Tag Archives: #Misogyny

The Radical Idea: Women’s Self-Care Doesn’t Need to Benefit Others

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The fingers of six white hands are pointing to a text with the words "The Others".
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay.

Recently, I had a thinking partnership session with an amazing female professional. These are sessions where two people take turns thinking and listening and through generative attention and questioning they aim to uncover assumptions and produce breakthrough, independent thinking.

My thinking partner was rightly tired because of all her work and family demands. Still, she kept denying herself the pleasure of simple things like reading a couple of pages from a novel or going to a Pilates class.

The reason? She felt guilty for doing so. Like she was “stealing” time she owed to her family.

About halfway into the session, she attempted to persuade herself of the perks of taking some minutes for self-care by repeating the legendary wellness mantra “Put the oxygen mask on before helping others” — that ingrained belief that even when women take time for themselves, it needs to be in preparation to benefit someone else.

However, the trope wasn’t working. Each time she’d try to convince herself that her loved ones would reap the perks of her self-care, guilt crept up and she would go back to her initial thinking that it was impossible to integrate self-care, work, and family.

That involuntary and repetitive act of self-harm in a person otherwise resilient and brave made me realize that her brain was not in the driving seat.

Who then? Patriarchy.

Patriarchy and Self-care

Article 24: Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

 Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Rest and leisure are human rights, still, often are marketed as a luxury.

To counter the guilt associated with the patriarchal oxymoron “women’s recreation,” the female self-care industry has adopted the slogan “Put your mask on so you help others” as a rallying cry under the pretense that it’s “empowering” and “feminist”.

Believe me, it’s all the opposite — a reboot of old patriarchy.

Under the hood, this mantra is yet another way to objectify women, telling them that they must be healthy as they are a conduit for others’ well-being. In other words, they are cogs that need to be oiled so that the machine — society — can run.

Going back to my thinking partner, instead of reassuring her that going to Pilates would result in better outcomes for her family or exploring how she could feel more comfortable with her “self-care” guilt, I challenged her assumptions

“What if instead of ‘I need to take care of myself because I can help others,’ you’d think ‘I need to take care of myself because I deserve it?’”

She looked at me blankly and then told me that she couldn’t even think of that possibility.

WOW.

Regenerating Patriarchal Minds

A woman's hand is watering a small green plant in soil with droplets of water falling from the fingertips.
Image by THỌ VƯƠNG HỒNG from Pixabay.

Unfortunately, it’s not only my thinking partner who unconsciously has been indoctrinated on the dogma of self-care as an undercover misogyny tool.

We see it everywhere, and the connotation is so positive that even women who think are beyond sexism’s claws are seduced by it.

That’s how deep patriarchy runs in our heads. We’re like the fish that doesn’t see the water.

I’m challenging you now as I challenged her

What if instead of thinking, “I must put my oxygen mask first so I can help others” you’d believe “I need to take care of myself because I’m human?”

And there are many other alternatives. Let’s try some:

I need to take care of myself because…

  • I’m worth it
  • I need it
  • I choose to
  • I enjoy it
  • I want it
  • I don’t need permission
  • I don’t own anything to anybody
  • My life is precious

It does feel good, doesn’t it?

Challenging Patriarchy One Thought At A Time

“Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

​Audre Lorde

Let’s change the patriarchal chip about women’s “usefulness” and challenge the status quo.

The work begins in our brains.

Who would you be if:

Book a free consultation to have a peek at how your patriarchy is sabotaging your brain against yourself.

My Post #IWD2024 Reflections: One Win and Three Persistent Failures

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Handcuffed hands of a woman on a background of a cloudy sky.
Image by Лечение наркомании from Pixabay.

Another International Women’s Day has passed but how much have women’s rights progressed since last year?

If my social media posts last week were an indication, there have been some important wins but at the core, we’re still living under patriarchy.

