LETTING GO

back to 'thoughts'

mission accomplished?

On Friday 5 December 2025, my mini campaign protesting against the oversexualisation of women by AI community ‘art’ platform users will have run for six weeks. Having opened an X account expressly to raise awareness, I found myself in contact with an English influencer concerned about her country’s family courts and two other brave souls campaigning for changes to the way rape cases are heard. An Australian anti-women objectification non-profit was among the small number of ‘followers’ my account attracted.

During the campaign, I managed to alert several Australian government agencies and one Australian politician to my own experience with a community ‘art’ platform based in their country: NightCafé. Unless they keep me in the loop, I’ll probably never know if my efforts made a positive difference. Although I still have a fully paid-up subscription to the platform, I’ve promised myself never to use it again. Sady, management dismissed most of my complaints about the avalanche of suggestive images on their website and in many of their competitions – eventually suspending me for two weeks. So, to return would be to condone and subject myself to the inconsistent application of their community standards and concede defeat.

Not that I feel defeated ... I’m convinced change will come, hopefully in the form of regulations with penalties for non-compliance.

But the broader societal problem of female objectification won’t disappear until women stop buying into and feeding a system that oversexualises them at every possible opportunity. The NightCafé users publishing provocative images of scantily clad women weren’t necessarily men. Of course, avatars and pseudonyms can be misleading, but my sense from reading image captions and comments was that many women enjoyed the attention these images attracted and deliberately prompted the AI models to generate that kind of result.

A post on X during my brief time there illustrated this perfectly. It was from a young woman who had just completed her postgraduate degree and was circulated with a photograph of her in a cleavage-revealing minidress – showing a lot of leg and other charms through a gap in her carefully draped graduation robe. Apparently, the young woman was also a rape survivor and had been repeatedly abused while studying for her degree.

I couldn’t help but wonder why – in the wake of such harrowing experiences – she chose to dress that way for a graduation ceremony.

It’s definitely time to move on.