Every time I’ve found myself lost for words over something in the news this past year—which has happened disconcertingly often—I’ve returned to the same book for guidance, the philosopher Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, published in 2017, largely in response to the election of Donald Trump. Misogyny, Manne argues, is often less about hating women outright than about policing and punishing their behavior.
It can—of course—be an expression of both. “Fucking bitch,” a male voice, believed by many to be that of the ICE agent Jonathan Ross, was captured on video saying last week—after Ross had crossed in front of Renee Nicole Good’s car; after she’d calmly told him, “I’m not mad at you”; and after he’d then shot her at least three times. Good didn’t seem afraid of Ross—even though, apparently, she should have been. She wasn’t sufficiently reverent and deferential to the uniform he wore, to the gun in his hand, to the terror the Trump administration is using ICE to elicit in so many American communities. And because of that, she’s dead.
[Sophie Gilbert: No, women aren’t the problem]
Not just dead but grotesquely maligned in her death, in ways that try to enforce and underscore the patriarchal order that women such as Good threaten. “There’s a weird kind of smugness,” the conservative analyst Will Cain said on Fox News, “in the way that some of these liberal white women interact with authority.” Good was, President Trump himself said, “very, very disrespectful” in her interactions with the officer who shot her. Other people compelled to weigh in on the mother of three’s manifestly avoidable violent death seemed to take umbrage at the fact that she had previously specified her pronouns, that she was visibly queer, and simply that she was, in the right-wing pundit Erick Erickson’s words, an AWFUL: an Affluent White Female Urban Liberal.
If sexism is based on the belief that men are inherently superior to women, misogyny, Manne writes, especially targets “unbecoming women—traitors to the cause of gender—bad women, and ‘wayward’ ones.” Good has apparently been deemed by some to be all three. “You guys gotta stop obstructing us,” the Minnesota Reformer quoted one ICE agent as telling another activist this week. “That’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” Women are by no means ICE’s primary target or victims—officers have been empowered to act as aggressively as they please toward anyone they encounter. (Thirty-two people died in ICE custody last year according to The Guardian, the highest number in more than two decades.) On Wednesday night, an agent reportedly threw flash-bang grenades and tear gas near a car filled with children, causing airbags to deploy, three minors to be hospitalized, and an infant who was in the car to momentarily stop breathing, the child’s mother said. Over the past year, videos have documented agents throwing people to the ground, shooting them with “nonlethal” rounds at close range, raiding day-care centers, leaving children alone and unattended after detaining their parents.
Good’s wife, Becca, stated after Good’s death that she was “a Christian who knew that all religions teach each other the same essential truth: We are here to love each other, care for each other, and keep each other safe and whole.” For her insurgent empathy, the U.S. government has labeled her a domestic terrorist, and has instructed Minneapolis prosecutors to investigate her wife. (Six federal prosecutors in Minnesota subsequently quit in protest.)
Hating and wanting to punish women is an ancient pastime—“fucking bitch” made me catch my breath, as honest as it was in its loathing—but one that is being ever more gamified, turned into recreation. On January 2, The Guardian reported that Grok, xAI’s chatbot, had been generating images of women and children “in minimal clothing,” responding to prompts that could turn virtually any picture of any person into nonconsensual pornography. In many countries, including the U.S., publishing imagery like this of minors is illegal, and yet X’s owner, Elon Musk, responded to Grok’s generation of sexually humiliating imagery and child-sexual-abuse material (CSAM) with crying-laughing emojis. (xAI posted, “We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—CSAM is illegal and prohibited.”) Later, Musk asserted that any country seeking to prevent this kind of ritualized harassment by taking X offline would be suppressing free speech, even though sexual imagery of minors has historically been the one kind of speech that virtually everyone can agree should be suppressed.
[Read: Elon Musk cannot get away with this]
It’s beyond clear that the technologies being imposed upon us exaggerate and enable tendencies that used to be unspeakable. They normalize abuse, and they have already normalized gendered hatred. These compulsions come from the same place as the impulse to punish Renee Nicole Good for protesting, for not bending to patriarchal authority. Grok, in fact, generated images of Good wearing a bikini and pictures of her defaced with bullet holes in the days after her death. Objectification, Manne writes, “can seemingly serve not only as punishment but also as a way of defusing the psychic threat that certain women pose.” What do you do with a disrespectful woman, a wayward one? Punish her, dehumanize her as an example everyone can learn from. What do you do with a woman who seeks authority for herself? Remind her of her place. It’s not surprising that many of the first people targeted by AI deepfake “undressing” technology were women in positions of power. In her 2025 book, The New Age of Sexism, the writer and activist Laura Bates describes learning that her image had been modified into deepfake pornography, seemingly in response to her work addressing sexism. “Even now, it feels like a violation,” she writes. “There’s a little shock, disgust, fear, and, yes, shame every time I see it.”
We have a choice to make about whether we simply accept Musk’s right to turn his social-media site into the world’s biggest pixelated abuse generator—whether we yield to the idea that any woman who appears online or annoys a man runs the risk of being turned into grotesque sexual caricature. As my colleagues Charlie Warzel and Matteo Wong have written, if we refuse to put a “red line around AI-generated sex abuse, then no red line exists.” (Musk has since responded to pushback in certain countries by supposedly geoblocking Grok from fulfilling explicit requests on X in some places, although reporters in Britain have noted that its “undressing” mode continues to function.)
In some ways, what Grok is doing is what new technological platforms have always done. “Sex,” a Wired essay stated in 1993, “is a virus that almost always infects new technology first.” The first mass-consumed video of the online age was a private tape of one of the most famous women in the world that a disgruntled contractor stole and turned into nonconsensual pornography. One of Mark Zuckerberg’s early websites was Facemash, a site that encouraged Harvard students to rate the hotness of female students, and the “Metaverse,” the virtual-reality landscape he spent almost $100 billion building, suffered from widespread reported incidents of sexual harassment and assault from the very beginning.
So many of the platforms that have come to dominate our daily lives were born out of the simple desire to see women exposed. Objectification isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. But Grok’s transformation into a nonconsensual-porn factory is unprecedented in its shamelessness, its seeming impunity, its scale. (One report in 2023 identified 95,820 deepfake videos circulating online; Grok has been generating thousands of “nudified” images per hour.) And it speaks to all the ways in which contemporary reality is currently chipping away at women’s rights and status, with predictable consequences. “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human,” Aldous Huxley wrote in The Olive Tree in 1936. We are now facing an urgent choice as to whether we submit to the entrenched hatred and abuse of women as a technological and cultural norm, or whether we fight for an alternative way forward.
When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
The post An Ancient Pastime With New Tools appeared first on The Atlantic.