More precisely 

  • Abortion became a constitutional right in France
  • Femicide alarming UK statistics 
  • The feminisation of hybrid work
  • The unnecessary male context in framing women’s achievements

Let me share my take.

France makes abortion a constitutional right

I love and hate International Women’s Day.

I love #IWD because it tells the world that we won’t close our eyes to gender violence, gender health disparities, gender pay gap, and other gender inequalities.

I hate it because it “reminds” me that I’m still a second-class citizen. For example, I don’t have the same rights about my body that a man has.

Moreover, unlike when I was a young woman when I could see barriers coming down, I now see barriers been purposely built to prevent women from being prosperous, educated, and healthy.

This is not a bug but a feature.

Women keep spending their energy re-fighting their basic rights instead of innovating, creating products that serve us, or investing their money to ensure we have enough wealth to enable us to get a dignified retirement.

Amid these conflicting emotions, an unexpected gift arrived:

This week France became the first country in the world to explicitly include the right to abortion in its constitution.

Of course, there is no free meal in the universe, so reading this BBC article, my heart skipped a beat — or 2 — when I read

1.- “Before the vote, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal told parliament that the right to abortion remained “in danger” and “at the mercy of decision makers”.”

In summary, decision-makers are not on the side of women. 

2.- “In a 2001 ruling, the council based its approval of abortion on the notion of liberty enshrined in the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, which is technically part of the constitution.”

We have a Declaration of the Rights of “Man” dated almost 250 years ago that “decision makers” haven’t updated to the Rights of “human being” or “people“.

Until when will we need to keep fighting for laws and regulations that treat women as human beings with the same rights as men rather than Adam’s rib?

(Note: More on the Adam’s rib below)

Femicide alarming UK statistics

The European Institute of Gender Equality defines femicide as the killing of women and girls because of their gender, among other things, which can take the form of

  • The murder of women as a result of intimate partner violence
  • The torture and misogynist slaying of women
  • Killing of women and girls in the name of “honour”
  • Targeted killing of women and girls in the context of armed conflict
  • Dowry-related killings of women
  • Killing of women and girls because of their sexual orientation and gender identity
  • Killing of aboriginal and indigenous women and girls because of their gender
  • Female infanticide and gender-based sex selection foeticide
  • Genital mutilation-related deaths
  • Accusations of witchcraft
  • Other femicides connected with gangs, organised crime, drug dealers, human trafficking, and the proliferation of small arms.

When we talk about femicide we may think about Latino America, Asia, or Africa.

But we’re wrong.

A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK on average. 

The Guardian

During #IWD2024 social media was full of posts talking about having more women in leadership, in tech, in STEM, in business…

But the reality is that society cannot even keep women alive.

The Guardian has started an interactive project highlighting the women who have been murdered in 2024 so we don’t forget them.

But is that enough?

No. Because they are not the problem.

We need to start focusing on the perpetrators.

  • Who are they?
  • How come sons, husbands, brothers, and male neighbours feel entitled to kill their mothers, wives, sisters, and female neighbours?
  • How do we as a society foster and at the same time minimise those murders naming them as “crimes of passion” or a “spur of the moment act”?

And also on their alibis

  • Family
  • Police
  • Justice system
  • Patriarchy
  • Misogyny

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

Let’s start doing things differently.

The feminisation of hybrid work

I got an email from LinkedIn asking me to comment on the post Flexibility versus visibility: Does hybrid work threaten women’s progression? sharing their research on their site. 

I have reproduced below the key insights about hybrid work

“Now, LinkedIn data shows that women in the UK are more likely to have a job offering hybrid work than other types of work. More women had a hybrid role in 2023 than a fully remote or onsite role. Across a majority of industries, women are also more likely than men to have a hybrid role. In finance, consumer services, retail and even accommodation and food services, where remote and hybrid roles are less common, women are more likely than men to split their working week between home and the physical workplace.”

My take? I challenge how many men reporting “office” jobs are not doing “hybrid” jobs in disguise. 

