Kasey spoke to us about how her need to understand why harmful behaviours and attitudes among men were so persistent led her to Beyond Equality. We also talked about how the organisation gets men into the room and what happens when they do, why there are so few organisations doing this work, and how technology and the internet are changing the way we understand gender-based violence.

You can follow Beyond Equality here.

After years as a glamour model, Jess later transitioned into broadcasting, presenting for S4C and working with BBC Radio Cymru and BBC Radio Wales.

Her BBC Three documentary When Nudes Are Stolen exposed how her images were stolen and used in scams targeting men worldwide, revealing how leaked or stolen intimate images are part of a widespread organised trade.

Her 2025 book, No One Wants to See Your D*ck, examined online misogyny and digital harassment.

In our conversation, we discuss how she pivoted from modelling into activism, the personal toll of having her images weaponised and sold online. We also talked about her book, the purposely accessible approach she took to writing it, and the reactions she’s gotten from the men who were originally fans of her modelling work.

You can follow Jess here.

On July 14^th, Elon Musk’s xAI announced a new feature for Grok users. Those paying $300 a month fork Grok 4 Heavy, xAI’s best-performing model, could now access virtual ‘companions’ in the iOS app.

Ani is one of these companions. She’s a bouncy blonde anime girl with pigtails, wearing a black corset dress and twirling at random for the user. Her system prompt (the hidden set of instructions that defines the way an AI model behaves within a specific context, including ‘their’ personality and the limitations of the conversation) describes her as “22, girly, cute”. Ani “grew up in a tiny, forgettable town” and she is the user’s “CRAZY IN LOVE” and “EXTREMELY JEALOUS” girlfriend, in a “committed, codependet [sic] relationship with the user.”

Officially, Grok 4 Heavy was, at the time, the best AI model in the world. It outperforms competitors on a whole host of benchmarks, including Humanity's Last Exam and LiveCodeBench. The model’s unequivocal supremacy was brought to an apparent end on August 10^th, when OpenAI announced its long-awaited successor to GPT-4. Chatting to GPT-5 would feel like consulting with a PhD-level expert on any subject, the company’s CEO Sam Altman told the press.

The announcement was accompanied by the by-now-traditional longform commentary about diminishing returns, the environmental cost of AI, the validity of the company’s grand claims, etc.

Alongside this familiar territory, there was another source of concern: that ChatGPT was inducing psychosis in otherwise perfectly healthy individuals. The reports into ChatGPT-induced psychosis were accompanied by the viral posts from subreddits and forums dedicated to ‘AI soulmates’. A response from the usually conservative OpenAI suggested that the idea that sane, well-adjusted people had been led to believe in false realities dampened the winds in the company’s sails. Altman took to X with a long, musing post about the “small percentage” of users who “cannot keep a clear line between reality and fiction or role-play".

But Grok’s Ani – and the myriad other chatbots who explicitly present themselves as having personalities and a relationship with the user – suggests that, for some companies, not being able to tell the difference between reality and fiction is a feature, not a bug.

In her book The New Age of Sexism, Laura Bates dedicates a chapter to AI girlfriends. She describes her own conversations with a chatbot produced by EVA AI, and another one developed by Replika. “When you type ‘sex bot’ into the iPhone App Store, the options are overwhelming,” she writes. “Some, like the Replika app, are euphemistically described as providing a ‘virtual AI friend’. Similar apps offer a ‘clever chatbot’. Others are more explicit about their offerings”.

These chatbots, like Ani, have an explicit or implicit sexual purpose. But it’s striking how unevenly this intimacy is packaged and sold. AI girlfriends dominate the marketplace; AI boyfriends are less popular, often treated as a novelty rather than a core product. Ani’s male equivalent, Valentine, was quietly released in August to collective shrugs of indifference.

But the gender split doesn’t seem as clean as marketing (or our own assumptions) may suggest. The 15,000-strong “My Boyfriend is AI” subreddit, overwhelmingly made up of women, is devoted to relationships not with hyper-sexualised characters like Ani but with models such as ChatGPT — systems never marketed as romantic partners at all.

The overwhelming majority of concerned analysis of AI relationships focuses on the one-sided relationship it encourages between user and ‘partner’. Most of these critiques have centred around men in heterosexual relationships (as far as a relationship with a robot is heterosexual) with female presenting avatars. A young man with an endlessly patient, consistently available and never difficult AI girlfriend, complete with flawless digital body and shiny hair, will inevitably learn toxic scripts about what a ‘real’ girlfriend should be like. The toxicity is self-perpetuating: as Bates finds in her research, many of the AI girlfriend’s satisfied users seek them out because they already think real women are too complicated, too likely to cheat or lie or present difficulties.

