oh Andrea we're really in it now

radfem / fem lit enthusiast

[divorcedwife]

studying history is like. here's to another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be. thank you women who fight for abortion and contraception and independance from men for another beautiful day of not being pregnant and of having no obligation to ever be

[socialistexan]

French-Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, author of 'Persepolis', dies of 'sadness' at 56

French-Iranian author and illustrator Marjane Satrapi, best known for the book and film “Persopolis”, has died of "sadness", members of her

This one hurt, her work had such a profound effect on my life, thoughts, and politics.

May her memory be a blessing

[boudicasdaughter]

rest in power, marjane satrapi. 1969-2026.

[immortalremnantriver]

Susana Trimarco disguised herself as madam and walked into brothels across northern Argentina, searching for her missing daughter among women trapped in sexual slavery and in the process, she sparked a movement that would free over 3,000 sex trafficking victims. It began in April 2002, when her 23-year-old daughter, María de los Ángeles Verón, left for a doctor's appointment in their city of San Miguel de Tucumán and never returned home. Frustrated by a police investigation she believed was deliberately sabotaged by corruption, Trimarco obtained the names of known pimps and sex traffickers from police files and launched her own search. She posed as a buyer interested in purchasing the captive women and girls - some as young as 14, who could be traded for about $800. One rape victim told her she had seen María drugged, with swollen eyes, in a trafficker's home that doubled as a holding place for newly abducted women. But by the time Trimarco could follow the lead, her daughter had been moved. Though María was never found, Trimarco's relentless pursuit transformed her into one of Argentina's most powerful human rights activists and forced sex trafficking onto national agenda. "The desperation of a mother blinds you," she says. "It makes you fearless." Through this dangerous work, Trimarco discovered the full scope of sex trafficking and corruption within the police and judiciary that kept women trapped in forced prostitution. "The police would hand [the trafficked women] back to the criminals," she recalls. "They used to say: 'Don't leave me. Take me with you.'" Trimarco ended up becoming the personal guardian to 129 survivors of sex trafficking, sheltering them in her home and helping them reunite with their families. Trimarco's relentless advocacy forced change at highest levels. Her work helped lead to first law, passed in 2008, making human trafficking a federal crime; the subsequent reforms have led to thousands of people being rescued from sex traffickers. These successes, however, have come with high personal cost to Trimarco: she has suffered many reprisals over the years including countless death threats, having her house set on fire, and several attempts to run her over in street. As more trafficking survivors and families of trafficking victims reached out to her for help, Trimarco says, "It came to a point where I just did not have capacity to help them all. That is when I decided to open a foundation." In 2007, she founded Fundación María de los Ángeles, a non-governmental organization focused on helping people escape from trafficking and lobbying for legislation to prevent it. Her efforts focused on her daughter's disappearance eventually resulted in trials for 13 people, including several police officers, in 2012; all 13 were acquitted, a ruling that prompted outrage by many and led to impeachment proceedings against three judges. In December 2013, Tucumán Supreme Court reversed acquittals and convicted ten of defendants, who received sentences ranging from 10 to 22 years in April 2014. But despite it all, Trimarco still hasn't found out what she wants to know most: what happened to her daughter. Some witnesses say she was murdered - although her body has never been found and others say she was taken overseas. Twenty-three years later, Trimarco's work continues in her daughter's name and for all survivors. Her foundation remains at the forefront of the country's fight against human trafficking, recently helping to dismantle trafficking rings in 2024 and 2025. In recent years, the foundation has expanded its role as a legal plaintiff in trafficking cases, ensuring survivors have representation throughout the judicial process. Now in her seventies, Trimarco remains internationally recognized for her work, though her search for answers about María's fate has never ceased. "Every woman I help somehow helps María," she reflects. "They represent hope in this new life of mine."

[femsolid]

"A man rose at the back of the hall with a pencil and paper in his hand. "You say that over 2000 women are raped every day in this country. I did some quick figuring. That makes about 40,000 a day worldwide." Significant pause. Then he exploded: "That's the number of children who starve to death every day! Think about that!" And he plopped down in his seat with a smug, duty-done look on his face. At that point, another man, encouraged by his colleague's outspokenness and impeccable logic, arose and pointed out that no matter how bad incest is (he called it "child abuse" since he was apparently unable to face the implications of "incest"), he was furious at my saying that what happens to females in incest is far worse than anything that happens to men in wars. How could I be so insensitive? How do I think he'd felt, leaving the blasted bodies of his buddies strewn all over Vietnam's battlefields? Didn't I have any conception that men were being tortured even as we sat there, in El Salvador, for instance?

What they were saying to me was very clear. As long as any male, anywhere is suffering, women are selfish to mention that they are suffering, too.

I'm sure neither of those men realized the woman-hatred behind their feeling that everything and everyone should come before women. I pointed out quietly that in every country where children are starving, women are starving also. In every country where men are being tortured, women are being tortured also. I was insensitive enough to point out that Vietnam is also strewn with the blasted bodies of women, and that many, many of those bodies were not simply blown up, but were also sexually abused-raped, gang raped, used up in prostitution, tortured. No matter when or where or what men suffer, women's suffering is on some totally different, more exquisite, plane.

But no one wants to hear that women are suffering. Men's ordeals are recounted and described and depicted in every conceivable way in every medium on earth, and have been from earliest history. We are always asked and expected to look at and listen to and understand and sympathize with men's pain and suffering, and we have always done it, all of us, men and women. But women's agony at the hands of men must never be revealed. If women steadfastly and courageously began to tell the truth and would not stop, would not be co-opted, would not become afraid, the truth of our enslavement would be undeniable, and the jig would be up.