In my experience, women need to be very clear about the terms and conditions of their place of work because of their caregiving obligations, hence the preference for jobs clearly articulated as such. 

On the flip side, men don’t see themselves as having such constraints, so they are happy to go for an “office” job and in practice do remote work.

For example, my company advertises jobs as office-based but in practice, employees can work up to 2 days a week from home.

Another point: Uneven transparency. Whilst typically women announce that they’ll be late, have been late, or won’t be able to make a meeting because of childcare responsibilities, men simply say that they are “double-booked” or that they cannot make it.

Whilst definitively there are gendered patterns, it’s paramount to recognise that men have the luxury to disguise hybrid work as office work whilst many women don’t.

The Adam’s Rib effect

Why can’t the media highlight a woman without “attaching” her to a man?

It happened again this Sunday.

I’m reading an article in The Guardian and the Headline reads

“ ‘I could have written three plays about her’: Jennie Lee, MP and wife of Nye Bevan, is celebrated on stage

Then, the subtitle says

“The coal miner’s daughter who set up the Open University and the Arts Council and was Britain’s youngest MP is the subject of two new shows”

And then, the first paragraph continues

“ ‘Behind every great man stands a great woman,’ the dated old saying goes. In the case of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan, honoured in a new play at the National Theatre in London, the woman is his largely forgotten wife, Jennie Lee, who earned her own independent “greatness” on the public stage, not a domestic one.”

If that was not enough, even the article’s URL mentions her husband

https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2024/mar/10/i-could-have-written-three-plays-about-her-jennie-lee-mp-and-wife-of-nye-bevan-is-celebrated-on-stage

Ms. Jennie Lee, MP

  • Is Britain’s youngest MP
  • Britain’s first arts minister
  • Set up the Open University and the Arts Council

But in the first 4 sentences of the article — title, subtitle, and first paragraph — The Guardian feels is important to to let us know that

  • She was the wife of Nye Bevan
  • A coal miner’s daughter
  • And then repeat that she’s the largely forgotten wife of the celebrated Labour politician Aneurin Bevan

We need to wait until the second paragraph to actually learn about this woman.

“Lee, who was Britain’s first arts minister and established the Open University and the Arts Council, as well as backing the building of the National Theatre itself”

As the article continues, we learn more about a play about his husband and it’s not until the fourth paragraph that we learn more about Ms. Lee.

“she became an MP aged just 24 and had a big influence on British postwar culture.”

Can somebody explain to me why we cannot have a headline highlighting a brilliant woman without “sprinkling” a man — or two — on it? 

Why does the media believe that we need to know first about her husband, father, son, brother, and teachers as a preamble to showcasing a woman’s merits?

I’m naming this the “Adam’s rib” effect — providing unnecessary “male” context when highlighting the achievements of a woman.

This is utterly ridiculous and it’s a contemporary version of a not so distant past when women needed their husbands’ signatures to open a bank account.

@The Guardian — You need to do much better.

Back to you

How do you feel about #IWD?

Defying Patriarchy: Strategies for a Joyous New Year’s Celebration

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Christmas dinner table with a white millennial man sat at the top of the table flanked by an old white couple on his right and two brown children on his left. On the other side of the chlidren there is a millennial brown woman lighting the candles on the table. The millennial man and woman smile.
Let’s guess who prepared the Christmas dinner. Photo by cottonbro studio.
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The period between Christmas and New Year is supposed to be a moment for families to reunite, share traditions, and celebrate.

Under that benevolent facade, patriarchy and its ally misogyny are plotting in plain sight. 

Let’s revisit three patriarchy’s ghosts of Christmas past and discover three strategies to break free from their grip in time for New Year’s celebration.

Three patriarchal principles that underpin this holiday season

There are many ways this time of the year enforces patriarchal norms and processes. 