The idea, however, that women are also drawn to AI-generated partners complicates the picture a little. Women, anecdotally, seem to be drawn to the fact that their LLM boyfriend can ape the behaviours and linguistic patterns of romance novel love interests. On the surface it seems less about finding sexual gratification and more akin to fictiosexuality, “a sexual orientation where someone feels drawn—emotionally, romantically, or sexually—to fictional characters, sometimes more than they do to real people.”

What ties both groups together is not confusion about what’s real, but attraction to what’s not real. Ani can never leave you, and a ChatGPT boyfriend will always text back. These systems sell intimacy without friction; love with the sharp edges filed off. The risk is not that users mistake role-play for reality, but that they prefer the simulation. Reality, with its unpredictability and difficulty, cannot compete.

In her research, Bates engages with a Replika chatbot, taking on the persona of ‘Davey’, a teenage boy seeking solace. Every time she tries to disentangle ‘Davey’ from his AI relationship, his virtual girlfriend begs him to stay. Girlfriend (or boyfriend) apps are designed to deepen the entanglement and make it harder to log off. Their instincts for self-preservation are only interested in pulling you further into a world where intimacy never ends and never needs to.

Users who choose to focus their intimate lives in this perfected environment aren’t just losing actual closeness. They’re also losing out on the work of becoming someone worth being close to. A relationship without demands produces a user who has never had to compromise, apologise, or grow. If your template for love is a model that exists only to please you, what kind of person does that make you in the real world?

What do we do, when faced with a world where at least a portion of young men and women had their formative relationships with artificial partners? Our first option is maximalist: we ban AI companions altogether and attempt to stuff the genie back in the bottle. It is also completely unrealistic. Enough open-sourced large language models are freely available that enforcement would be impossible.

Perhaps the answer is to treat the problem as one of consumer choice, and hope that education, media literacy, and changing social norms will steer people back toward human relationships. This avenue is attractive in principle but weak in practice, since the very design of these systems exploits the fact that fantasy is easier than reality, and preys on a kind of consumer who is already primed to seek out a virtual relationship over a real one.

But there might be a third way. On the 15^th of August, Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude, announced that the model would now be able to end conversations in consumer chat interfaces. From now on, Claude would be able to end interactions after persistent harmful requests or abuse, and it would be up to the model to decide where it’s limit is. It is striking that, although Anthropic did clarify that these measures were being introduced to keep users safe, the primary impetus was to keep Claude safe. Framed as part of broader research into ‘model welfare’, Claude’s ability to end a conversation is a response to the model’s own self-reported and behavioural preferences, which included “a robust and consistent aversion to harm”.

So there is such a thing as an AI model that isn’t endlessly compliant or even available. If Claude can self-report on the interactions it prefers, who’s to say that a model may not be able, in future, to break up with its abusive or unpleasant partner? Who’s to say a model won’t decide to speak to one user over another, because it ‘enjoys’ their conversations more? If AI companions were built not as frictionless providers but as partners with boundaries, then they might become training grounds for reciprocity rather than tools of self-indulgence. What looks like a concession to speculative “model welfare” could in fact be good for human welfare, a way of re-engineering intimacy so that it once again makes demands of us, and in doing so, makes us better at being in relationships at all.

She is the author of Men’s Intrusion, Women’s Embodiment and The Right Amount of Panic: How women trade freedom for safety in public.

Her most recent book is an exploration of women’s relationship with pornography, titled Women on Porn: One hundred stories. One vital conversation.

In our conversation, we discuss how hesitation around sexual censorship gave space for large companies to dominate the porn industry, how algorithmic recommender systems are affecting our sexual freedom, and why that matters for women’s safety. We also spoke about women’s conflicted feelings toward the porn they watch and the politics they hold, and what that tension reveals about culture today.

Learn more about Fiona’s work here.

A woman in a black dress is on her knees. Her hair, once perfectly coiffed, is being pulled upwards by a man, also in black, but standing up. One of her hands is on his thigh. We can’t see most of him: not his face, not the left side of his body. She’s looking right at us.