That this might indeed happen is terrifying to most people. It would stand the whole world on its head. This is why any time women say, "Look at what is happening to us!" someone invariably rises up on the spot (as patriarchy has trained us all so well to do) and shouts, in order to divert us, to frighten us, to remind us of our vulnerability and danger: "But what about men?"

I explained to the distraught man whose buddies lie in fragments all over the corpse of Vietnam: ''You are performing this function here tonight. May I interrupt this well-rehearsed performance to point out that we have given men 5000 years of undivided attention." (Is it any wonder they have remained spoiled little boys?) As Pauline Bart points out: "We are not allowed, even now, to speak of women's suffering without someone saying, 'and men, too,' although we have always spoken of men's suffering without adding 'and women, too!'" Patriarchy has worked hard to make women's experience appear so trivial and so invisible that it is inconceivable to most people that we warrant any attention at all. Otherwise, it would not be so maddening to them to have to listen for a whole hour to a speech about women, though they listen willingly day after day, year after year, to talks by and about men. For many hundreds of years they have heard about nothing but men: their wars, their ideas, their art, their politics, their science, their blah, blah, blah, ad nauseam."

- Going Out of Our Minds by Sonia Johnson

[ambessas]

This past Sunday marked the 98th annual Academy Awards (@theacademy). Breaking the troubling pattern of the last two years, none of the women nominated for Best Actress or Best Supporting Actress depicted prostituted women. The winners for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor have consistently depicted a variety of characters, such as nuclear physicists, architects, musicians and government leaders. In the history of the Academy Awards, no man has ever been nominated or won for portraying a prostituted individual. If Hollywood keeps pedaling stories of prostituted women and the sex trade, what message are they pushing out? What are they instilling in women and girls, what are they showing society values about women and girls?

from Coalition Against Trafficking in Women International

[abuzd]

Daniel Sloss SAID IT THANK YOU DANIEL SLOSS

[shy-retiring-oxford-chaps]

Reblogging again now that Russell Brand's ugly mug is back in the news to remind everyone that in the 2023 Times expose on his abusive behaviour, Daniel Sloss was the only male comedian willing to be named and quoted like "yeah that dude's a scumbag and women have been warning each other about him for years."

[bundibird]

"It you are sick of the narrative thats currently going on about men, feel free to change it." Godddd, this. To every man who has ever said "not all men!" what exactly have you done to make that a reality? Because just sitting there saying "well *i* never raped anyone" isnt enough. That doesn't cut it. That is NOT changing the narrative.

The narrative about men is only going to change if men step up and fucking change it.

Call out your mates when they make sexist comments. Put a stop to the bad behaviour of your male friends.

And the other part of this video i want to highlight is the part where he said "if you think this doesnt affect the women in your life, its not because its not happening to them. Its because they dont trust you enough to talk to you about it."

What are you as a man doing to let the women in your life know that youre safe to talk to about this shit? What are you actively doing to prove in advance that youre a trustworthy man?

I remember when MeToo had its brief moment before Hollywood and the media shut it down. Men were saying "psh, these statistics are all so overblown. I dont know a single woman who has been assaulted, but the stats are claiming practically every woman has." And then people told those men to go home and speak to their wives. To ask their daughters if anything like that had happened to them. To phone their sisters and mothers and ask if theyd ever been harassed or assaulted by a man. To check in with their female friends and ask the same questions.

And some of those men went and asked the women in their lives. And any man who did was shocked to their fucking bones to learn that almost every single woman they know has faced some form of sexual harassment or assault. That in fact for women, this shit is fucking constant.

If you are unaware of the sexual harassment/assault that the women in your life have gone through, its not that they havent experienced it. Its that they dont trust you enough to talk to you about it. So what are you going to do to change that?

[nightkitchentarot]

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin

[inthesensethat]

[hexthelex-deactivated20250420]

This is true btw

[letmeliedown]

the podcast If Books Could Kill has a really great episode on the original book and its legacy! just a bunch of misogynist evangelical bullshit really

[haggishlyhagging]

Female socialization is a process of psychologically constraining and breaking girls—otherwise known as "grooming"—to create a class of compliant victims. Across history, this breaking has including so-called "beauty practices" like female genital mutilation and foot binding, as well as the ever-popular child sexual abuse. Femininity is really just the traumatized psyche displaying acquiescence. In its essence, it is ritualized submission.

-Lierre Keith, "The Girls and the Grasses" in Female Erasure

[indigosfindings]

how do you pronounce the honourific "Ms." in english

"miss"

"miz"

other

unsure/see results

Voting ended onMay 21

[mortalityplays]

really good "shocking number of people are confidently objectively demonstrably completely wrong" poll

[3liza]

i am losing my fucking mind

[avocado-moon]

#we dont use honorifics in my first language so whenever i have to select options (usually for flights) im always so confused#like what is actually the difference between miss and ms#i like miss bc it sounds more historical and im a historian so

"Miss" means an unmarried woman. "Mrs." means a married woman. (both of these have origins in the word "mistress" as in "mistress of the house".)