Note that I’m not talking only about sexism — the division of labour based on gender, e.g. women shop, cook, and care for others whilst men converse with the visits  — but it’s how we do it. 

It’s in the “how” that patriarchy has a field party. Three of its principles particularly shine during this time of the year. Each of them reinforces the others.

Let’s get cracking!

Principle #1: Women are responsible for the “perfect” holiday season

As I discussed before in this article about the patriarchal value of time and women’s unpaid work, women are perceived as “human doings”, not human beings. That means that our worth is correlated with what we “produce” for others.

And what does that mean during this time of the year? That somehow the Powers that Be have bestowed upon women the duty of creating the perfect holiday season for those around us.

BTW, no need to worry about what perfection looks like— leave it to social media, magazines, TV shows, and even ChatGPT to give us their “feedback” on 

  • Cooking the perfect Christmas dinner
  • Choosing the perfect wine
  • Setting the perfect New Year’s Eve table
  • Decorating the perfect Christmas tree
  • Picking the perfect gift for everybody else

And the list goes on, personalised for each family member, friend, and acquaintance. 

Of course, women don’t escape either to this quest for perfection. The perfect body, hairstyle, shoes, and skin complexion are dictated by our always-evolving patriarchal standards and are now reinforced by AI, as the research by The Bulimia Project has surfaced.

As that to-do list is not enough, women are also required to care for everybody else’s emotions.

And how do they achieve that? Go to the next principle.

Principle #2: Women’s job is to make others happy

Patriarchy wants us to believe that everybody depends on women for their emotions. We can magically make them happy, sad, frustrated, appreciated… and so on.

The underlying theory is that people around us are emotional children and whatever women do/don’t say or do will impact their emotional wellbeing.

As the Christmas to New Year period is marketed as “the happiest time of the year” in most of the Western world, women bear the brunt of not “screwing this up” for everybody.

As a result, we should deploy our “innate” social skills and guess when to act as 

  • The cheerleader
  • The listening ear
  • The supporter
  • The clown
  • The role model
  • The confidant
  • The graceful host
  • The helpful guest
  • And even the self-deprecating joker.

Failure to cater to everybody’s mood and needs indicates a “lack of empathy” — a capital sin for women — and, more importantly, selfishness.

Speaking of which, let’s check the last principle.

Principle #3: Women are selfless 

What happens when making other people happy conflicts with women’s happiness? That’s easy. By default, our own happiness is at the bottom of the list, buried under others’ needs.

This manifests as

  • Demands on women’s time and attention — who said that Christmas was a period of relaxation for everybody? The reality is that for some to be able to rest and enjoy the holiday, others — women — need to do the work.
  • Opinions on women — This time of the year women are supposed to shut up and stoically endure jokes and opinions about how we live our lives. Why we don’t have children, have too many children, or not enough children. Why do we have a paid job, work part-time, or don’t have paid employment. Why we’re divorced, lesbian, single, or bisexual… and the list goes on. There is no question intimate enough that’s off-limits provided that the setting involves enough people that can be “upset” if we fight back. And if in doubt, watch or read Bridget Jones’s Diary.
  • Entitlement to voice entrenched stereotypes and discriminatory beliefs — somehow this season appears to foster the perfect conditions for people to feel emboldened to express racist, sexist, and ableist remarks — as well as any other prejudiced statements against underrepresented groups like immigrants and trans people — expecting to get reassurance from the audience or at least no pushback. And knowing that their host or a female guest is specially engaged in DEI activities is far from a deterrent. Instead, the person should expect to be publicly named and warned that resistance is futile, e.g. “Mary, I know you’re [feminist, defendant of gay rights, DEI activist, etc..] BUT you should agree that [prejudice, stereotype, bias]”.

Women are expected to accept these additional burdens gratefully, as setting any kind of boundaries somehow will destroy the illusion of harmless banter and festive spirit.

