The creepiest AI trend (and four other stories)

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

Dear readers,

I hope you’ve had a good week. At the end of January I went to an event in London chaired by Sheryl Sandberg, the woman who made Facebook profitable, and the first woman hired to the company’s board (which she very recently left). The event (co-organised and funded by the Israeli embassy) was part of a campaign to raise awareness of the sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas on 7th October, as denialism over what happened continues. I managed to ask her a few questions as we were all being rushed out of the room, and I wrote about this brief encounter for the New Statesman magazine (where I work).

One of the things the speakers at the event highlighted was that rape has only been prosecuted as a distinct war crime for the past 30 or so years. The 2002 Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court, was the first international legal instrument to codify rape and sexual violence as specific war crimes. “That history is what makes this moment so critical,” Sandberg said. “The ground we gained for protecting women was so long fought [for].” Now, she warned, we risk losing it. Here is a link to the piece.

And now to the reads….

1) Sexism in (nearly) all the world’s textbooks

A study of 1,255 textbooks in 34 countries, including the UK, US, India, and South Africa, has revealed “widespread gender bias” in 69 per cent of the books included in the research, and across 33 of the countries. According to the Center for Global Development’s press release:

Across all the textbooks analysed, there were twice as many male words (like he, him, his) as there are female words (she, her, hers). And where they were present, women were more often linked to domestic roles, family and appearances—closely linked to words like "wedding", "home", and "beautiful”. Men were more likely to be associated with words like "leader", "authority", and "career", and are most frequently depicted as scientists, for instance. Women are also depicted in more passive roles, with female characters significantly less likely to be the active subject of sentences.

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The level of gender bias in textbooks correlates with broader measures of gender inequality in respective countries. The countries with the least representation of women and girls are Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and South Sudan.

The study’s authors note that in many lower-income countries school books are funded by foreign aid programmes. They specifically examined sexism within these donor-funded books, and found that while they perform slightly better, there is still significant under-representation of women and girls.

Here is a link to the full report and to a blog post about it.

P.s. On Slate, parenting advice columnist Jamilah Lemieux counsels a mother whose teen daughter went from having career ambitions to wanting to meet a “nice rich man” after spending lots of time on TikTok consuming tradwife content.

2) The continuing horror of giving birth in Gaza

As has been widely reported, the ongoing war in Gaza has decimated healthcare for women and babies. An estimated 50,000 women were pregnant in Gaza when the war began in October. For The Cut, Andrea González-Ramírez spoke to Rondi Anderson, a midwife working with the humanitarian aid group Project Hope, who recently spent two weeks on the ground in Gaza. She describes the impact of the virtual absence of care. On the kinds of complications pregnant women are experiencing, she says:

One of the biggest ones is anemia. The leading cause of death in pregnant women is postpartum hemorrhage, and women that are anemic are much more at risk. We are hearing stories of women giving birth in the shelters and outside of hospitals. In terms of miscarriages and bleeding during pregnancy, if women have to go a long way to get to the hospital, they can lose a lot of blood and be at risk for infection.

High blood pressure is the other leading cause of maternal death. You need prenatal care, and you need to be checked so that somebody knows what your blood pressure is before you go into labor. The complications can come on very quickly — you can develop pre-eclampsia, for example. The stress of a pregnant woman living in a tent, displaced from her home and seeing and hearing bombs going off, itself is associated with lots of complications, including stillbirth, premature delivery, and miscarriage.

She was also asked what impacted her the most in her time in Gaza:

I talked to a midwife who did a C-section after a woman had died. A bomb went off and the woman was killed in that explosion; the midwife jumped into action because the mother was gone, but the baby was still alive. I can’t imagine having the presence of mind to do that. It is incredibly heroic. People are willing to give their last drop of energy to take care of each other. Most doctors and other health-care workers are living in tents themselves, displaced after having their houses destroyed and many of their loved ones killed. They are facing the same food insecurity. It makes a powerful statement that they are as resilient as they are.

3) Caravan protesting FGM to journey across Africa

Female genital mutilation survivors and activists are embarking on a two-year journey across 20 African countries to try to end the practice. The caravan will travel across more than 7,000 miles, starting in Mauritania in June and finishing up in Djibouti in 2026. As per Caroline Kimeu’s report in The Guardian:

FGM in Africa has declined over the past three decades, in some places quicker than others. Countries such as Kenya, Burkina Faso, Togo and Liberia have witnessed a rapid decrease, while high levels of support for it still exist in the Gambia, Somalia, Mali and Guinea. In Sierra Leone, it remains legal despite sustained calls for a ban, which were revived after three girls died during an FGM ritual in January. Although many African countries have anti-FGM laws, activists say poor enforcement allows the practice to persist.

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Activists, medical professionals and religious leaders from high prevalence areas in these countries will hold a series of events and radio broadcasts tailored to local challenges in eradicating FGM. At the border of each country, the convoys will hand over an anti-FGM banner and the “Dear Daughter” pledge book, in which families commit to protecting their daughters from the cut, to the next caravan.

4) The creepiest AI trend you’ve seen

In a decidedly unsettling trend that started on 4chan, men are using AI to put clothes on women who have been photographed naked or in revealing clothes, or to remove their tattoos, and of course sharing these images all over the internet along with the hashtag #DignifAI. A website set up with tutorials on how to do this reads: “We’re putting clothes on degenerate women for fun. Come join”. Günseli Yalcinkaya has a piece on this in Dazed. She writes:

The hashtag began last week on 4chan’s /pol/ board when an anon posted a red-pilled manifesto declaring:

With the power of AI
We will clothe the instahots
We will purify them of their tattoos
We will liberate them of their piercings
We will lengthen their skirts.

A scroll of #DignifAI reveals racist as well as misogynist applications. In photographs where women are pictured with dark-skinned partners or children, someone with far too much time on their hands has used AI to replace those men or children with lighter-skinned men or children. This is the kind of story that makes me despair for humanity.

5) Slowness wins

Rebecca Solnit has written for Lithub about how “slow change can be radical change.” This isn’t strictly speaking about gender equality or feminism. In fact, the piece comes from Solnit reflecting on when she understood the urgency of the climate crisis. Still, her thoughts on why an arc of change is necessarily long-term seem relevant to the enormous and complex task of achieving gender equality. Here is a snippet:

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.

And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.

Bonus: Ms Magazine’s guide to feminist books coming out this year | it’s official: social media algorithms amplify misogynistic content

Thank you for reading. See you next week.