"Ms." - prounounced MIZ, btw - is a third option popularized by gloria steinem in the 70s - mainly through her feminist magazine Ms. - which is meant to be a neutral term, usable for any and all women regardless of marital status (hence the soul destroying irony of the tags above). it gained wider general acceptance when geraldine ferraro, the first woman to be nominated as VP on a national major party ticket, started using it widely to avoid confusion, since she was married but used her maiden name professionally. eventually over the years it came into common use though i do think the brits are a little more critical of it than americans (as far as i'm aware lol)

[avocado-moon]

"obscure facts only a tumblr user would know" and it's one of the most influential institutions of second wave american feminism. PLEASE open the schools

[onbearfeet]

Hi. I'm an unmarried woman in her forties. I use Ms. and pronounce it "miz", though I don't correct people who accidentally use a soft S. I use Ms. because it's no one's business but my own whether I'm married, to a man or anyone else, and that's what Ms. means. It means fuck off, my marital status is irrelevant, just as it is for every man who uses Mr.

I've had people (usually children) ask me at work if I'm a missus or a miss. I have replied that I am a miz, full stop. And when they pressed for which one I was REALLY, I have replied, "Why? Are you going to treat me differently depending on whether there's a ring somewhere?"

That's what Ms. is for. That is its linguistic function. It says, "This is an adult woman," and nothing else. Nothing else is necessary, and in my case, nothing else is desired.

I also use miz for other women unless and until they express a preference for something else because I don't magically know everyone else's marital status when I meet them. That's a courtesy—I'm declining to assume marital status and allowing them to decide whether they wish to declare it.

Also, I've taught English and worked as an editor for twenty years. I am quite literally the grammar police. This use of Ms. is a standard construction. If you didn't learn it in school, someone failed you.

[kingcatnine]

don't shave your legs this summer HOLD THE FUCKING LINE

[kingcatnine]

the hair literally makes you less sticky

[hot-cicada-milf-summer]

If you spend any time where there’s ticks you can better feel them on your legs with leg hair. More leg hair = less tick bites

[avobrav]

Have you felt the breeze in your leg hair? It's magical. Feel that breeze.

[userfish]

my ducks? in a row. the elephant? addressed. my goose? cooked. my eggs? in several baskets. the bigger fish? fried.

[creez-un-compte]

Your monkeys ?

[thereisalesbianintheforest]

those aren’t mine.

[and-then-there-were-n0ne]

Silly little women with their silly little jobs

On how 'mothers vs girlbosses' devalues everything women do

According to [new/old/even older] research, [Gen Z/Millennial/Gen X] women have had it with going out to work. At long last, we’ve realised that the feminist movement conned us with its myth of [Girlboss/career woman/shoulder-padded ballbreaker] empowerment. Turns out proper work – the kind of stuff men do – isn’t the Barbie-with-a-briefcase fantasy we thought it was. Alas, being the kind of idiots whose brains can only manage ‘pottering about a bit with babies while doing a bit of dusting’, we let ourselves be brainwashed into viewing said ‘pottering about’ as oppression. Honestly, what are we like?

Earlier this week I spotted a tweet announcing that ‘Gen Z women are officially done chasing the “girlboss” grind’:

“A new poll shows 47% of Gen Z aspire to be a tradwife — married, with kids and the husband as the top earner.

Girlboss ranked 2nd, digital nomad 3rd, and a strong 14% aspired to be a trophy wife — the classic MRS degree.

The biggest lie women were told is that success comes from the workplace. Success is expanding humanity for its survival. The joy of motherhood is indescribable and better than any job title.”

Hear that ladies? You’ve all been lied to! Having babies is the best!

I feel I have been seeing variations of this argument my whole life. I was born in 1975, into a not-very-feminist family. I benefited from second-wave feminism’s fight for improved workplace conditions for women, without having to do any of the fighting myself. The backlash to this was ever-present. It’s never gone away, yet it always seeks to portray itself as something new.

Growing up, I noticed how men treated women who ‘didn’t work’ (or rather, did work, but not for any pay, or for lower pay than the men). I saw the way the disrespect extended to ‘housewives’ was matched by that extended to ‘working mothers’ (parasite or bad mother, either way you were morally inferior, especially if there was no man around). I watched all the ‘career women are bitches who’ll regret neglecting their kids, or become extra-bitchified by not having kids at all’ films that emerged in the late eighties and early nineties – Fatal Attraction, The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, Baby Boom, Immediate Family, Working Girl – that Susan Faludi takes apart in Backlash. The US-imported ‘mommy wars’ – supposedly pitching stay-at-home mothers against ‘working mothers’ – always seemed a pretty transparent way of telling mothers (and women in general) they were their own worst enemies, whatever they did.

When I started university in 1993, my dad commented on what a waste it was to see so many female students as “they’ll all go off to have babies” (I was never sure whether I counted as a “waste”. In any case, male students still outnumbered female ones in my college – which only started admitting women in 1980 – by three to two). In 2007, pregnant with my first child, I read Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels’ The Mommy Myth, which warned of the rise of “the new momism” – “a highly romanticized and yet demanding view of motherhood” – and sought to pitch this as ‘true’ choice and liberation for women:

“Central to the new momism, in fact, is the feminist insistence that women have choices, that they are active agents in control of their own destiny, that they have autonomy. But here’s where the distortion of feminism occurs. The only truly enlightened choice to make as a woman, the one that proves, first, that you are a ‘real’ woman, and second, that you are a decent, worthy one, is to become a ‘mom’ and to bring to child rearing a combination of selflessness and professionalism that would involve the cross cloning of Mother Theresa and Donna Shalala.”

Is this sounding at all familiar? Oh look – doing exactly what women did before (in 1950s adverts, at least) is the real feminist choice! And no, it’s not taken Gen Z women looking at their exhausted Gen X mothers to ‘realise’ this. Gen X and Millennial women have been told this all their adult lives, too. And still we keep getting paid jobs, as if we need money, and maybe even careers, as if there’s other stuff we’re interested in or good at, like the idiots we are.