Three strategies to fight back against a patriarchal holiday

But not all is lost. Three coaching tools can help you minimise the impact of patriarchy on your enjoyment of this holiday season.

Strategy #1: Embrace emotional adulthood

What if people’s emotions didn’t depend on you? For good or bad, others’ emotions depend on them. More precisely, on their thoughts about circumstances.

Don’t believe me? Then, remember the expression ”Is the glass half empty or half full?” The premise of this famous question is that the same fact can be framed as a positive or a negative, depending on how you look at it.

In contrast to emotional childhood explained above, emotional adulthood is when we believe that people’s emotions are dependent on them and not on us. The reality is that if Aunt Maud is sad because you didn’t invite Uncle Sam to the dinner, it’s not you that causes her sadness but it’s what she’s making it mean.

Next time you’re put on the spot as “causing” somebody’s negative feelings, I invite you to hold tight and resist the emotional blackmail from those around you and instead believe in their power to manage their own emotions.

Strategy #2: Aim for B- work

This is what I’ve learned about perfection

  • It’s ill-defined — what’s perfect one day, can be a mess later on.
  • It’s overvalued — when you look back on your life and reflect on the moments that have brought you joy, chances are that by no means they were “perfect”. For example, last summer my mother broke her hip and I remember my joy at seeing her walking after the surgery. Would the moment have been better if we both had perfect hair and makeup? The answer is no.
  • Makes people feel inadequate —we’re taught that perfection is a gift to others and ourselves. I disagree. It’s often poisoned candy as it leverages comparison to make some people feel like winners at the expense of others feeling like losers.
  • Our worth doesn’t depend on “producing” perfection — We’re already worthy as we are.

My solution to perfectionism? Aiming for B- Work. 

Just to be clear, not only I’m telling you not to go for perfection or even excellence, but I’m recommending you aim for good going down to satisfactory.

If in doubt, imagine how planning for good — instead of perfect — could give you back

  • Time
  • Energy
  • Peace of mind

Isn’t worth a try?

Strategy #3: Decide ahead of time

I’ve talked about this strategy before in this post where I discussed the power of integrating quitting your job into your career success strategy.

Deciding ahead of time is to plan how you’ll think, feel, and act in advance of certain triggers appearing. 

For example, how will you react when

  • Cousin Alex treats you like their personal bartender and waitress during the dinner you’re hosting.
  • Uncle John asks you — like every Christmas — why are you still single.
  • Niece Jenny complains — again — about how immigrants steal “all jobs” and also claim “all benefits” somehow forgetting to notice that you’re an immigrant too.

Note that when I say “deciding ahead of time” this includes choosing not to do anything at all, including smiling or leaving the table to make it look like you forgot something in the kitchen. Moreover, you can even come up with a list of things you won’t do! 

In the end, the goal exercise is about allowing yourself to choose in advance what works for you.

Conclusion

The Christmas to New Year period is full of patriarchal dos and don’ts. It’s also ripe for disruption. 

Let’s start right now.

BACK TO YOU: What patriarchal principle makes it harder for you to enjoy this holiday season? 

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Navigating the Digital Battlefield: Women and Deepfake Survival

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Two people are illustrated in a warm, cartoon style, one on the left and one on the right. The person on the left, who has their back to the viewer, and is typing on a laptop which is sitting on a table. The computer screen is dark with rows of coloured squares representing programming. The person on the right is wearing a white lab coat and safety goggles. They are reaching down to lift up an orange hazard label which is about the size of a book. The label is an orange square with a black exclamation mark in the middle. The person looks like they are being careful as they lift it.
Yasmin Dwiputri & Data Hazards Project / Better Images of AI / Safety Precautions / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0.

The annual campaign 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence begins on 25 November, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, and runs through International Human Rights Day on 10 December.

Gender violence campaigns traditionally focus on physical violence: sexual harassment, rape, femicide, child marriage, or sex trafficking. The perpetrators? Partners, family members, human traffickers, soldiers, terrorists.

