"Nobody “owes” anyone sex. We don’t lend and borrow sex like we lend and borrow money or our favorite sweaters. But plenty of people consider or engage in sex or certain sexual activities out of feelings of obligation or duty. Obligatory sex usually feels crappy and boring at best, and horrible, emotionally and physically, at worst, especially over time if it becomes a habit. When we’re really not interested in partnered sex at all and agree to it, it may even feel like rape. When our partner is doing their homework in their heads during sex rather than being fully present with us, or just saying yes to avoid an argument, it can feel pretty weird, and create some unhealthy patterns.
Maybe your partner performed oral sex for you, so you feel that – no matter what you want – you’re obliged to perform a similar or understood-to-be-equal activity. Your boyfriend or girlfriend is someone you feel you don’t deserve, or who is somehow above you, and sex seems like a good way to even the scales. Friends may push or pressure you to become sexually active or engage in sex for their own agendas. Perhaps your partner has had a level of previous sexual experience you feel you’ve got to live up to. Maybe it’s been a certain length of time at which point it seems sex should happen, by some arbitrary and invisible timeline, or it’s been a few weeks since you had sex, and even though you’re not in the mood, for whatever reason, you don’t want to leave your partner without sex from you.
If your partner performed oral sex for you, and they’re expecting something in return you aren’t interested in, then you can let them know you aren’t interested in whatever that is and fill them in on the things you ARE or may be interested in instead. If your boyfriend or girlfriend is someone you feel you don’t deserve, or who is somehow above you, then you deal with the esteem issues or relationship imbalances that are causing you to feel that way. If it’s been a certain length of time at which point it seems sex should happen, by some arbitrary and invisible timeline, then you can start talking to your partner about feeling that way, and discuss, between you, what both of your own individual timelines are and what you feel ready for and want. If it’s been a few weeks since you had sex, and you’re still not in the mood, start talking: look into why that might be, like relationship or sexual problems, stress, depression, low libido, or just not feeling up to sex at this point in time. You owe your partner communication and honesty, not sexual favors, and they owe you patience and understanding."
I had a therapist once--one of the good ones I've ever had, I miss that guy--who told me 'sex should be like communism, not commerce' and that was one of the reasons my ex husband told me to stop seeing him. But yeah, 'sex is communism' still lives in my head rent-free.
Breakup with anyone who makes you feel like sex is tit for tat. Break up immediately.
chien-shiung wu disproved a fundamental law of physics and the nobel committee pretended she didn't exist
let me tell you about the most disrespected physicist you've never heard of.
chien-shiung wu was born in china in 1912. her father was radical for his time — he believed girls deserved education and founded a school for them. wu thrived. she moved to the US in 1936 to pursue graduate studies in physics at berkeley. she never saw her parents again. they died during the turmoil in china while she was building a career on the other side of the world.
she became one of the foremost experts on nuclear physics. during the manhattan project — yes THAT manhattan project — she was recruited to help solve a critical problem with nuclear reactors. she fixed it. she was one of the few women involved and her contributions were quietly filed away while the men around her became famous.
but the real betrayal came later.
in 1956 two theoretical physicists — tsung-dao lee and chen-ning yang — proposed something wild. they suggested that parity — a fundamental symmetry law in physics that had been assumed true for decades — might not hold in certain nuclear reactions. basically they were saying the universe might not be symmetrical in the way everyone believed. it was a bold claim. but it was just theory. someone needed to prove it.
they went to wu. because she was the best experimentalist alive. they knew it. everyone knew it.
wu designed and conducted one of the most elegant and difficult experiments in the history of physics. she cooled cobalt-60 atoms to near absolute zero and observed their radioactive decay. the results were clear. parity was violated. a law of physics that had been treated as sacred was wrong. she proved it.
the physics world was shaken. this was a massive deal. one of those moments that reshapes how we understand the universe.
in 1957 lee and yang won the nobel prize in physics. the fastest nobel award in history at the time. they proposed the theory. wu proved it. guess who the committee left out.
chien-shiung wu.
the two men who said "hey what if this law is wrong" got the highest honor in science. the woman who actually demonstrated that it WAS wrong got nothing. not even a shared prize. not even a mention.
