"I don't want to be that kind of idiot" (and four other stories)

Five reads on gender (in)equality and the backlash against feminism to end your week.

Good morning. It’s been a long week, so it’s straight to the reads….

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1) Meta’s all-male AI council

Last month, Facebook’s parent company Meta announced the establishment of a new AI advisory council. All four members were white men of similar-looking age. TechCrunch has a good piece digging into what many people might presume was, at this point, obvious: that not factoring in diversity and representation in the development of tech like AI will only lead to the continued perpetuation of racism and other forms of discrimination, like sexism. For instance:

Women are far more likely than men to experience the dark side of AI. Sensity AI found in 2019 that 96% of AI deepfake videos online were nonconsensual, sexually explicit videos. Generative AI has become far more prevalent since then, and women are still the targets of this violative behaviour. 

And also:

There are numerous reports of middle school and high school-aged students making explicit deepfakes of their classmates. While this technology has been around for a while, it’s never been easier to access — you don’t have to be technologically savvy to download apps that are specifically advertised to “undress” photos of women or swap their faces onto pornography. In fact, according to reporting by NBC’s Kat Tenbarge, Facebook and Instagram hosted ads for an app called Perky AI, which described itself as a tool to make explicit images. 

2) Stormy Daniels vs Donald Trump

The big story of the week was a New York jury finding a former US president (and probable Republican candidate once again) guilty of falsifying business records to hide hush money payments to a woman he had slept with, ahead of the 2016 elections. The case wasn’t about Donald Trump’s relationship with Stormy Daniels, an adult film star, per se, but her testimony was central to the proceedings. Early last month, on the 19th, Barbara Rodriguez and Mariel Padilla argued that the trial was a reminder of how difficult it can be for women to be believed. Daniels has spoken about the relationship on numerous occasions to the press, in a book, and in a documentary. Trump, meanwhile, has denied it repeatedly, “accusing her of lying and often criticizing her appearance”:

Nicole Bedera is a sociologist who studies sexual violence and credibility. She said her research into credibility comes down to who society thinks “deserves the blame.”

“When people say that a woman isn’t credible, they aren’t necessarily saying they don’t believe her. They’re just saying that they think she’s to blame for what happened,” she said. “Or rather, even if they’re not going to say that she’s to blame for what happened, saying, ‘We can’t be certain that the man on trial is to be blamed for what happened.’”

P.s. On Ms Magazine’s Fifteen Minutes of Feminism podcast, Moira Donegan and Michele Goodwin talk about why the Trump trial was also about mistreatment of women.

P.p.s., on her Substack,

E. Jean Carroll

, the American journalist and advice columnist who sued Trump in a civil court last year over sexual abuse and defamation, posted jubilantly after the new verdict came in:

STORMY!!

3) Mexico’s two-woman election

Today (Sunday 2nd June), Mexicans go to the polls in an election likely to result in their first-ever woman president. The two leading candidates are women: Claudia Sheinbaum is running for the ruling party; the opposition candidate is Xóchitl Gálvez. Will this be good for women’s rights in a country where rates of gender-based violence and femicide are among the highest in the world? For Le Monde, Anne Vigna profiles 61-year-old Sheinbaum. Vigna outlines the steps that the former mayor of Mexico City took to tackle violence against women, support victims of domestic abuse and better investigate femicides in the capital. But, she writes:

At the national level, violence against women remains endemic. "Our big disappointment is not Claudia but AMLO [outgoing President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the same party as Sheinbaum], who had promised to establish the most feminist government in history and did nothing," said anthropologist Marta Lamas. "Some women blame Claudia for not pushing the president hard enough to address these issues."

A left-wing woman, Sheinbaum has only proclaimed herself as being a feminist for a few years. According to her opponents, it's an opportunistic stance, but according to her supporters, it's a a political evolution. "My position has always been that of our movement, whose motto is 'For the good of all, first the poor,'" she explained. "However, I recognize that we have a debt toward the women of this country and that we must listen to their demands."

Also, NPR interviewed the esteemed Mexican writer Elena Poniatowska, 92, who has long chronicled the struggles of Mexican women, about the “triumph” of this election:

“This is how I imagined (it). I worked for it. And I not only hoped it would happen. Women now have invaded territories that before they didn’t know,” Poniatowska says. “The only woman they used to speak about was the artist Frida Kahlo… And so now there are other women scientists, astronomers, women in hospitals, and women everywhere."

4) The secret history of the Pozzi forceps

For New Lines, Diane de Vignemont has written a fascinating essay about Pozzi forceps, a medical instrument used in gynaecological procedures for more than 100 years that causes many of the women it is used on (the writer included) incredible pain. The piece is about Samuel Pozzi, the father of French gynaecology and inventor of tenaculum forceps, but it is also about the broader story of patriarchal medicine and women being gaslit over painful medical experiences. She writes:

At a time when radical hysterectomies were still the norm to deal with cysts and other uterine diseases, [the tenaculum forceps] allowed doctors to gain access to their patient’s uterus through the cervix. This meant that they could treat their ailments in a less invasive manner.

Pozzi had obviously been inspired by his time as a field medic two decades prior. In his revolutionary “Treatise on Gynecology,” published one year later and soon translated into five languages, he described his new tool in the simplest of terms, as “a forceps (which is none other than the American bullet extractor).”

As for its use, he wrote the following: “The tenaculum only makes two insignificant stings, which cause no harm and which barely bleed.”

And also:

“That’s the ‘small pinch’ they warn you about prior to insertion,” historian Evan Elizabeth Hart told me: “the literal stapling of your cervix. Without anesthesia.” Hart specializes in the history of women’s health activism at Missouri Western State University. She’s not afraid to call this what it is — medical gaslighting.

5) Re-reading Andrea Dworkin

The anti-porn radical Andrea Dworkin is (probably) one of the most challenging of second-wave feminist thinkers. On The Point, Sophie Lewis has written on the difficulties and inconsistencies that Dworkin and her work present. Here is a snippet:

Notwithstanding my own feminist ultra-radicalism and the overlaps between her personal experience of gender and my own, her state of emergency about the “terrorism” of porn left me cold. Rereading her in my mid-thirties has been, then, a semi-desperate attempt to relate to the current resurgence of enthusiasm for her thought. Part of me has wanted to have my mind changed, if only so I could stop feeling so crazy.

And also:

Dworkin is back, and you know what? I’ve done the reading. After all, the gay liberation veteran Martin Duberman was publishing her biography in 2020, and the Marxist John Berger speculated once that Dworkin might be “the most misrepresented writer in the western world.” Not only have I done the reading, but I’ve done what all these peremptory Dworkin experts told me to—the ones who always bark that we whorephilic queers have simply misunderstood—and read with an open mind. Fateman strongly implies that all feminist critiques of Dworkin are simply symptoms of “the feminine/feminist race to perfection which renders our movement’s dialectics shameful,” and just out to “castigate a woman of brilliance and ambition.” I certainly wouldn’t want to commit sexism, or overlook the value of one (dialectical) motor of women’s liberation. The charge intimidates me; I don’t want to be that kind of idiot.

Bonus: Taylor Swift studies | “Really glacial progress” | Those protonatalists

Thank you for reading. See you next time.