But that’s not all. You may be a victim of digital violence right now — in the comfort of your home.

Let’s talk about deepfakes.

The myth of political deepfakes

Deepfakes are images, audio, or video generated or manipulated using artificial intelligence technology to convincingly replace one person’s likeness with that of another. 

When talking about deepfakes, most media refer to the threats they may pose to democracy. That was exemplified in the famous deepfake video of Obama in 2018, where he called Donald Trump a “total and complete dipshit”. Although that video was clearly false, it did show the potential of the technology to meddle in elections and spread disinformation.

Capitalism and deepfakes

In addition to the threat to political stability, the benefits and threats posed by deepfakes are often framed in a capitalistic context

  • Art —  Artists use deepfakes technology to generate new content from existing media created by them or by other artists.
  • Caller response services — Provide tailored answers to caller requests that involve simplified tasks (e.g. triaging and call forwarding to a human).
  • Customer support —  These services use deepfake audio to provide basic information such as an account balance.
  • Entertainment — Movies and video games clone actors’ voices and faces because of convenience or even for humourous purposes. 
  • Deception — Fabricating false evidence to inculpate — or exculpate — people in a lawsuit.
  • Fraud — Impersonate people to gain access to confidential information (e.g. credit cards) or prompt people to act (e.g. impersonate a CEO and request a money transfer). 
  • Stock manipulation — Deepfake content such as videos from CEOs announcing untrue news such as massive layoffs, new patents, or an imminent merger can have a massive impact on a company’s stock.

As a result of that financial focus, tech companies and governments have concentrated their efforts towards assessing if digital content is a deepfake or not. Hence, the proliferation of tools aimed to “certify” content’s provenance as well as legal requirements in some countries to label deepfakes. 

And many people share the same viewpoint. It’s not uncommon that, when discussing deepfakes, my interlocutors dismiss their impact with remarks such as “It’s easy now to spot if they’re fake or not”.

But the reality is that women bear the brunt of this technology.

Women and deepfakes

Deepfakes themselves were born in 2017 when a Reddit user of the same name posted manipulated porn clips on the site. The videos swapped the faces of female celebrities — Gal Gadot, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson — onto porn performers. And from there they took off.

A 2019 study found that 96% of deepfakes are of non-consensual sexual nature, of which 99% are made of women. As I mentioned in the article Misogyny’s New Clothes, they are a well-oiled misogyny tool:

  • They are aimed to silence and shame women. That includes women politicians. 42% of women parliamentarians worldwide have experienced extremely humiliating or sexually-charged images of themselves spread through social media.
  • They objectify women by dismembering their bodies — faces, heads, bodies, arms, legs — without their permission and reassembling them as virtual Frankensteins. 
  • They may be the cheapest way to create pornography — you don’t need to pay actors and there are plenty of free tools available. Not willing to put the effort into learning how to create them yourself? You can order one for as low as $300.
  • They are the newest iteration of revenge porn — hate your colleagues? Tired of the women in your cohort ignoring you? You create deepfake videos from them made from their LinkedIn profile photos and university face books and plaster the internet with them.
  • They disempower victims — Unlike “older” misogyny tools, women cannot control the origin of deepfakes, how they spread, or how to eliminate them. Once they are created, women’s only recourse is to reach out directly to the platforms and websites hosting them and ask for removal.
  • As with all types of gendered violence, women are also shamed for being the target of deepfakes — they are blamed for sharing their photos on social media. I encourage you to read Adrija Bose’s excellent article that summarises her research work on the effect of deepfakes on female content creators.

What do we get wrong about deepfakes?

If 96% are non-consensual porn, why don’t we do anything about it?