let that sit for a second. in physics, theory without experimental proof is just a guess. lee and yang's idea would have remained a hypothesis without wu's experiment. she didn't assist. she didn't support. she DID the work that made the discovery real.
and it's not like she was unknown. she was called "the first lady of physics." her colleagues respected her enormously. lee and yang themselves acknowledged her work was essential. but the nobel committee looked at three chinese-american physicists, picked the two men, and moved on.
she spent the rest of her career continuing to do extraordinary work. she became the first woman president of the american physical society. she received other awards eventually. but the nobel — the one that would have put her in textbooks forever — never came.
she once said "i wonder whether the tiny atoms and nuclei, or the mathematical symbols, or the DNA molecules have any preference for either masculine or feminine treatment." she knew exactly what was happening. she just kept working anyway.
wu died in 1997. her gravestone reads "she was one of the giants of physics." and she was. but the world made her fight for every inch of recognition while handing glory to the men standing next to her.
the next time someone tells you science is a meritocracy remember chien-shiung wu. remember that she broke the universe's symmetry and the system still couldn't see past hers.
I grew up in the 1960s on the West Side of Chicago. My mother died when I was six months old. She was only 16 and I never learned what it was that she died from - my grandmother, who drank more than most, couldn’t tell me later on.
It was my grandmother that took care of me. And she wasn’t a bad person - in fact she had a side to her that was so wonderful. She read to me, baked me stuff and cooked the best sweet potatoes. She just had this drinking problem. She would bring drinking partners home from the bar and after she got intoxicated and passed out these men would do things to me. It started when I was four or five years old and it became a regular occurrence. I’m certain my grandmother didn’t know anything about it.
She worked as a domestic in the suburbs. It took her two hours to get to work and two hours to get home. So I was a latch-key kid - I wore a key around my neck and I would take myself to kindergarten and let myself back in at the end of the day. And the molesters knew about that, and they took advantage of it.
I would watch women with big glamorous hair and sparkly dresses standing on the street outside our house. I had no idea what they were up to; I just thought they were shiny. As a little girl, all I ever wanted was to be shiny.
One day I asked my grandmother what the women were doing and she said, “Those women take their panties off and men give them money.” And I remember saying to myself, “I’ll probably do that” because men had already been taking my panties off.
To look back now, I dealt with it all amazingly well. Alone in that house, I had imaginary friends to keep me company that I would sing and dance around with - an imaginary Elvis Presley, an imaginary Diana Ross and the Supremes. I think that helped me deal with things.
Even though I was a smart kid, I disconnected from school. Going into the 1970s, I became the kind of girl who didn’t know how to say “no” - if the little boys in the community told me that they liked me or treated me nice, they could basically have their way with me. By the time I was 14, I’d had two children with boys in the community, two baby girls. My grandmother started to say that I needed to bring in some money to pay for these kids, because there was no food in the house, we had nothing.
So, one evening - it was actually Good Friday - I went along to the corner of Division Street and Clark Street and stood in front of the Mark Twain hotel. I was wearing a two-piece dress costing $3.99, cheap plastic shoes, and some orange lipstick which I thought might make me look older.
I was 14 years old and I cried through everything. But I did it. I didn’t like it, but the five men who dated me that night showed me what to do. They knew I was young and it was almost as if they were excited by it.
I made $400 but I didn’t get a cab home that night. I went home by train and I gave most of that money to my grandmother, who didn’t ask me where it came from.
The following weekend I returned to Division and Clark, and it seemed like my grandmother was happy when I brought the money home.
But the third time I went down there, a couple of guys pistol-whipped me and put me in the trunk of their car. They had approached me before because I was, as they called it, “unrepresented” on the street. All I knew was the light in the trunk of the car and then the faces of these two guys with their pistol. First they took me to a cornfield out in the middle of nowhere and raped me. Then they took me to a hotel room and locked me in the closet. That’s the kind of thing pimps will do to break a girl’s spirits. They kept me in there for a long time. I was begging them to let me out because I was hungry, but they would only allow me out of the closet if I agreed to work for them.