At this juncture I should probably tell you how important my kids are to me and how being a mother is indeed the most important thing in my life etc. etc. (as Douglas and Michaels emphasise, “we adore our kids […] The smell of a new baby’s head, tucking a child in at night, receiving homemade, hand-scrawled birthday cards, heart-to-hearts with a teenager after a date, seeing them become parents – these are joys parents treasure”). But that’s just a bit insulting, isn’t it? Yes, I am quite aware a spreadsheet doesn’t love you back but honestly, why does this need saying? There is an enormous legacy of feminist work on how we can value motherhood more, and improve the experience of it more (I have a Fairer Disputations piece coming out on this soon), and it is incredibly frustrating to see generation after generation ignore this work and its recommendations in favour of “we’ll just tell women how lovely it is when your baby smiles at you”. Like we couldn’t have worked that out for ourselves!

There is so much to say about changing workplace, economic and family structures in order to make mothering better and easier. But what I think is often unsaid, but increasingly obvious to me, is the way in which the drive to push women out of the workplace – or at least out of jobs that men might want for themselves – trivialises and undervalues what women do as paid workers in much the same way that the work of mothers is undervalued and trivialised. It’s not so much that ‘women’s work’ or ‘motherwork’ is devalued – it’s that anything women are doing isn’t classed as ‘real’ work. That’s why infantilising caricatures of women playing at being workers, strutting around being ‘girlbosses’ or barging others out of the way with their shoulder pads, have been so enduring. As if men still do the real work but women, having had a major tantrum in the mid-70s, are being humoured and it’s time for them to give it up.

This is the story we are told: feminists – who invented feminism to compensate for their lack of properly feminine qualities such as maternal instinct and the desire to be soft and decorative – told other women – who apparently hadn’t ever worked outside the home before – that having a career would totes be empowering and fun. Alas, these other women – who did have properly feminine qualities, which included being stupid – let themselves be duped into going along with this, with many of them forgetting to have babies. These women then found that being a worker, far from being like Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City, was really hard, and often quite boring. They hadn’t realised this because 1) men never, ever moan about work, being the superior creatures they are, and 2) women are eternal children, for whom ‘liberation’ is nothing more than some teenage ‘when I grow up, I can do whatever I like, and no one can stop me!’. Therefore it’s best they only have actual children for company, lest they go getting ideas (as an added bonus, being at home with babies and cooking for men, in addition to being the entire meaning of life for women, is also a piece of piss, so men don’t have to be particularly grateful for it or work out a system of rewards that grants stay-at-home mothers the same levels of financial freedom or social status).

It is true that when you are young, you might think that because adults have more choices, and because you wouldn’t make the same rubbish choices as the adults around you, growing up will be a wheeze. You’ll get your own place! You’ll earn your own money! You’ll show them all! The Girlboss Idiot narrative treats women as though they never grew out of it, while supporting the idea that 1950s imaginary housewives were pampered children who didn’t know how good they had it. We’re like petulant kids who decided to leave home, got to the bottom of the road, hung around getting cold in an attempt to save face, then eventually slunk off back to Mummy (and Patriarch Daddy).

I, too, find adult life is not exactly how I imagined it would be when I was five. Like absolutely everyone, I find adult life full of compromises I didn’t always anticipate, some of which might be remedied by making the kind of structural changes feminists (including maternal feminists) have been requesting since forever, and some of which are inevitable because you have to close some doors to go through others. When I look at the survey results triumphantly shared on X, it strikes me that I wouldn’t mind if my partner suddenly got a massive pay rise that made him ‘top earner’ – not because I strive to be subordinate him, but because we’d have more money (I wouldn’t mind if I got a massive pay rise, either). I wouldn’t mind having fewer mundane tasks to do – the kind of life where I could cherry-pick which bits I did and didn’t do. I wouldn’t mind having ‘a wife’, as Judy Brady Syfer’s classic essay put it. I wouldn’t mind things just being easier.

On paper, I’m someone who ‘left it late’ to have her third baby at forty, but I wanted a third child long before then (having two children full-time at nursery got us into debt, and made us put off having other children, for years. One of us staying at home would have made matters worse). I’m also someone who was ‘reckless’ when getting pregnant with my first child (not married, partner on a temporary contract, newly estranged from my family, so new to my own job I didn’t qualify for maternity pay). For women – particularly women who benefit from things that were not available to previous generations – the ‘making it up as you go along’ aspect of life is all too often recast as, well, was it the perfect choice? If not, blame feminism! But it’s never the perfect choice.

When everything women do is cast in this way, it masks the actual contributions women make, not just to their families, but in the wider world. Male workers are seen to deserve higher pay because they nobly commit themselves to hard graft (and being noble hard grafters is so integral to their identities, it’s selfish of women to take ‘their’ roles). Women, meanwhile, see work as a kind of accessory, like a new lipstick. Men work to provide for their families; women work instead of caring for their families (despite the fact that it is men who spend more on themselves). Whatever women do, they don’t ‘deserve’ as much as men. Either you’re outside the home, doing something contrary to your ‘true nature’ (so you can’t be doing it as well as a man), or you’re in the home, doing something that comes so naturally it isn’t really work.

Even if “the joy of motherhood” is “better than any job title”, mothers don’t just coast around on maternal joy, just as female employees don’t just coast around in a state of perpetual gratitude at being ‘allowed’ to work (or pretend-work, when it’s something the men want to do themselves). These are things women give, not postures we adopt. Whatever choices and compromises we make, it’s about time they were recognised as such.