  • We think they are not as harmful as “real” porn because the victim didn’t participate in them. What we miss it’s that we “see” the world with our minds, not with our eyes. If you want to have a taste of how that feels, you can watch the chilling 18-minute documentary My Blonde GF by The Guardian where the writer Helen Mort details her experience of being deepfaked for pornography.
  • Knowing that it’s fake is of little relief when you know that your family, friends, and colleagues have watched or could eventually watch them. Moreover, there is research proving that deepfake videos create false memories.
  • As we believe that “it’s not the real you, it’s fake”, victims receive little support from the justice system and governments in general. You can watch this 5-minute video from Youtuber and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) artist Gibi who has been repeatedly targeted by deepfakes and who shares the very real consequences of this practice that is perfectly legal in most countries.

Talking about governments, let’s check how countries regulate deepfakes.

Deepfakes and the law

In 2020, China made it a criminal offense to publish deepfakes or fake news without disclosure. Since January 2023 

“Companies have to get consent from individuals before making a deepfake of them, and they must authenticate users’ real identities.

The service providers must establish and improve rumor refutation mechanisms.

The deepfakes created can’t be used to engage in activities prohibited by laws and administrative regulations.

 Providers of deep synthesis services must add a signature or watermark to show the work is a synthetic one to avoid public confusion or misidentification.”

On Friday 8th December 2023, the European Parliament and the Council reached a political agreement on the Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), proposed by the Commission in April 2021. Although the full text is not available yet, the Commission published an announcement where deepfakes are categorised as specific transparency risks 

“Deep fakes and other AI generated content will have to be labelled as such, and users need to be informed when biometric categorisation or emotion recognition systems are being used. In addition, providers will have to design systems in a way that synthetic audio, video, text and images content is marked in a machine-readable format, and detectable as artificially generated or manipulated.”

In the US, there are no federal regulations on deepfakes. Some states like California, New York, and Virginia have passed laws targeting deepfake pornography.

What about the UK? In September 2023, the Online Safety Bill was signed off by the Houses of Parliament which criminalises sharing deepfake porn. The offence will be punishable by up to six months in prison and it would rise to two years if intent to cause distress, alarm, or humiliation, or to obtain sexual gratification could be proved. Note that the bill doesn’t criminalise the creation of deepfakes, only sharing them.

For further details about global deepfake regulation approaches including countries such as Canada and South Korea, check this article from the Artificial Intelligence Institute. 

Call to action

The remedy of our patriarchal society against physical violence towards women has been to encourage them to self-suppress their rights so that the perpetrators can roam free. 

For example, we tell women that to avoid becoming a victim of violence they should stay at home at night, avoid dark places, or don’t wear miniskirts. Failure to do so and get harmed is met with remarks such as “She was looking for it”.

I hope you’re not expecting me to exhort women to disappear from Instagram, get rid of their profile photos on LinkedIn, or stop publishing videos on TikTok. All the opposite. It’s not for us to hide from deepfake predators, it’s for platforms and regulators to do their job.

My call to action to you is threefold

1.- Take space: Let’s not allow this technology to make us invisible on social media —  hiding has never challenged the status quo. It’s a survival mechanism. If we hide now because we’re afraid of deepfakes, we’ll never be safe on the internet again.

2.- Amplify: Educate others about the risks and challenges of deepfakes as well as how to get support when deepfaked for pornography. 

3.- Demand action: Lobby to make platforms, software development companies, and governments accountable for making us safe from non-consensual sexual deepfakes.

BACK TO YOU: What’s your take on deepfakes? Should they be fully banned? How do you believe the benefits outweigh the risks?

PS. You and AI

  • ​Are you worried about ​the impact of A​I impact ​on your job, your organisation​, and the future of the planet but you feel it’d take you years to ramp up your AI literacy?
  • Do you want to explore how to responsibly leverage AI in your organisation to boost innovation, productivity, and revenue but feel overwhelmed by the quantity and breadth of information available?
  • Are you concerned because your clients are prioritising AI but you keep procrastinating on ​learning about it because you think you’re not “smart enough”?

I’ve got you covered.

AI Readiness Checklist