They pimped me for a while, six months or so. I wasn’t able to go home. I tried to get away but they caught me, and when they caught me they hurt me so bad. Later on, I was trafficked by other men. The physical abuse was horrible, but the real abuse was the mental abuse - the things they would say that would just stick and which you could never get from under.
Pimps are very good at torture, they’re very good at manipulation. Some of them will do things like wake you in the middle of the night with a gun to your head. Others will pretend that they value you, and you feel like, “I’m Cinderella, and here comes my Prince Charming”. They seem so sweet and so charming and they tell you: “You just have to do this one thing for me and then you’ll get to the good part.” And you think, “My life has already been so hard, what’s a little bit more?” But you never ever do get to the good part.
When people describe prostitution as being something that is glamorous, elegant, like in the story of Pretty Woman, well that doesn’t come close to it. A prostitute might sleep with five strangers a day. Across a year, that’s more than 1,800 men she’s having sexual intercourse or oral sex with. These are not relationships, no one’s bringing me any flowers here, trust me on that. They’re using my body like a toilet.
And the johns - the clients - are violent. I’ve been shot five times, stabbed 13 times. I don’t know why those men attacked me, all I know is that society made it comfortable for them to do so. They brought their anger or whatever it was and they decided to wreak havoc on a prostitute, knowing I couldn’t go to the police and if I did I wouldn’t be taken seriously. I actually count myself very lucky. I knew some beautiful girls who were murdered out there on the streets.
I prostituted for 14 or 15 years before I did any drugs. But after a while, after you’ve turned as many tricks as you can, after you’ve been strangled, after someone’s put a knife to your throat or someone’s put a pillow over your head, you need something to put a bit of courage in your system.
I was a prostitute for 25 years, and in all that time I never once saw a way out. But on 1 April 1997, when I was nearly 40 years old, a customer threw me out of his car. My dress got caught in the door and he dragged me six blocks along the ground, tearing all the skin off my face and the side of my body.
I went to the County Hospital in Chicago and they immediately took me to the emergency room. Because of the condition I was in, they called in a police officer, who looked me over and said: “Oh I know her. She’s just a hooker. She probably beat some guy and took his money and got what she deserved.” And I could hear the nurse laughing along with him. They pushed me out into the waiting room as if I wasn’t worth anything, as if I didn’t deserve the services of the emergency room after all.
And it was at that moment, while I was waiting for the next shift to start and for someone to attend to my injuries, that I began to think about everything that had happened in my life. Up until that point I had always had some idea of what to do, where to go, how to pick myself up again. Suddenly it was like I had run out of bright ideas.
A doctor came and took care of me and she asked me to go and see social services in the hospital. What I knew about social services was they were anything but social. But they gave me a bus pass to go to a place called Genesis House, which was run by an awesome Englishwoman named Edwina Gateley, who became a great hero and mentor for me. She helped me turn my life around. It was a safe house, and I had everything that I needed there. I didn’t have to worry about paying for clothes, food, getting a job. They told me to take my time and stay as long as I needed - and I stayed almost two years. My face healed, my soul healed. I got Brenda back.
Usually, when a woman gets out of prostitution, she doesn’t want to talk about it. What man will accept her as a wife? What person will hire her in their employment? And to begin with, after I left Genesis House, that was me too. I just wanted to get a job, pay my taxes and be like everybody else. But I started to do some volunteering with sex workers and to help a university researcher with her fieldwork. After a while I realised that nobody was helping these young ladies. Nobody was going back and saying, “That’s who I was, that’s where I was. This is who I am now. You can change too, you can heal too.” So in 2008, together with Stephanie Daniels-Wilson, we founded the Dreamcatcher Foundation.
A dreamcatcher is a Native American object that you hang near a child’s cot. It is supposed to chase away children’s nightmares. That’s what we want to do - we want to chase away those bad dreams, those bad things that happen to young girls and women. The recent documentary film Dreamcatcher, directed by Kim Longinotto, showed the work that we do. We meet up with women who are still working on the street and we tell them, “There is a way out, we’re ready to help you when you’re ready to be helped.” We try to get through that brainwashing that says, “You’re born to do this, there’s nothing else for you.“
I also run after-school clubs with young girls who are exactly like I was in the 1970s. I can tell as soon as I meet a girl if she is in danger, but there is no fixed pattern. You might have one girl who’s quiet and introverted and doesn’t make eye contact. Then there might be another who’s loud and obnoxious and always getting in trouble. They’re both suffering abuse at home but they’re dealing with it in different ways - the only thing they have in common is that they are not going to talk about it. But in time they understand that I have been through what they’re going through, and then they talk to me about it.
