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Whether or not they’re victims in a strict legal sense the girls are clearly victims here.
More generally I feel like men wildly underestimate how bad it can feel to be the object of unwanted, intrusive sexual desire/advances due to “men be horny” type attitudes. I spent most of my life rolling my eyes and thinking “how bad can it be to be DESIRED” but over the years I acquired a few stalkers and have had a few women make aggressive and clearly unwanted sexual advances. It actually feels pretty shitty and occupies a lot of your idle thinking. It makes you feel guilty! Like you did something wrong. And this was the mildest stuff imaginable. Having my peers make (even fake) nudes of me would be insanely, ridiculously disturbing and cause legitimate anguish.
I will say upfront that I don't know the details of your situation, so I could be way off base here, but I'm reminded of Dawkins's Dear Muslima:
People desire other people. Some people will desire other people who don't want to be desired. Coordination is a really hard problem. It's not always as easy as one thinks to let it be known what they want and don't want, especially when people really do tend to change their minds when new opportunities are presented to them, and shit tests abound. And generally (though not in your case) it's a problem that causes men to have to be the ones to have to put themselves out there and take the initiative. Just be glad that we live in a society where the norms are such that you won't be physically hurt and you have the freedom to say no.
This argument proves way too much. Yes, there is female genital mutilation in other societies and it’s abhorrent. That doesn’t give American high school boys, or socially maladjusted or inept men in general, free rein to harass women.
Well, Dawkins's point is that feminists ranting about how women are made to feel uncomfortable by men asking for coffee is trivial, and that if feminists really want to help women, there are actual third world problems they should be dealing with, not first world problems. My point is that being made to feel guilty or awkward over difficult situations is likewise trivial first world problems, and somewhat of a natural extension of participating in a society composed of layers of social customs built on top of animal instincts. Having to deal with other people is basically just a part of life, and so is having awkward social interactions.
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They are "victims" in the same sense as a boy who a girl spreads rumors about how he's "creepy" or, more on the nose, that he has a small or deformed penis. Which is to say, not in a way which should be actionable.
Having a fake nude made of you is way more disturbing than someone saying you’re creepy or have a small penis.
I agree that you shouldn’t go to jail for fake nudes but I do think it’s absolutely legitimate to suspend or expel boys who do this.
(apparently this line of argument has has upset people traumatized by being called creepy)
Expelling someone is an extreme act. And given my rock-bottom opinion of public school administrators, we just can't trust them to make this kind of decision.
Literally just don’t make AI porn of your female classmates? Why is everyone on this site struggling with this so much?
I won't, wasn't going to and will strictly demand that my kid never does that. And also expulsion is an extreme punishment and we shouldn't casually advocate for it or give school administration any benefit of the doubt.
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There is kind of an issue here in that Evil Maid attacks are so goddamned easy on a campus (especially the collaborative Evil Maid where one conspirator deliberately creates the distraction) that "beyond a reasonable doubt" is unachievable without substantial resources and any lower standard gets loners expelled by bullies manipulating the system. Admittedly, one can do this with actual child porn anyway, but that's trickier to get and, due to being actually illegal, risks the police coming in and actually tracing it to the bully.
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Because there are things that women do to men that are more inherently destructive (in the same lopsided manner as this) due to men and women being different, yet no such uproar is heard when this happens.
When one notices that, one tends to stop caring about "vulnerable women" and switch to "if you want equal rights, you can take equal lefts". Either both genders get special protection from the things [that the other gender does] that will affect them most, or neither do; to do otherwise is not justice.
We have to allow men to make AI porn of their underaged high school classmates because sometimes women do bad things too? And what are the highly destructive things you have in mind?
There's a world of space between "allowing" them to do it and expelling them from school. Much the same way there's a world of space between allowing criminals to do as they please and no-trials street executions for misdemeanors.
Also uncool reframing "not-expelling students" as "allowing bad behavior".
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We have to allow boys to make AI porn of their similarly-aged high school classmates (yes, I see what you did there) because we have freedom of expression in this country. We can resist being stampeded into doing it anyway because "vulnerable women" (or girls) by noting that women (and girls) ain't angels either.
Under the letter of the law and also under most people’s more general moral and ethical reasoning it’s “okay” for schools to restrict expression to, e.g., stop extreme bullying. I’m pretty far on the side of allowing free expression but this seems pretty reasonable.
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Agreed that unwanted sexual advances can be frightening and quite unpleasant. But this is not that. If I construct porn in your likeness in private and you never learn about it, you can't be a victim. It can't be the creation or existence of the images that harms the girls. No doubt the girls in the story experienced suffering, but you and I don't see eye to eye on whether they should have any recourse beyond social shaming. They're victims in only the loosest literary sense of the word.
I mean sure but in practice this only comes to light when they’re discovered or distributed which does harm the girls. And I think “creation + distribution” is worse than “distribution” alone if for no other reason than it speaks to a more culpable mens rea and greater capacity to reoffend.
I don’t think the boys should go to jail but I do think they should be suspended or probably expelled.
If instead of photo-realistic AI generation it was anime would you think the same?
If instead of AI it was hand drawn by one of the boys in the style of , 'I want you to draw me like one of your French girls.'? Is this better, worse or the same?
The degree of realism and personalization intuitively matters a lot so without any other context the AI thing seems worse. But as with many things like this often the real answer is that context matters and fact finders on the ground are better at determining that than we are on some random online forum. It also seems like a sort of a bad faith waste of time to try to legalistically determine which side of the line some particular way of sexually harassing high school girls falls on.
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But this porn will be shared. "Check out this picture of Alice I've found!" "Lol, is this Jamal? You sick fuck! Can you make one where she's rimming an old dude? No, wait, can you make the dude be our science teacher?"
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