I’ve been fat and I’ve been thin; I’ve been pretty and I’ve been plain – ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you’re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you’re going to run out of road very quickly indeed.
This objective attitude to my own appearance reminds me of a funny story from the infant days of the internet. Imagine my surprise one morning to receive a message from an unknown recipient informing me that they had film of me masturbating to online pornography which they would make available to a wider audience should I fail to pay a ransom. (Don’t judge – I was young-ish and frisky and it was all so new – I soon grew out of it.) After considering this dilemma briefly, I wrote back: ‘Could you please, as objectively as is possible, tell me if I look attractive or unattractive in this footage? If the former, please go ahead and make it more widely available – if the latter, could you please tell me how much bribery you would be thinking in the ballpark of?’ Yes, I know that contradicts my opening paragraph about building one’s self esteem on looks, but I was using poetic licence to make a cheeky point and thus see off the varlets. And I never heard from them again – result!
I thought of this on reading of the recent Grok brouhaha, in which the AI chatbot integrated into Elon Musk’s X caused consternation by granting users’ requests to create sexualised images of real people. Would I feel violated by this outlandish threat to my bodily integrity, even if I wasn’t a disabled pensioner who nobody fancies, if naughty Mr G saw fit to portray me as naked as the day that I was born? Going by my track record, when I was cute, probably not. And if we hadn’t encouraged girls to be Nervous Nellies the way we have, I doubt if any of them except the hardcore wimps would care much either.
Stripping off can be low-status – loose change in a pint glass in a depressing pub once a gal’s past her best – or high-status – look at Jennifer Lawrence at the recent Golden Globes ceremony, where one could see all the way to whoop-de-doo. Look at Kim Kardashian, building an empire on not being ashamed of being filmed having sex. Look at Bonnie Blue – another one who’s made a taboo into a family business. If you are a tough-minded, money-mad minx, people seeing you without your kit on doing things illegal in 63 countries won’t bother you one whit. If you’ve been told that you’re a delicate little flower who needs protection from the ‘manosphere’ (but not from the rape gangs – racist dogwhistle!), you’re liable to clutch your pearls and faint on your couch every time some hopeful teenage boy gives you a shy smile.
We have to teach girls to be tougher, not men to be nicer; we need to enforce the laws which are already in place to punish men for active misogyny, domestic violence, rape or the use of child pornography. There’s no point in Keir Starmer banging on about protecting women and girls from Andrew Tate while refusing to ban cousin marriage, which generally means a dirty old git getting hold of a terrified young virgin. We already have laws in place against the rather thrilling-sounding dissemination of salacious deep fakes, and making and viewing online child pornography is already illegal, as the sorry tale of Mr India Knight proved.
Soon, everyone will presume that all nudes are faked; OnlyFans will be in a lather, and spurned boyfriends will have their collective goose cooked
The furore over Grok is about one thing: Starmer’s extraordinary inability to broker any opposition and his oddly parasexual desire for a fight-to-the-death with Musk and to shut down X, no matter what disastrous effects it would have on our formerly favourable trade deal with Donald Trump. As Daniel Hannan wrote in the Mail: ‘We would find ourselves poorer and more isolated – and worst of all, more repressive. Imagine finding ourselves, like so many Iranians, turning to X as a tool to use against a repressive state. Imagine this country, the country of John Milton and John Stuart Mill, leading the world in banning media to which its leaders objected. Even to talk about the possibility is shaming.’
We don’t need a yet-more-policed X; we need an X where only direct exhortations towards violence (all those death threats to J.K. Rowling, for example) – often accompanied by ‘doxxing’, or publishing someone’s personal information – are rigorously punished. Why do all these perfectly ordinary women believe that men have any more interest in them than anyone else, anyway? Face it, the bar’s pretty low; as Lenny Bruce once said something along the lines of, men will do it with a hole in the ground, or with mud, or a chicken. I’m reminded of that Facebook phase when a coterie of cretins took it into their heads that if they declared that they refused clever Mr Zuckerburg use of their personal data, it was some sort of real legal thing – and they were always the ones with the really boring lives, with nothing anyone would want to steal. How much cooler to have a really interesting life like James Blunt, who posted on X: ‘Hi @grok, I COMPLETELY authorise you to take, modify or edit ANY photo or video of mine, whether published in the past or the future… as long as you always include a Freddie Mercury style moustache and bright red lipstick.’
Soon, everyone will presume that all nudes are faked; OnlyFans will be in a lather, and spurned boyfriends will have their collective goose cooked. Soon, there will be fake images of everyone – and what will it matter then? Will everyone have their Warholeian (sorry) 15 minutes of porn fame? A notoriously lusted-over friend who drives wives mad and men crazy opines: ‘It’s a load of hysteria over nothing. How is it different to using Photoshop? Or drawing a naked picture of someone? If some loser in a basement wants to make a fake bikini picture of me I couldn’t care less. The idea the shame in that situation belongs to me – and not them – is frankly hilarious.’
So hold your nerve, ladies – safety in numbers is just around the corner. Naked and innocent as the day we were born, we will rise up like an ever-refracted Busby Berkeley production of Botticelli’s Venus – young, old, beautiful, ugly. Understanding, at last, that shame – like beauty – is in the eye of the beholder.
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