People say different things about prostitution. Some people think that it would actually help sex workers more if it were decriminalized. I think it’s true to say that every woman has her own story. It may be OK for this girl, who is paying her way through law school, but not for this girl, who was molested as a child, who never knew she had another choice, who was just trying to get money to eat.
But let me say this too. However the situation starts off for a girl, that’s not how the situation will end up. It might look OK now, the girl in law school might say she only has high-end clients that come to her through an agency, that she doesn’t work on the streets but arranges to meet people in hotel rooms, but the first time that someone hurts her, that’s when she really sees her situation for what it is. You always get that crazy guy slipping through and he has three or four guys behind him, and they force their way into your room and gang rape you, and take your phone and all your money. And suddenly you have no means to make a living and you’re beaten up too. That is the reality of prostitution.
Three years ago, I became the first woman in the state of Illinois to have her convictions for prostitution wiped from her record. It was after a new law was brought in, following lobbying from the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, a group that seeks to shift the criminal burden away from the victims of sexual trafficking. Women who have been tortured, manipulated and brainwashed should be treated as survivors, not criminals.
So I am here to tell you - there is life after so much damage, there is life after so much trauma. There is life after people have told you that you are nothing, that you are worthless and that you will never amount to anything. There is life - and I’m not just talking about a little bit of life. There is a lot of life.
i have seen this post many many times on my dash, and yet it only has 2200 notes…. it makes me think that the only friends of prostitution survivors are radical feminists. no one else will listen.
So annoying to me when people think citing the actions of FICTIONAL female characters counts as evidence that femininity doesn't hold women back. "Omg, she can run and fight with heels and a dress! What an icon, I can't even walk in heels." She is not real, and therefore her body doesn't follow the same laws that ours do. She will do whatever the writers want her to, because she is ANIMATED. And even if the actor is a real person, the scene is choreographed, rehearsed and edited with CGI. It's fake!
Not only do these types of outfits make the stunts harder to pull off, they can also make them more dangerous.
“I actually was put into a fire sequence in a negligee,” Donna Keegan, whose credits include “Independence Day” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” told me. “Do you know how flammable negligees are? They just kept dousing flame retardant stuff all over it.”
“One time, I had to dive through a plate glass window with a spaghetti strap top on and in a miniskirt with Doc Marten boots,” Keegan recalled. “You're not getting candy glass for that kind of piece. No matter what they're going to do, there are shards. ... You come out a porcupine, bleeding everywhere.”
Their skin's exposed, and they often don’t have any padding. “Try doing stunts with no pads and no clothing. I have been thrown down marble stairs in a bra and underwear,” Keegan said, remarking that the first time she saw that set, “I looked at that and went, ‘You're kidding me, right?’”
Source: Documentary lauds Hollywood stuntwomen, who do everything men do but in high heels (Sept. 22, 2020)
One of the most sought-after stuntwomen in Hollywood, Ms. [Zoe] Bell crashes through glass, slams into book cases and leaps from tall buildings. She has done stunts on more than 20 films and television series, including "Alias," "Kill Bill" and "Xena: Warrior Princess." Asked if she could accomplish a 22-story spinning fall from a skyscraper for 2004's "Catwoman," Ms. Bell thought for a moment and said, "Yes, I can." To get the chilling fall just right, she did it four times.
"It's not until after you've been hit by a car and landed all right that the fear kicks in," she said.
Stuntwomen often face greater dangers than their male cohorts. While stuntmen wear pads under their clothing, stuntwomen in action films are often minimally clothed; there is no place to hide padding or protective gear in their bikinis or ball gowns. Doubling for Sharon Stone, Ms. Bell had to do the high fall in "Catwoman" in high heels. "Because that's how women fight and die—in heels," she said, with a slight roll of her eyes.