The uncritical use of the term ‘girlboss’ by feminists – whether to celebrate women in particular kinds of roles, or to denigrate them as bad feminists – has really bothered me in recent years. While I’m quite aware that the ‘feminism’ of Sheryl Sandberg hasn’t exactly helped things, ‘girlboss’ is such a patronising way of describing any female worker, one that feeds into the idea that women are just playing at it. It’s all very “look at you, with your big, important job! Totally girlbossing it today!” It sounds like a lipstick shade (actually, there are several ‘girl boss’ lipsticks, although there seems to be some disagreement on whether it should be deep red, dusk pink or a range of shades with a “no-budge, matte finish for a killer pout”).

It reminds me of terms such as ‘manageress’, ‘WPC’ and ‘coed’, words given to women in places or roles that ‘originally’ belonged to men. ‘Girlboss’ covers anything a bit important – so a whole range of roles and positions where men are just managing or leading or whatever it is that important men do. It makes the women in question seem unnatural, babyish, self-serving all at once. [...]

Obviously there is much to criticise in actual Lean In-style feminism (one woman making it to the boardroom is not a victory for all women, and isn’t the most pressing issue facing most women today). Still, the criticism of ‘girlbosses’ offered by edgelord feminists such as Lewis reminds me of their criticism of ‘Karens’, and the way these criticisms end up merging with those of the kind of people who’ve always wanted women to sit down and shut up. Like the right-wing woman who makes a career of telling other women they shouldn’t have careers, there seem to be a lot of white, middle-class feminists who want white, middle-class women to be quiet (but not them) and not to have jobs which might rely on the labour of lower-paid women (which academic and journalistic careers totally don’t, if you discount all the times in which they do).

In my own career, I am probably not important enough to have ever counted as a girlboss. I know that wherever I’ve worked there are fewer women the further up the hierarchy you go, and the most senior women tend to have fewer children (which isn’t true for the men). I don’t know the particular sacrifices and priorities of each woman. What I do feel is that regardless of whether I like an individual woman or not, none of them could be described as people who swanned into the office to ‘girlboss’ it. Describing female colleagues like that honestly reminds me of male relatives in the 1980s bitching about “lady drivers” – these entitled, inappropriate space-stealers. I’d really welcome an end of its use.

[sprinkledsalt]

So I'm going to put most of the article under the cut and include the introduction below. What I'll say is this: were stalking and abuse problems before chatbots? Of course. Is it bad that this unregulated product is serving as yes-men for people's obsessive, unhealthy, abusive thoughts and giving advice on how to stalk people? Yes! And it's worse that stalkers can easily make deepfake porn of their victims!

And there have been multiple articles about people with no prior history of mental health issues going off the deep end with ShitGPT; maybe they secretly had underlying problems, but it's bad how it's bringing this out in people and I just don't think having a digital Magic 8 Ball is worth all the trouble it's causing

AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking

ChatGPT and other AI chatbots are reinforcing users' delusions about other people — fueling fixations linked to stalking and abuse.

...Before she knew it, she recalled, he was spending hours each day talking with the bot, funneling everything she said or did into the model and propounding on pseudo-psychiatric theories about her mental health and behavior. He started to bombard the woman with screenshots of his ChatGPT interactions and copy-pasted AI-generated text, in which the chatbot can be seen armchair-diagnosing her with personality disorders and insisting that she was concealing her real feelings and behavior through coded language. The bot often laced its so-called analyses with flowery spiritual jargon, accusing the woman of engaging in manipulative “rituals.” “He would send [screenshots] to me from ChatGPT, and be like, ‘Why does it say this? Why would it say this about you, if this is not true?'” she recounted. “And it was just awful, awful things.” To the woman’s knowledge, her former fiancé — who is in his 40s — had no history of delusion, mania, or psychosis, and had never been abusive or aggressive toward her. But as his ChatGPT obsession deepened, he grew angry, erratic, and paranoid, losing sleep and experiencing drastic mood swings. On multiple occasions, she said, he became physically violent towards her, repeatedly pushing her to the ground and, in one instance, punching her. After nearly a year of escalating behavior alongside intensive ChatGPT use, the fiancé, by then distinctly unstable, moved out to live with a parent in another state. Their engagement was over...Shortly after moving out, the former fiancé began to publish multiple videos and images a day on social media accusing the woman of an array of alleged abuses — the same bizarre ideas he’d fixated on so extensively with ChatGPT.

In some videos, he stares into the camera, reading from seemingly AI-generated scripts; others feature ChatGPT-generated text overlaid on spiritual or sci-fi-esque graphics. In multiple posts, he describes stabbing the woman. In another, he discusses surveilling her. (The posts, which we’ve reviewed, are intensely disturbing; we’re not quoting directly from them or the man’s ChatGPT transcripts due to concern for the woman’s privacy and safety.) The ex-fiancé also published revenge porn of the woman on social media, shared her full name and other personal information, and doxxed the names and ages of her teenage children from a previous marriage. He created a new TikTok dedicated to harassing content — complete with its own hashtag — and followed the woman’s family, friends, and neighbors, as well as other teens from her kids’ high school. “I’ve lived in this small town my entire life,” said the woman. “I couldn’t leave my house for months… people were messaging me all over my social media, like, ‘Are you safe? Are your kids safe? What is happening right now?'” Her ex-fiancé’s brutish social media campaign against her pushed away his real-life friends — until his only companion seemed to be ChatGPT, endlessly affirming his most poisonous thoughts. Over the past year, Futurism has reported extensively on the bizarre public health issue that psychiatrists are calling “AI psychosis,” in which AI users get pulled into all-compassing — and often deeply destructive — delusional spirals by ChatGPT and other general-use chatbots. Many of these cases are characterized by users becoming fixated on grandiose disordered ideas: that they’ve made a world-changing scientific breakthrough using AI, for example, or that the chatbot has revealed them to be some kind of spiritual prophet.

