Please God, Render Me Beautiful.
By Caitlin Small
It is no grave derailing of the human track to utilise the beauty and comfort of women as a means of gain. For thousands of years, it has been the case. It can be “menial”: beautiful ring girls strutting between boxing rounds to promote sponsorships, magicians with a beautiful assistant to distract from their sleight of hand, anything to keep the business going, to maintain and grow.
It can also be dirty and outright degrading, simple oil for the war machine. What is dangerous, to me anyway, is how increasingly hard it is to see through it. With the rise of AI throughout social media, this was inevitable. Artificially generated photos of female soldiers with an America-First, MAGA agenda are plastered throughout Instagram, notoriously through the model “Jessica Foster”.
This “individual,” or perhaps “creation,” suits better… is just blessed with an accentuated chest, blonde hair, and a beautiful face. She is frequently generated as wearing 5-inch stilettos whilst delivering pro-Trump peace conferences by day. By night, she is an OnlyFans foot fetish model, naturally, because what else is a woman good for if not her body?
Granted, the Instagram account promoting the model has now since been deleted, but not before it amassed over one million followers, which could be construed as convenient. One could suppose. [1]
What this signals, to me at least, is the end towards any meaningful or logical defence of female sex work as a means of agency. Before deepfakes and other generative AI, a modern feminist defence of this line of work was that it functioned as a means for women to reclaim their sexuality, on their own terms. It was a sense of liberation in a way.
Now, when such captivating models no longer need a brain, or flesh, just 1s and 0s, the argument seems rather obsolete. Yes, the vast majority of sex work is indeed carried out on a rather involuntary basis; however, the few who enter on “their own terms” (which is arguable in its own right) will slowly become obsolete.
There can be little need for “terms” to be met if you do not need a woman to present her own. Now, instead, we can pimp from the comfort of our repulsive desks, in between swimming through 4chan cesspools.
It is no novel argument that the model’s creator was not just selling the image of the female body, but politics, and it was lapped up by an audience trained to respect attractive bodies over perspective. NB: This, of course, does not apply to men in any similar political capacity; I do not remember Captain America as a gigolo. Any attractiveness was an embellishment on what his character stood for, not the entire transactional purpose.
We have truly evolved beyond the likes of Hanoi Hannah, whose calm, feminine voice helped spark demoralisation amongst US troops. No matter the opinion on her views or actions, it is objectively true that, at least, she could be reckoned with or queried. There are no bounds, however, with images of war like Jessica Foster. Their creators remain anonymous, and likely within the halls of the state apparatus.
In the grand scheme of global society, the women of Ireland are in a secure position. We have education, bank accounts, and other wonderful baseline human rights generously given at our disposal. Such safeguards to the dignity of the human female experience become objectiveless, however, when it is no longer necessary to protect the vulnerable and exposed. That would be quite a hard task to undertake, we can see, if the individual at hand is a rendering of pixels and does not exist in the corporeal sense.
It is, in a way, terrifying to see the female condition adapt to this digital age. Many of us thought that it would bring institutional change for the better. Easier access to education, social networks, low entry barriers… I could go on; all are pathways to social mobility.
They still exist, but, strangely enough, AI pornographic propaganda, tailored to misogynists, makes it hard to move past the growing sense of lethargy or detachment. What could genuinely be the point? It’s terrible to admit, but I would argue it is only to be expected, and perhaps that is indeed the intention behind it all. A tired woman is a quiet one after all, so we must speak against it.
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