Source: Fighting and Falling in High Heels (Updated July 23, 2011)
I’m going to say something that might sound crazy. Suicide and suicide attempts are sort of a societal alarm bell that says “something is very wrong with the environment this individual was in.” A living being choosing to take themselves out of existence is the most extreme act of distress there is. The state stepping in to silence this alarm bell by funneling suicidal people into a state sanctioned euthanasia program, normalizing this act through a socially accepted bureaucratic system, is not a good thing. It goes hand in hand with the state’s interest in maintaining the status quo at the expense of the population and the psychiatric industry’s interest in individualizing societal problems to extract profit and aid the existing system. It’s saying “there are no complaints here, just people with sick brains, carry on.”
This isn’t directly related to your point but I’ve been thinking about euthanasia lately so I wanted to bring this up as well.
I see liberal support for euthanasia as connected to support for things like prostitution and surrogacy. They are all seen as issues of bodily autonomy, and many uninformed supporters don’t look past that to see the societal issues at play. In fantasy land where everyone is in control of their own lives, there’s no reason why they can’t do whatever they want, even extreme things, to their own bodies, but we don’t live in fantasy land. You can’t consent to sex if there is a financial incentive and you can’t consent to suicide if you have the want to commit suicide disease. And you also can’t ignore the way that poor women especially are funneled towards survival sex work and now state sanctioned euthanasia
10 Female Written Short Stories Everyone Should Read
I have seen a post circulating for a while that lists 10 short stories everyone should read and, while these are great works, most of them are older and written by white men. I wanted to make a modern list that features fresh, fantastic and under represented voices. Enjoy!
1. A Temporary Matter by Jhumpa Lahiri — A couple in a failing marriage share secrets during a blackout.
2. Stone Animals by Kelly Link — A family moves into a haunted house.
3. Reeling for the Empire by Karen Russell — Women are sold by their families to a silk factory, where they are slowly transformed into human silkworms.
4. Call My Name by Aimee Bender — A woman wearing a ball gown secretly auditions men on the subway.
5. The Man on the Stairs by Miranda July — A woman wakes up to a noise on the stairs.
6. Brownies by ZZ Packer — Rival Girl Scout troops are separated by race.
7. City of My Dreams by Zsuzi Gartner — A woman works at a shop selling food-inspired soap and tries not to think about her past.
8. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor — A family drives from Georgia to Florida, even though a serial killer is on the loose.
9. Hitting Budapest by NoViolet Bulawayo — A group of children, led by a girl named Darling, travel to a rich neighborhood to steal guavas.
10. You’re Ugly, Too by Lorrie Moore — A history professor flies to Manhattan to spend Halloween weekend with her younger sister.
oh i have some of these too! many are science-fiction or science-fantasy, because the woman in those genres are severely under-represented ! The first two authors are slightly older, but their works are so important in the development of the roles of women in scifi as a genre so!
23. “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and “Mountain Ways” by Ursula K. Le Guin — The first is a study of philosophical questions similar to the trolley problem, told in very loose form. The second is a science-fantasy story about two women navigating love and sexuality in their society’s polyamorous marriage rituals. But honestly you should read all of Le Guin’s short stories and novels, she’s amazing.
24. “Bloodchild” by Octavia Butler — One of my all-time FAVORITE short stories, about a future where humans live alongside large insect-like aliens, and serve as hosts for their eggs and larval young. It’s gruesome, gory, unsettling, and honestly pretty horrific but it’s really wonderful–if you can handle horror in your stories I highly recommended it. Butler’s novels are also wonderful, please check them out if you can (not all of them are this unsettling)
25. “The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi” by Pat Cadigan — A trans allegory in which future humans go through surgery to become invertebrate sea creatures (cephalopods and arthropods mostly) in order to better work in space. Wonderfully weird in so many ways.
26. “From the Lost Diary of Treefrog7” and “The Palm Tree Bandit” by Nnedi Okorafor — Lost Diary is a story about a woman and her husband exploring an alien jungle told through research log-style journal entries. Very much survival horror scifi. Palm Tree Bandit is told as a mother reciting a story to her daughter as she braids her hair, about her great-grandmother who started a kind of small revolution for women in Nigeria. Nnedi’s novels and other short stories, as well as her works within the comics industry, are all fantastic, so look into her more if you can!!!