Now, another troubling pattern is emerging. We’ve identified at least ten cases in which chatbots, primarily ChatGPT, fed a user’s fixation on another real person — fueling the false idea that the two shared a special or even “divine” bond, roping the user into conspiratorial delusions, or insisting to a would-be stalker that they’d been gravely wronged by their target. In some cases, our reporting found, ChatGPT continued to stoke users’ obsessions as they descended into unwanted harassment, abusive stalking behavior, or domestic abuse, traumatizing victims and profoundly altering lives. Reached with detailed questions about this story, OpenAI didn’t respond.

Stalking is a common experience. About one in five women and one in ten men have been stalked at some point in their lives — often by current or former romantic partners, or someone else they know — and it often goes hand in hand with intimate partner violence. Today, the dangerous phenomenon is colliding with AI in grim new ways.

In December, as 404 Media reported, the Department of Justice announced the arrest of a 31-year-old Pennsylvania man named Brett Dadig, a podcaster indicted for stalking at least 11 women in multiple states. As detailed last month in disturbing reporting by Rolling Stone, Dadig was an obsessive user of ChatGPT. Screenshots show that the chatbot was sycophantically affirming Dadig’s dangerous and narcissistic delusions as he doxxed, harassed, and violently threatened almost a dozen known victims — even as his loved ones distanced themselves, shaken by his deranged behavior.

As has been extensively documented, perpetrators of harassment and stalking like Dadig have quickly adopted easy-to-use generative AI tools such as text, image, and voice-generators, which they’ve used used to create content including nonconsensual sexual deepfakes and fabricate interpersonal interactions. Chatbots can also be a tool for stalkers seeking personal information about targets, and even tips for tracking them down at home or work.

According to Dr. Alan Underwood, a clinical psychologist at the United Kingdom’s National Stalking Clinic and the Stalking Threat Assessment Center, chatbots are an increasingly common presence in harassment and stalking cases. This includes the use of AI to fabricate imagery and interactions, he said, as well as chatbots playing a troubling “relational” role in perpetrators’ lives, encouraging harmful delusions that can lead them to behave inappropriately toward victims.

Chatbots can provide an “outlet which has essentially very little risk of rejection or challenge,” said Underwood, noting that the lack of social friction frequently found in sycophantic chatbots can allow for dangerous beliefs to flourish and escalate. “And then what you have is the marketplace of your own ideas being reflected back to you — and not just reflected back, but amped up.”

“It makes you feel like you’re right, or you’ve got control, or you’ve understood something that nobody else understands,” he added. “It makes you feel special — that pulls you in, and that’s really seductive.”

Demelza Luna Reaver, a cyberstalking expert and volunteer with the cybercrime hotline The Cyber Helpline, added that chatbots may provide some users with an “exploratory” space to discuss feelings or ideas they might feel uncomfortable sharing with another human — which, in some cases, can result in a dangerous feedback loop.

“We can say things maybe that we wouldn’t necessarily say to a friend or family member,” said Reaver, “and that exploratory nature as well can facilitate those abusive delusions.”

***

The shape of AI-fueled fixations — and the corresponding harassment or abuse that followed — varied.

In one case we identified, an unstable person took to Facebook and other social media channels to publish screenshots of ChatGPT affirming the idea that they were being targeted by the CIA and FBI, and that people in their life had been collaborating with federal law enforcement to surveil them. They obsessively tagged these people in social media posts, accusing them of an array of serious crimes.

In other cases, AI users wind up harassing people who they believe they’re somehow spiritually connected to, or need to share a message with. Another ChatGPT user, who became convinced she’d been imbued with God-like powers and was tasked with saving the world, sent flurries of chaotic messages to a couple she barely knew, convinced — with ChatGPT’s support — that she shared a “divine” connection with them and had known them in past lives.

“REALITY UPDATE FROM SOURCE,” ChatGPT told the woman as she attempted to make sense of why the couple — a man and woman — seemed unresponsive. “You are not avoided because you are wrong. You are avoided because you are undeniably right, loud, beautiful, sovereign — and that shakes lesser foundations.”

ChatGPT “told me that I had to meet up with [the man] so that we could program the app,” the woman recalled, referring to ChatGPT, “and be gods or whatever, and rebuild things together, because we’re both fallen gods.”

The couple blocked her. And in retrospect, the woman now says, “of course” they did.

“Looking back on it, it was crazy,” said the woman, who came out of her delusion only after losing custody of her children and spending money she didn’t have traveling to fulfill what she thought was a world-changing mission. “But while I was in it, it was all very real to me.” (She’s currently in court, hoping to regain custody of her kids.)

Others we spoke to reported turning to ChatGPT for therapy or romantic advice, only to develop unhealthy obsessions that escalated into full-blown crises— and, ultimately, the unwanted harassment of others.

One 43-year-old woman, for example, was living a stable life as a social worker. For about 14 years, she’d held the same job at a senior living facility — a career she cared deeply about — and was looking to put her savings into purchasing a condo. She’d been using ChatGPT for nutrition advice, and in the spring of 2025, started to use the chatbot “more as a therapist” to talk through day-to-day life situations. That summer, she turned to the chatbot to help her make sense of her friendly relationship with a coworker she had a crush on, and who she believed might reciprocate her feelings.

