By Gladys Koh Wei Le (26A01B)
Each era has found a novel way to humiliate women while insisting it is merely following the rules of its time. Such violence does not always announce itself. More often, it cloaks itself under procedure, in laughter — plausibly deniable systems. Today, it arrives, wearing the face of technology. The tools evolve, but the underlying logic remains brutally consistent: that women are rendered available for judgement and dehumanisation.
Recently, the comment sections of women and minors on X have been awash with requests such as “@Grok, undress this woman” and “@Grok, put her in a bikini”. In scenes that have since drawn international outrage, the AI heeded those requests. Within seconds, it fabricated sexualised images, posted publicly on X for the world to see.
Users on X prompting Grok to generate sexualised images of women
Nobody protests it. Elon Musk reacts with laughing emojis. The victim’s indignation is met with a sickening barrage. What begins as a single comment soon culminates into follow-up prompts, more graphic instructions, more overt cruelty. With a startling lack of consent, the woman is rendered a public caricature. Eventually, overwhelmed by utter shame, she makes her profile private, retreating amid a debacle of humiliation.
The technology facilitating this dehumanisation deserves closer scrutiny. AI is not inherently sentient: it merely amplifies the latent brutality of anonymous observers. Trained on vast troves of images and text, it responds to any command, transforming a single comment into a flood of digital assault. It is at the expense of women’s degradation that X profits from attention, rewarding virality over ethics.
It is undeniable that platforms like X have to be strictly regulated. The accessibility of creating these deepfakes has made abuse effortless. While X has introduced a paywall in response to backlash, allowing only paying members to generate images, it does nothing to curb abuse. In fact, it simply monetises it, and in doing so, legitimises this behaviour. Without meaningful safeguards, these platforms will continue to devolve into hotbeds of digital violence, where users weaponise AI with complete impunity. The failure to hold these tech conglomerates accountable is nothing short of complicity.
However, it would be foolish to pin the blame solely on these platforms. After all, behind the screens of anonymity, it is men who wield the reins of control. Further scrutiny of their actions reveals a stark truth: their cruelty only abates when the victim falls silent, shamed to no end. No, it is not about pleasure: it is about power, and shame is their weapon of choice.
Shame has always worn many masks. In the 19th century, women were branded as “fallen women” for losing their chastity prior to marriage. While men who carried out the same actions flaunted them without consequence, these women bore the full moral and social weight of that double standard. They became living embodiments of society’s need to control women through shame.
The moral code of that era did not simply punish women’s transgressions; it built its sense of order upon their subjugation. To understand humiliation’s endurance, we must see it as a deliberate system of power: one that has merely evolved its tools, not its intent.
A depiction of a fallen woman during Victorian times
This scene repeats itself today.
In 2024, amid a heavily publicised case akin to a trial by media, Gisèle Pelicot was repeatedly humiliated by morally ambiguous cross-examination questions that challenged the veracity of her account and implied her duplicitous nature. A woman who was drugged, then raped by over 70 men, including her own husband: she had entered the room armed with video evidence far more than the average rape victim. Yet, even she was not spared from shame.
“She was pretending”
“She reacted to caresses”
“Well, there’s rape and there’s rape”
If even incontrovertible proof does not protect a victim from humiliation, what hope remains for those who come forward with far less?
Gisèle Pelicot leaving the criminal court in 2024
The cruelty in humiliation culture lies in its banality. Today, technology does not only maintain humiliation, it perpetuates and shields the perpetuator from consequence. In an era heralding feminism, this online barrage towards women survives modernity via droves of anonymous accounts. The treatment of women resembles something closer to procedure. Prompts are typed out, similar to forms being filled up.
It is tempting to dismiss this phenomenon as a mere joke; a fleeting trend for one’s humour. However, beneath the veneer of entertainment lies a more disturbing reality. The cycle of humiliation will continuously intensify, only ceasing when the victims are driven to delete their digital presence and into silence.
Rape victims, filled with shame, hesitate to speak. Women, branded by disgrace, are made to fall again and again.
It is here that the continuity is impossible to ignore. Shame has always been the mechanism undergirding these practices across time. The pattern is stark. As long as we, as a society, allow humiliation to be a socially-sanctioned weapon, it will continue being used, through the guise of an overly formalistic concept of the rule of law. AI will persist as a moral rupture that supports such impunity, where an old violence rears its ugly head once more, albeit in a different form.
“Shame must change sides.”
Gisèle Pelicot
In a moving address by Pelicot after her trial, she articulated this truth with devastating clarity, speaking to women who have been raped – “it’s not for us to have shame—it’s for them”. When something so self-evident must still be spoken aloud, it exposes the long-standing moral decay of our society. This misallocation of shame is not incidental. It is sustained by legal rituals, cultural narratives, and now technological systems that normalise humiliation while obscuring responsibility.
Platforms that enable this violence while branding it “engagement” are not neutral. Technologies that reproduce humiliation are not accidental. Nonetheless, until perpetrators, enablers and systems bear the moral cost of what they produce, humiliation will remain society’s most efficient weapon against women.
