I\u2019ve been fat and I\u2019ve been thin; I\u2019ve been pretty and I\u2019ve been plain \u2013 ugly, even. Throughout this, my self-esteem has stayed generally constant, as if you\u2019re going to base it on something as ephemeral as physical beauty, you\u2019re going to run out of road very quickly indeed.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t judge \u2013 I was young-ish and frisky and it was all so new \u2013 I soon grew out of it.) After considering this dilemma briefly, I wrote back: \u2018Could 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 \u2013 if the latter, could you please tell me how much bribery you would be thinking in the ballpark of?\u2019 Yes, I know that contradicts my opening paragraph about building one\u2019s 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 \u2013 result!<\/p>\n
I thought of this on reading of the recent Grok brouhaha, in which the AI chatbot integrated into Elon Musk\u2019s X caused consternation by granting users\u2019 requests to create sexualised images of real people. Would I feel violated by this outlandish threat to my bodily integrity, even if I wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t encouraged girls to be Nervous Nellies the way we have, I doubt if any of them except the hardcore wimps would care much either.<\/p>\n
Stripping off can be low-status \u2013 loose change in a pint glass in a depressing pub once a gal\u2019s past her best \u2013 or high-status \u2013 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 \u2013 another one who\u2019s 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\u2019t bother you one whit. If you\u2019ve been told that you\u2019re a delicate little flower who needs protection from the \u2018manosphere\u2019 (but not from the rape gangs \u2013 racist dogwhistle!), you\u2019re liable to clutch your pearls and faint on your couch every time some hopeful teenage boy gives you a shy smile.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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<\/a> proved.<\/p>\n Soon, everyone will presume that all nudes are faked; OnlyFans will be in a lather, and spurned boyfriends will have their collective goose cooked<\/p>\n The furore over Grok is about one thing: Starmer\u2019s 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: \u2018We would find ourselves poorer and more isolated \u2013 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.\u2019<\/p>\n We don\u2019t 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) \u2013 often accompanied by \u2018doxxing\u2019, or publishing someone\u2019s personal information \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019m 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 \u2013 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: \u2018Hi @grok, I COMPLETELY authorise you to take, modify or edit ANY photo or video of mine, whether published in the past or the future\u2026 as long as you always include a Freddie Mercury style moustache and bright red lipstick.\u2019<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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: \u2018It\u2019s 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\u2019t care less. The idea the shame in that situation belongs to me \u2013 and not them \u2013 is frankly hilarious.\u2019<\/p>\n So hold your nerve, ladies \u2013 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\u2019s Venus \u2013 young, old, beautiful, ugly. Understanding, at last, that shame \u2013 like beauty \u2013 is in the eye of the beholder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I\u2019ve been fat and I\u2019ve been thin; I\u2019ve been pretty and I\u2019ve been plain \u2013 ugly, even. 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