Deepfakes and the Right’s War on Women
The other day in here I shared a piece by Gareth Watkins titled AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism. It perfectly encapsulated my feelings on this fucking con artist garbage.
"No amount of normalisation and ‘validation’, however, can alter the fact that AI imagery looks like shit. But that ... is its main draw to the right. If AI was capable of producing art that was formally competent, surprising, soulful, then they wouldn’t want it. They would be repelled by it."
Today Watkins writes for Hell World on a related matter: The proliferation of AI-generated "deepfake" pornographic images, Melania Trump's (perhaps) well-intentioned efforts to address them, the domineering masculinity of the "traditional" conservative family structure, and the inevitability of the right using such a law to only harm their critics.
“And I’m going to use that bill for myself too if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online. Nobody.”
You can guess who said that I'm sure.
Deepfakes and the Right’s War on Women
by Gareth Watkins
The sexual psychology of right wing males is dull and predictable. Conservative parents, fathers in particular, are encouraged by the vast ecosystem of religious child-rearing manuals and their own suspicion of empathy to be strict, emotionally remote and often physically abusive. The family home is the nation-state or God’s kingdom in miniature, and the father is head of state and God’s representative on Earth. He isn’t fun, he doesn’t joke around, he won’t play dress-up, won’t have a dance party in the kitchen, and he won’t engage in any recreational activities that aren’t competitive or cruel (sports, hunting etc.) He is, as he should only be, a stern authority figure. One assisted by the mother, who acts as his executive officer. It’s important, parenting manuals say, that the mother not be too compassionate or it will turn male children “sissy.” Her role is to make sure that bruises don’t show up at school and to explain to children that their father “forgets himself sometimes” but that he “still loves you.” (He does not).
The child of conservative parents grows up seeing that their father’s power is intimately connected to cruelty. And so he must be cruel to maintain his power and he must maintain his power in order to continue to enjoy cruelty. Whether that cruelty takes the form of emotional neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse, a female figure is almost always close, able to help but unwilling. When the conservative child is an adult, he will continue the cycle. It’s hard to imagine a world without power, and harder still to exist in this one while renouncing a simple way to have one’s needs met. That could mean expecting free domestic labour from a woman maintaining a “traditional” household, or feeling powerful by hurting somebody weaker than you. The child of conservative parents has no choice but to Be A Man, and will grow to fetishize male power and cruelty while despising the entire gender that failed to protect him from it.