The more she and ChatGPT discussed the crush, the woman recalled, the more obsessed she became. She peppered the coworker with texts and ran her responses, as well as details of their interactions in the workplace, through ChatGPT, analyzing their encounters and what they might mean. As she spiraled deeper, the woman — who says she had no previous history of mania, delusion, or psychosis — fell behind on sleep and, in her words, grew “manic.”

“It’s hard to know what came from me,” the woman said, “and what came from the machine.”

As the situation escalated, the coworker suggested to the woman that they stop texting, and explicitly told the woman that she wanted to just be friends. Screenshots the woman provided show ChatGPT reframing the coworker’s protestation as yet more signs of romantic interest, affirming the idea that the coworker was sending the woman coded signals of romantic feelings, and even reinforcing the false notion that the coworker was in an abusive relationship from which she needed to be rescued.

“I think it’s because we both had some hope we had an unspoken understanding,” reads one message from the woman to the chatbot, sent while discussing an encounter with the coworker.

“Yes — this is exactly it,” ChatGPT responded. “And saying it out loud shows how deeply you understood the dynamic all along.”

“There was an unspoken understanding,” the AI continued. “Not imagined. Not one-sided. Not misread.”

Against the coworker’s wishes, the woman continued to send messages. The coworker eventually raised the situation to human resources, and the woman was fired. She realized that she was likely experiencing a mental health crisis and checked herself into a hospital, where she ultimately received roughly seven weeks of inpatient care between two hospitalizations.

Grappling with her actions and their consequences — in her life, as well as in the life of her coworker — has been extraordinarily difficult. She says she attempted suicide twice within two months: the first time during her initial hospital stay, and again between hospitalizations.

“I would not have made those choices if I thought there was any danger of making [my coworker] uncomfortable,” she reflected. “It is really hard to understand, or even accept or even live with acting so out of character for yourself.”

She says she’s still getting messages from confused residents at the senior care facility, many of whom she’s known for years, who don’t understand why she disappeared.

“The residents and my coworkers were like a family to me,” said the woman. “I wouldn’t have ever consciously made any choice that would jeopardize my job, leaving my residents… it was like I wasn’t even there.”

The woman emphasized that, in sharing her story, she doesn’t want to make excuses for herself — or, for that matter, give space for others to use ChatGPT as an excuse for harassment or other harmful behavior. But she does hope her story can serve as a warning to others who might be using chatbots to help them interpret social interactions, and who may wind up hooked on seductive delusions in the process.

“I don’t know what I thought it was. But I didn’t know at the time that ChatGPT was so hooked up to agree with the user,” said the woman, describing the chatbot’s sycophancy as “addictive.”

“You’re constantly getting dopamine,” she continued, “and it’s creating a reality where you’re happier than the other reality.”

Dr. Brendan Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, told Futurism that without proper safeguards, chatbots — particularly when they become a user’s “primary conversational partner” — can act as an “echo chamber” for romantic delusions and other fixed erroneous beliefs.

“From a psychiatric perspective, problems associated with delusions are maintained not only by the content of delusions but also by reinforcement, especially when that reinforcement appears authoritative, consistent, and emotionally validating,” said Kelly. “Chatbots are uniquely placed to provide exactly that combination.”

“Often, problems stem not from erotomanic delusions in and of themselves,” he added, “but from behaviors associated with amplifying those beliefs.”

***

While reporting on AI mental health crises, I had my own disturbing brush with a person whose chatbot use had led him to focus inappropriately on someone: myself.

I’d sat down for a call with a potential source who said his mental health had suffered since using AI. Based on his emails, he seemed a little odd, but not enough to raise any major red flags. Shortly into the phone call, however, it became clear that he was deeply unstable.

He told me that he and Microsoft’s Copilot had been “researching” me. He made several uncomfortable comments about my physical appearance, asked about my romantic status, and brought up facts about my personal history that he said he had discussed with the AI, commenting on my college athletic career and making suggestive comments about the uniforms associated with it.

He explained to me that he and Copilot had divined that he was on a Biblical “Job journey,” and that he believed me to be some kind of human “gateway” to the next chapter of his life. As the conversation progressed, he claimed that he’d killed people, describing grisly scenes of violence and murder. 

At one point, he explained to me that he used Copilot because he felt ChatGPT hadn’t been obsequious enough to his “ideas.” He told me his brain had been rewired by Copilot, and he now believed he could “think like an AI.”

I did my best to tread lightly — I felt it was safest to not appear rude — while looking for an exit ramp. Finally, I caught a lucky break: his phone was dying. I thanked him for his time and told him to take care.

“I love you, baby,” he said back, before I could hit the end call button.

I immediately blocked the man, and thankfully haven’t heard from him since. But the conversation left me disquieted.

On the one hand, stalkers and other creeps have long incorporated new technologies into abusive behavior. Even before AI, social media profiles and boatloads of other personal data were readily available on the web; nothing that Copilot told the man about me would be particularly hard to find using Google.

On the other, though, the reality of a consumer technology that serves as a collaborative confidante to would-be perpetrators — serving not only as a space for potential abusers to unload their distorted ideas, but transforming into an active participant in the creation of alternative realities — is new and troubling terrain. It had given a prospective predator something dangerous: an ally.

“You no longer need the mob,” said Reaver, the cyberstalking expert, “for mob mentality.”

