Language & Meaning: Sex, Love, and Power
a connected timeline, 1513 to now
led to provoked pushback long echo
Tap an event to trace what it led to. Tap a thread name to isolate it. Swipe sideways.
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Law & the container
Colony & empire
Deemed not sexual
Body as object
Horizontal policing
Gender & trans policing
Media & platforms
Capitalism & apps
Counter-current
THE CONTAINER
WHO OWNS HER
WHO DEFINES GENDER
WHO PROFITS
WHO RESISTS
Brakes that failed: how ordinary men do it
Not one monstrous belief, but enough brakes switched off at once. Each row points back to a timeline thread; the last column is a design proposal, built alongside sex workers so repair doesn't become new whorephobia. Bandura 1999; Finkelhor 1984 AI column: proposal adaptation: Merroir
Brake, inner → outer
Switched off by
Assault
Deepfake
Interrupt here
What AI could do
1 · She is a person
body as object; media
"free p—"
"it's just pixels"
name her, not her body
refuse to undress real people; label AI images; hash-match takedowns
2 · It's called harm
euphemism (Edwards; Koss)
"force," not "rape"
"a fake," not abuse
use the real word
name it plainly, once, no lecture
3 · It's my act
diffusion; displacement
"the group did it"
"the app made it"
ask: what did you do?
make him the author: "you're asking me to make this"
4 · Peers stop me
Sanday; manosphere
peers reward it
forums share it
one man saying no shifts the group
show real peer norms; rehearse the line that turns the group
5 · Others step in
ownership frame; horizontal policing
"private," "she wanted it"
"she posted photos"
bystander training; believe her
bystander rehearsal that points back to people
6 · Institutions act
institutional betrayal; platforms
the house is protected
platforms profit
independent review; survivor chooses the process
pay sex workers & survivors to red-team; measure consent erosion, not engagement
7 · The law fits
law & colony threads
force-based consent law
creation still largely unregulated
affirmative consent; regulate creation; decriminalize sex work
provenance trails; consent, credit & pay for training data
Matrix of domination, applied to sex-as-object language
Collins' four domains of power across the eras of objectification, with sex worker and community pushback. Collins 1990
Owner1662–1800s
Market1900s–50s
Conqueror1950s–2000s
Group & price2010s–now
Pushbacksex worker & community-led
Structurallaw & institutions
coverture; womb as property
obscenity law hides, markets sell
marital rape legal in some states to 1993
FOSTA; consent law that requires force
decriminalization; Zapatista law
Disciplinaryrules & surveillance
Magdalen asylums for the "fallen"
Hays Code: desire on screen, punished
dress codes, purity pledges
content moderation, shadowbans
Hacking//Hustling; bad-date lists
Hegemonicideas, media, language
"ruined," "damaged goods"
"piece," "dish," pin-ups
"score," "hit it," Playboy
"body count," "SMV," looksmaxxing
reclaiming "slut," "whore"
Interpersonaleveryday relating
wife as husband's asset
"treating": dates for gifts
notches, locker-room talk
group-chat sharing; women policing women
pods, peer screening, consent practice
Sanday: one core dynamic, four domains
What Sanday's 1981 study of 156 societies found, read across four present-day domains. Sanday 1981, 1990 original framework: Merroir
Core dynamicwhat Sanday found, 1981
Sexual violencecampus & cross-cultural
Sex work stigmaworkers & buyers
Dating nowapps & scripts
AI companionsdesign / user-enacted
Toughness ideology
where men prove status through toughness, rape is more common
higher rape incidence
patriarchal entitlement (buyer research)
alpha / dominance scripts (Connell 1995)
jailbreak culture / deepfake NCII
Women excluded from power
where women share public power and decisions, rape is rarer
shut out of decisions
whore stigma polices all women (Pheterson)
algorithmic mate-value ranking (Bruch & Newman 2018)
contempt absorbed / sexist synthetic images
Sexual separation
where men and women live ritually apart, rape is more common
male secret societies; "pulling train"
institutional stigma (Hallgrímsdóttir)
manosphere peer support (DeKeseredy & Schwartz 1998)
bypass methods shared / harm normalized in enclaves
Violence & exchange
where violence is everyday and women are exchanged between men, rape is more common
raiding, bridewealth: women as medium
buyer–IPV link (South Africa studies)
transactional scripts (Baumeister & Vohs 2004)
paywalled compliance / NCII monetized
Protective: rape-free analog
female status & respect
sacred, complementary status (Ashanti, Mbuti)
decriminalized, labor-recognized
affirmative consent (CA SB 967, 2014)
consent architecture: AI can decline
Beyond the binary: trans, nonbinary, and colonial lenses
Six questions the timeline raises once "men/women" stops being the unit. sourced
What happens
Key scholarship
Pushback
How do trans people experience sexual policing?
read as deceptive or as sex workers by default; "walking while trans" arrests; "trans panic" defenses; desired in secret, excluded in public (87.5% of ~1,000 surveyed would not date a trans person)
Spade 2011, administrative violence · Bettcher 2007, "deceivers" · Serano 2007, transmisogyny · Blair & Hoskin 2019
NY "walking while trans" law repealed 2021 · trans panic defense banned, California 2014
How does transition alter the power dynamics?
transition exposes the bargain from inside: trans men often report gaining credibility at work; trans women report losing it and gaining sexual surveillance
Schilt 2010, Just One of the Guys? · Serano 2007 · Stone 1987
trans testimony as evidence that power follows how you are read, not biology
What happens when "men/women" isn't the unit?
Sanday, Kandiyoti, and double-standard studies code two sexes; nonbinary, intersex, and Two-Spirit people fall out of the data; the binary itself was a colonial export
Lugones 2007, coloniality of gender · Oyěwùmí 1997 · Butler 1990 · Two-Spirit, 1990
code positions of power (owner/owned, legible/illegible), not sexes
How do nonbinary people experience dating-app classification?
labels added (OkCupid 2014, Tinder 2016) while matching and filters stay binary; nonbinary users report being shown to few people; trans users reported and banned
Hutson et al. 2018, "Debiasing Desire" · Bruch & Newman 2018 · Blair & Hoskin 2019
self-described fields, no gender-gated filters, text-first queer apps
How do trans sex workers experience platform governance?
profiled offline and online: loitering arrests, then shadowbans and deletions after FOSTA; trans women of color hit hardest
Namaste 2000, Invisible Lives · Mock 2014 · Blunt & Stardust 2021 · Hacking//Hustling, "Erased," 2020
worker-run platforms, mutual aid, decriminalization (New Zealand 2003)
How do AI systems reproduce or disrupt gender categories?
gender-recognition AI sorts faces M/F; worst on trans men; cannot see nonbinary people at all; models trained on scraped sex work content
Keyes 2018 · Scheuerman et al. 2019 · Buolamwini & Gebru 2018 · Costanza-Chock 2020, Design Justice
refuse to infer gender; consent-based data; Q, the genderless voice, 2019
soleil merroir · cyborgdreamz