I haven’t seen it yet on this post so I want to add probably my all-time favorite short story!
27. “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison — implicit racial biases analyzed through two girls’ stories as they grow up. Every paragraph is a new perspective on race and prejudice and it really makes you think.
Here is my current collection of feminist books TBR one by one. Some have not arrived yet but I'm counting them.
What do you think? Any experience with these books, did you enjoy them? What books am I missing? I know I'm missing works by Dworkin but I'm saving up for those.
JESSICA CHOU Has A YouTube Channel Teaching Women About Basic Vehicle Maintenance
This is quite an interesting YouTube channel concept, and it shows that … Asian chicks kick ass! JESSICA CHOU is a young Asian American woman who has a YouTube channel which basically teaches other girls and women about how to fix their car.
“I think we don’t see as many female mechanics because the industry is still so heavily dominated by men. When we think of a mechanic, we think of men. When we see ads or posters of mechanics, we see men. When we see shows about cars, we see men. It will take a long time to change all of this, but in the 10 short months that I’ve been on this journey, I’ve met so many incredible people who are out to change the game.”
male mechanics are known to overprice and add on unnecessary services to female patrons because they assume they dont know shit about cars. go jessica!!!
<p>Abuse driven not just by misogyny, but by financial gain</p>
Council of Europe Strasbourg 11 June 2026
Women are being pushed from online spaces, harming democracy
The Council of Europe has launched a new recommendation aimed at strengthening accountability for technology-facilitated violence against women and girls, a rapidly growing form of abuse that increasingly threatens women's safety, dignity and participation in public life.
Technology-facilitated violence includes cyberstalking, online harassment, the non-consensual sharing of intimate images, privacy violations, misogynistic hate campaigns, threats and image manipulation. Such abuse often accompanies other forms of violence, including domestic violence, allowing perpetrators to extend surveillance, coercion and control through digital tools.
Europe comes together against online violence against women and girls
Many representatives of the Council of Europe’s 46 member countries attended the 10 June launch, which was held online and at the Council of Europe’s headquarters in Strasbourg. Featured speakers at the event praised the recommendation, adopted by the Committee of Ministers in March, for providing guidance to European countries on preventing and combating violence committed, assisted, aggravated or amplified through digital technologies. It also sets out measures to ensure that perpetrators, facilitators and, where appropriate, technology companies are held accountable.
Catherine Van De Heyning, Professor of European fundamental rights law at the University of Antwerp and Deputy Public Prosecutor in Antwerp's cybercrime division, described the recommendation as “a major step forward in ensuring that justice systems are equipped to respond effectively to technology-facilitated violence against women and girls.”
She highlighted emerging forms of abuse driven not only by misogyny or harassment, but also by financial gain, citing a recent case in which Belgian authorities arrested a Dutch national accused of operating Telegram groups that distributed and sold intimate images and personal information of women without their consent.
Online violence harming women in public life
The recommendation warns that technology-facilitated violence can lead to anxiety, depression, reputational harm, economic loss and withdrawal from online spaces. It also notes that women in public life are particularly affected, including journalists, politicians, human-rights defenders and women’s rights activists, who are frequently targeted by coordinated online attacks intended to intimidate or silence them.
To address these challenges, the recommendation calls for stronger laws and policies, effective investigations and access to justice, improved support services for victims, enhanced international cooperation and greater responsibility for technology companies and online platforms. It also promotes prevention through education, digital literacy and awareness-raising.
Also participating in the launch, María Rún Bjarnadóttir, head of legal at the Office of the national commissioner of the Icelandic police and a member of the Council of Europe’s GREVIO monitoring body (which deals with violence against women) stressed the need to strengthen law-enforcement capacity and to keep pace with rapidly evolving technologies such as digital forensic expertise.
The recommendation forms part of the Council of Europe's broader efforts to ensure that women and girls can participate fully, equally and safely in the digital environment and that technological innovation advances human rights rather than undermining them.