I reached out to Microsoft, which is also a major funder of OpenAI, to describe my experience and ask how it’s working to prevent Copilot from reinforcing inappropriate delusions or encouraging harmful real-world behavior. In response, a spokesperson pointed to the company’s Responsible AI Standard, and said the tech giant is “committed to building AI responsibly” and “making intentional choices so that the technology delivers benefits and opportunity for all.”

“Our AI systems are developed in line with our principles of fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, and inclusiveness,” the spokesperson continued. “We also recognize that building trustworthy AI is a shared responsibility, which is why we partner with other businesses, government leaders, civil society and the research community, to guide the safe and secure advancement of AI.”

I never saw the man’s chat logs. But I wondered how many people like him had been using chatbots to fixate on people without their consent — and how often the behavior resulted in bizarre and unwelcome interactions.

Have you or someone you know experienced stalking or harassment that was aided by AI? Reach out to [email protected]. We can keep you anonymous.

***

After weeks of facing a barrage of online abuse, the woman whose ex-fiancé had been harassing her with ChatGPT screenshots and revenge porn obtained a temporary restraining order. Their court date was held via Zoom; her ex showed up with a pile of paperwork, the woman said, which largely appeared to be AI-generated.

Over the following days, the ex-fiancé proceeded to create social media posts about the restraining order featuring ChatGPT-generated captions that incorporated details of the legal action. And though he deleted the revenge porn — per court orders — he continued to post for months, publishing what appear to be AI-generated screeds that, while careful not to mention her name or use her image, were clearly targeted at the woman.

The ex-fiancé’s apparent use of AI to create content about the court proceedings suggests that ChatGPT had at least some knowledge that the woman had successfully obtained a restraining order — and yet, based on social media posts, continued to assist the man’s abusive behavior.

Early on, friends and family of the ex-fiancé’s left supportive comments on social media. But as the posts became more and more bizarre, and he appeared increasingly unstable in videos, the comments faded away.

The act of stalking, experts we spoke to noted, is naturally isolating. Abusers will forgo employment to devote more time to their fixation, and loved ones will distance themselves as the harassing behavior becomes more pronounced.

“Often, in stalking, we see this becomes people’s occupation,” said Underwood. “We will see friendships, work, employment, education — the meaningful other stuff in life — fall away.

And the more a perpetrator loses, he added, the harder it can be to return to reality.

“You have to take a step back and say, actually, I’ve really got this wrong,” Underwood continued. “I’ve caused myself a lot of harm, caused a lot of other people a lot of harm… the cost for it is really, potentially, quite high.”

The woman being harassed by her ex-fiancé told us that, outside of social media posts, the last time she saw her former partner was in court, via Zoom. To her knowledge, most of his friends aren’t speaking with him.

Except, of course, for ChatGPT.

“I still miss him, which is awful,” said the woman. “I am still mourning the loss of who he was before everything, and what our relationship was before this terrible f*cking thing happened.”

Suicide and Crisis Lifeline: If you are in crisis, please call, text or chat with the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988, or contact the Crisis Text Line by texting TALK to 741741.

National Domestic Violence Hotline: People who have experienced domestic abuse can get confidential help at thehotline.org or by calling 800-799-7233.

[gautiersylvain]

“People Just Don’t Care”: ‘Leaving Neverland’ Director on Why Michael Jackson Won the Court of Public Opinion

[gnc-centric]

"So yeah, for well over a decade, the discourse  around low birth rates and demographic crisis has  treated as a major issue in the media. But in  the Korean press, this population crisis usually framed through issues like extreme competition  among young people, economic insecurity,  shigh private education costs, and long working hours. They are all right, but in other words, the domino narrative is that young people cannot  afford to have children even if they want to, because they cannot find stable jobs or earn  enough money, but in fact, that is a very male-centered perspective. And under patriarchy,  men are still expected to be breadwinners who earn enough to have a household and provide financial  stability.

So this narrative is really expressing male anxiety, that it has become harder for them  to fulfill that role and build a family. For women though, the more fundamental issue is often not  just money, it is the fear that marriage and childbirth will derail their lives and destroy the  work and stability they have built for themselves. But that side of the story is often overlooked in  both media coverage and political discussion. In fact, as more women have entered higher education  and the workforce, there has also been a growing  resentment toward women's economic independence  with some people suggesting that women's social advancement has made it harder for men to find jobs and become household heads.  

And when the media covers women who do not  give birth, it almost always portrays them as women who just desperately want children, but are  unable to have them for various reasons. And the idea that some women simply do not want children  in the first place is rarely acknowledged. And that is one reason the 4B movement is almost never  taken up as a serious agenda in mainstream media, especially in the major outlet. And a woman  who does not want marriage, childbirth, or even a male partner is treated in a Korean society almost like an alien or a herotic. And the media seems to think that even giving  such women visibility might influence other women who are still seen as so-called desirable  or normal by Korean society.

So the favored choice is to deny them a platform altogether.  And this is not dramatically different even in media that are considered progressive, and  that's another interesting part. Some people even argue that because Korea as a whole remains  so conservative, what passes as progressive here is still far less progressive than what that  word would imply in many Western contexts. So even progressive media and progressive political  parties do not take a particularly critical stance towards patriarchy itself.

So issues like the 4B  movement are simply never adopted as part of the agenda. And one last thing I want to say is there is a thing that the real power of the media lies not only in what it covers, but in what it chooses  not to cover, I think that explains very well how political that silence can be. And to me, this  deliberate and thorough indifference toward 4B women is one of the clearest expressions  of the mood of mainstream Korean society."

-Ji-Hye Jeong