort of fake-ass epiphany later, crying their butts off in online videos claiming regret, stating that they’re the victims of some evil patriarchal regime that ostracized them, appearing on anti-porn podcasts etc., demanding that their videos be removed from the internet, complaining about their young children being bullied etc.
Again, I leave it to your imagination to decide what attitudes towards women are all this driving among young men.
Indeed, it's basically a trope nowadays that female celebrities (or attractive young women in general) will complain about being sexualized and then post thirst-traps the next. Here's one example from Ariel Winter:
Also Ariel Winter:
Some individual pop stars were mentioned elsewhere by various commenters elsewhere in this thread. These include Ariana Grande, Britney Spears, Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter.
The simplest and most parsimonious explanation as to why such a range of popstars paint their faces, teehee around in skimpy outfits, and bask in the center of attention as sex objects is because they enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects and they're successful at it. The popstars' collective fanbases are wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women because they too enjoy painting their faces, teeheeing around in skimpy outfits, and basking in the center of attention as sex objects, and thus can relate to and live vicariously through such popstars.
When it comes to other entertainers such as male professional athletes, we generally automatically accept by default that they choose to play their sport as a profession because they enjoy doing so and are successful at it. In explaining why they do what they do, we usually don't start grasping for some Occam's Butterknife about them getting groomed, coerced, manipulated, or constrained by society. The fanbases of male professional athletes are predominantly male because they too enjoy(ed) playing that sport, wish they were that good at that sport, and/or can relate to and live vicariously through such athletes.
Yet when it comes to why female popstars choose to sexualize themselves—and why their fanbases tend to be wildly disproportionately heterosexual teenage girls and young women—out come the excuses about grooming, coercion, manipulation, Socialization, internalized misogyny, the male gaze, being sexualized against their will, etc., lest some women out there feel less Wonderful on behalf of the female gender. This could fit well into the "midwit" meme template, where the guy in the middle goes "nooo female popstars don't like being sex objects but if they do sexualize themselves it's only due to sleazy male managers and misogynistic marketing constraints and their female fans are just victims of marketing, socialization, conditioning, and internalized misogyny" while the guys on the left and the right go "female popstars and their female fans like being sex objects."
Another natural experiment is what these popstars do in their free-time and in private. While what they do in private is hard to come by (kind of by definition), that's where events like the Fappening come in handy (in more ways than one, perhaps). The Fappening shined a hilarious light into the lives of popstars such as Ariana Grande, Selena Gomez, and Miley Cyrus, whose photos contained numerous nude selfies and ass, pussy, tit shots. So it's not just an act, a show they conduct, a persona they put on for marketing purposes. Sexualizing themselves is a hobby they enjoy doing; being a sex object is an aspiration and their past-time, consistent with the revealed preferences of young women in general.
Do what you love and you never have to work a day in your life. Just like retired NBA players such as Luke Walton and Jason Williams sometimes play or played men's league basketball in their spare time, Britney Spears spends her retirement days posting thirst traps and almost-nudes. I say "almost" since as far as I'm aware—being the modest woman that she is—she covers up her nipples, pussy, and/or asshole with her hands while in her birthday suit. Tellingly, a lot of female college and professional athletes, whether active or former, also spend a lot of their on-court and off-court efforts to being sex objects.
That first Ariel Winter quote doesn't seem to be anti-sexualization, rather that she has received criticism/hate/thermonuclear online bile as a result of posting in a sexualized way. The "sexism" she points out is that people tell her to stop sexualizing herself or are mean about it. Even in that case, I don't see the issue with her being upset that others sexualize her. Obviously, sexualizing oneself is likely to produce an outsized degree of sexual attention and criticism. However, that doesn't automatically imply she's a hypocrite or stupid or what-not. To analogize: most famous people have to live with a security detail for the rest of their life, deal with stalkers, etc. I think it would be unreasonable to tell a celebrity that they should just stop being famous (even if that's a valid "solution" to the problem), otherwise they're a hypocrite. In an ideal world, they could be famous without those issues, but the whackos have to ruin it. The same goes for sexualization. People are allowed to complain about the negative consequences or risks of an act while still engaging in said act - there is nothing logically compromising in doing so, in my view.
One can always add more epicycles, carry more water, and find more ways to gerrymander as to why it doesn’t count, why there's not a disconnect between a given female celebrity's words and her actions.
Just off the top of my head, Brie Larson and Scarlett Johansson could serve as additional examples with regard to their public remarks, outfits they wear to events, their bodily displays on film, and the photos and/or videos they take of themselves privately.
I don't think it counts as an epicycle to point out "actually, she isn't complaining about being sexualized".
I don’t think it’s that hard to do a brief websearch for more quotes from Winter or other female celebrities before a contentless one sentence drive-by, if the previous example were insufficiently close to “hello, I am a female celebrity and I woud like to complain about being sexualized”:
There’s also a HuffPost article “Ariel Winter Wants To Remind You That Girls Are Not Sexual Objects” where Ariel’s IG caption is signal boosted:
Or a People article:
Bolding above mine. Impressive Trump hyperagency.
A wild Ariana Grande quote that appeared somewhere along the way:
Even temporarily putting Winter, Larson, or Johansson aside, additional quotes from PopSugar by similarly aged Chloe Moretz to Winter who was reportedly at one time or different times an ally or enemy or frenemy of Winter for whatever reason:
Whether historically Moretz can be commonly found in bikini or underwear in her public work and personal photos I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
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