On 20 May 2026, Brazil adopted Presidential Decree No. 12,976, establishing a comprehensive framework to address violence against women onli
By Diego Bonomo, Jadzia Pierce, Gustavo Akkerman & Anna Sophia Oberschelp de Meneses on June 11, 2026
Posted in International, Uncategorized
On 20 May 2026, Brazil adopted Presidential Decree No. 12,976, establishing a comprehensive framework to address violence against women online. Adopted alongside a parallel decree (No. 12,975) reforming intermediary liability, it reflects a more assertive approach to regulating online harms, including those driven or amplified by AI. Together, these measures will require companies to reassess internal processes to ensure rapid content removal and more proactive monitoring, including for AI‑enabled services.
While framed as a gender‑based violence measure, the Decree reflects a broader shift in regulatory expectations from reactive moderation to proactive platform duties and systemic accountability. It also forms part of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s administration’s broader efforts, ongoing since 2023, to regulate social media in the absence of comprehensive legislation. This approach has already triggered constitutional and policy debate, including regarding the use of presidential decrees to impose substantive obligations and potential implications for freedom of expression.
A broad, technology‑aware definition of digital violence
A key feature of the Decree is its expansive definition of “violence against women in the digital environment.” It goes beyond traditional offences such as harassment or threats to include conduct causing physical, psychological, political or economic harm, including where amplified by digital technologies.
The Decree expressly covers AI‑generated or manipulated content, such as synthetic intimate images and AI‑enabled harassment. This effectively integrates AI‑related harms into mainstream online safety rules rather than treating them separately. The framework is grounded in principles such as victim protection, privacy, and the prohibition of re‑victimisation.
From notice-and-action to structured platform duties
The Decree introduces a more structured regime for platforms hosting user‑generated content. In particular, platforms must:
provide accessible reporting channels;
assess and respond to notifications promptly;
communicate decisions and reasoning to both notifier and user; and
direct users to appropriate support services.
Platforms may retain content where there is reasonable doubt as to its illegality, provided the decision is justified and communicated, preserving proportionality and procedural fairness.
These obligations should be read in light of a 2025 Brazilian Supreme Court decision that significantly limited the traditional “safe harbor” under Article 19 of the Marco Civil da Internet. Under that regime, platforms were generally only liable for third‑party content if they failed to comply with a court‑ordered takedown. The Court’s decision departs from this approach, indicating that platforms may be required to remove unlawful content directly, including upon user notice, without prior judicial intervention, and introducing a broader “duty of care” (dever de cuidado). While not expressly codified, the Decree clearly reflects and operationalizes this shift by embedding more structured notice-handling accountability requirements.
Systemic liability and design‑level accountability
The Decree introduces a form of systemic liability, focusing on whether platforms implement adequate measures to prevent or limit harm at scale. The assessment shifts from individual moderation decisions to the effectiveness of systems, processes and safeguards.
Crucially, isolated incidents are unlikely to trigger liability on their own. Instead, the focus is on whether the platform’s systems, processes, and technical measures are sufficiently robust and effective.
Rapid removal obligations for intimate content
The Decree imposes particularly strict requirements for non‑consensual intimate content. Platforms must:
remove the content within two hours of notification; and
ensure that the content is technically marked and blocked from re-upload across the service.
This combination of rapid response and forward-looking prevention is significant. It reflects an understanding that harm in the digital environment is not limited to initial publication, but is exacerbated by repeated dissemination. From an operational perspective, this may involve techniques such as automated detection, hashing technologies, and cross-platform content identification tools.
Proactive duties and coordinated harassment
Another important departure from traditional models is the introduction of proactive monitoring obligations. Platforms are required to identify indicators of coordinated harassment campaigns and to take proportionate measures to reduce the reach and visibility of harmful content. Notably, these obligations apply even in the absence of a complaint from the victim. Platforms are therefore expected to act ex officio where they detect patterns suggesting coordinated abuse.
The Decree places particular emphasis on protecting women with public exposure, such as journalists or political figures, reflecting concerns around the use of online harassment to silence participation in public life.
