Hannah Greendale (Hello, Bookworm)

Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The s

Men and women can walk down exactly the same street and have vastly different experiences. The same is true of the online world.

We should be less concerned about what a malevolent AI of the future might do and more concerned with what some malevolent humans are doing right now with existing technology.

Deepfake pornography is a new form of abuse, but its underlying power dynamic is very, very old. [...] In another context, we might call this terrorism. And if we did that, if we used that accurate language and applied the same political and societal response that we should to any form of terrorism, perhaps we would see more appropriate and urgent action being taken as this technology proliferates.

By making these technologies widely accessible, we as a society are giving men a powerful delusion of ownership over the bodies of any women they choose, which in turn is going to have consequences in exacerbating the already dire levels of male violence against women.

Zuckerberg has grandly promised that "in the metaverse, you'll be able to do almost anything you can imagine." Which is the sort of promise that might sound intensely appealing to most men and terrifying to most women.

Just like women-only train carriages, rape alarms, and anti-rape underwear, all we are met with are hundreds of drearily repetitive, victim-blaming "inventions" that reinforce again and again the societal notion that women should be on the alert constantly—constantly responsible for their own safety.

...the more companies make dolls that seem to have minds of their own, the less their male users seem to like them. [...] ...in one chat room dedicated to owners of sex robots, several said they would not want the use of new AI features because they'd rather their doll wasn't speaking for itself.

...trying to position [sex dolls] as socially beneficial conveniently belies the truth that there is an increasing amount of money to be made from facilitating the hyperrealistic simulation of sexual violence.

By suggesting that sex robots are a natural and even altruistic solution to the problem of sexual violence, we ingrain the idea that such sexual violence is biological and unavoidable and can only be mitigated and avoided, not prevented.

I took a pair of latex gloves from the box next to the bed and pushed my fingers inside the doll. It felt like a violation, and I wanted to apologize. I found that I could not look at her face while I did this. What I touched was hard and ridged. I sniffed the holes. They smelled musty—like a mixture of disinfectant and mildew.

She was passive, available, submissive, placid, penetrable, silent, malleable, obedient—everything men have wanted women to be for centuries. It felt like a terrifying regression: and yet this voiceless, powerless body was being offered up to men by other men who call it progress.

...sex workers will likely bear the brunt of any impact on societal norms and attitudes before the ripple effect begins to widely impact other women. Indeed, sex workers, who already experience high levels of physical and sexual violence, have been raising a variety of concerns about sex doll brothels for some years.

...this is about appreciating sex and wanting to save it from being co-opted by the patriarchy to yet another site for oppression and violence.

"If the child give the effect another turn of the screw, what do you say to two children—?"

I remember the lawn and the bright flowers and the crunch of my wheels on the gravel and the clustered tree-tops over which the rooks circled and cawed in the golden sky.

...made me several times rise and wander about my room to take in the whole picture and prospect; to watch from my open window the faint summer dawn, to look at such stretches of the rest of the house as I could catch, and to listen, while in the fading dusk the first birds began to twitter...