Targeted regulation of AI-generated harms
The Decree also addresses certain risks associated with AI-generated content. It prohibits the generation or modification of intimate content involving third parties without consent and requires platforms offering AI-based functionalities to implement technical and procedural safeguards to detect and block harmful outputs. These safeguards must be deployed in a manner proportionate to the scale and risk profile of the service.
These provisions are particularly noteworthy in light of ongoing global debates around deepfakes and generative AI misuse. They signal an expectation that platforms will not only moderate harmful outputs, but also actively design their systems to prevent such outputs from being generated in the first place.
Enforcement and broader policy approach
Enforcement of the Decree is entrusted to Brazil’s Data Protection Authority (ANPD), which reflects a broader trend toward regulatory consolidation with the ANPD increasingly positioned at the intersection of data protection, online safety, and, potentially, future AI governance. In parallel, the Decree provides for the development of a coordinated framework through which multiple public authorities would work together on prevention, protection, and victim support. It requires the Ministry of Justice and Public Security to establish an interministerial working group, which will be tasked with designing the structure and implementation of this framework.
Parallel reform of intermediary liability
The Decree was adopted alongside a separate measure (Decree No. 12,975) amending Brazil’s framework under the 2014 Civil Rights Framework for the Internet (Marco Civil da Internet), following the abovementioned 2025 Supreme Court decision that significantly limited the traditional court‑order‑based safe harbor for online platforms.
While the previous regime largely conditioned liability on failure to comply with a judicial takedown order, the new framework introduces more structured due diligence and organizational obligations. It clarifies that liability may arise in cases of systemic failure to prevent or address certain categories of illegal content, including terrorism, child exploitation, hate speech and gender‑based violence.
Platforms must, in particular, appoint a local legal representative, maintain notice‑and‑action mechanisms, implement ongoing risk monitoring and mitigation measures, and increase transparency around content moderation, advertising and systemic risks.
Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift toward a proactive, risk‑based model of platform accountability, moving beyond purely reactive or court‑driven enforcement. This approach shows clear parallels with developments in the EU, in particular under the Digital Services Act, which similarly emphasizes systemic risk management, transparency and proactive obligations for platforms, as well as ongoing discussions under the AI Act regarding AI‑generated content and safety‑by‑design requirements.
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The Covington team continues to monitor developments in the area of digital services, content moderation and AI‑driven content closely and would be happy to assist companies in assessing the implications of this decree for their products, policies, and compliance strategies.
“supporting neil gaiman isn’t as bad as supporting jk rowling because he isn’t using his money to hurt trans people and he doesn’t seem bigoted!” is a real take i’ve seen and i am going to blow a gasket. “he doesn’t seem bigoted” He raped and trafficked women. Paying for his works and engaging in fandom for them is giving him money and good publicity that he uses to curry good favor with the masses and silence his victims in ongoing legal battles. You are enabling a rapist and abuser.
Last week, the High Court of England and Wales ruled against a mother's appeal against a decision not allowing her to change the surname of her child. The child bears the surname of the father. The father raped and abused the mother, and threatened the child, the mother, and the child's grandparents. The child, who is 5, has not seen the father since late 2021, 4 years ago.
The initial trial judge ruled that changing the child's surname would “constitute a further rupture in the link she has to her father in a way that is not justified or proportionate” (!) and that the surname "is a part of her identity and provides an important connection to her father and paternal heritage." The court refused to overturn this, arguing "no real prospect of success" in challenging the decision.
What about the connection to the mother and her maternal heritage? The mother who is actually involved in raising her? The mother with whom she has an actual ongoing relationship and against whom no abuse is alleged? Rather than an abusive man she last saw as an infant?
Charlotte Proudman, who represented the mother, said, "This is abusive, state-sanctioned harm. You are forcing a child to bear or to continue to retain the father’s surname, the man who raped her mother. That is abuse facilitated by the court."
“In what world would a child want to have the name of a man who raped and abused the mother? How is that upholding important identity and links? It’s really harmful. It just shows that a rapist’s rights are more important than [the] victim and a child’s right to freedom.”
(Article in the Times on this, archived here)
Yes, it's very important to girls to maintain their identity as the product of rape. This has no negative impact on their psychological health whatsoever.
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