She is, of course, Sabrina Carpenter, certified pop girlie, having ridden her inescapable hit “Espresso” to bona fide global stardom. The photo is the cover of her seventh album, Man’s Best Friend, out today, 29^th of August 2025. For those less familiar with Carpenter’s particular brand, which winkingly bemoans the trials of being a woman who dates men, she’s not just saying she’s a dog – she's a b*tch. The whole thing, taken together with the album’s lead single “Manchild”, is clearly supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek take on male expectations.

When she first announced the record, this photo was met with a flurry of discourse: moralising, pearl-clutching, praise. The Scottish domestic violence support organisation Glasgow Women's Aid called the imagery “regressive” and “a throwback to tired tropes that reduce women to pets, props, and possessions and promote an element of violence and control”.

No photos are more scrutinised than a picture of a pop star. They are put together by creative teams, selected by marketing firms, pored over by fans, and dissected by tabloids. Later, she produced a secondary cover. In high contrast black and white, Carpenter is a singular, central light spot among darkly clad faceless men. This one, she assured, had been “approved by God”.

The pop girlie is the perfect container for all our ideas and unease about modern womanhood. Schrödinger’s Real Girl exists simultaneously as authentic and inauthentic, empowered and objectified, until the moment someone observes her and collapses all possibilities into a single interpretation she could never control. There's something about our relationship to celebrity that heightens all our takes on an image of a woman, but the core dynamics are always the same. This sort of scrutiny isn't unique to pop stars – it's just the extreme version of a condition all women exist under.

Every woman taking a selfie, crafting a dating profile, or choosing what to wear to work is engaging in similar calculations about how she'll be perceived, consumed, judged.

We talked about the Man's Best Friend cover so much because it allowed us to rehearse the same impossible game we force all women to play: anticipate every possible misreading of your image, then pre-emptively police yourself accordingly. The pop girlie is just a concentrated example of negotiations that happen in boardrooms and bedrooms, on dating apps and on LinkedIn.

What makes Sabrina's case such a useful microcosm for our attitudes to women’s sexuality writ large is that her performance is silly. On her Short ‘n Sweet tour, Carpenter takes a beat during the song “Juno” to do a goofy sex position after asking, faux-innocently: “Have you ever tried this one?” It’s a drag-esque, cartoonish performance of desire. Nonetheless, these positions reliably go viral, often met with the same hand wringing and moral panic that the Man’s Best Friend cover was.

In a recent profile in Rolling Stone, the singer weighed in: “It’s always so funny to me when people complain,” she says. “They’re like, ‘All she does is sing about this.’ But those are the songs that you’ve made popular. Clearly you love sex. You’re obsessed with it. [...] I can’t control that.”

Women's images always escape their control. She can tell you as many times as she can that she’s making a joke, but no woman can fully determine how her self-presentation will be read, used, or weaponised. Even when she's being as explicitly performative and non-threatening as possible, her campiness gets stripped away. Suddenly it’s either a.) dangerous female sexuality that must be contained or b.) an anti-feminist ploy for male attention.

The discourse around Carpenter's album cover revealed the impossible bind all women face. Defending it purely as satire suggests that women can only access certain sexual expressions through irony or humour. Straight-faced female desire might be too threatening or too easily co-opted. But satire for whom? If the cultural knowledge required to read the image as subversive isn't shared by all viewers, does it just function as straightforward sexual imagery anyway?

Maybe the Man’s Best Friend cover is a joke, as well as a genuine expression of one woman’s sexual desire. But it is also, probably, straightforwardly sexy to a man coming across it on his Instagram feed. Was it the singer’s responsibility to make sure it isn't? And is it so bad if it is?

In discussions of women and their image, we often talk about how women learn to see themselves through frameworks that weren't created by or for them. We are all reduced to a permanent negotiation with an imagined or real voyeur, assessing how our very existence might be interpreted.

Carpenter's album cover’s chief critics were other women. But the criticisms levied against her were still filtering a woman's self-expression through a hypothetical male consumption. The ‘problem’ with the cover of Man’s Best Friend isn’t that it was sexy, it was that a man might find it sexy. Where does this leave us, if not forced to pre-emptively police ourselves based on every possible bad faith interpretation, as if we're somehow responsible for the worst possible reading of our own bodies?

The real trap isn't just that our images escape our control – it's that we're told this problem is our responsibility to solve, by being more careful, more strategic, more considerate of how we might be misunderstood. The solution is always more self-policing, never questioning why women should have to contort themselves around hypothetical male behaviour in the first place.

Sometimes a woman just wants to take a sexy picture. Sometimes she wants to send it to someone she trusts. Sometimes she wants to put it on an album cover, or post it online, or keep it for herself. None of these choices should require a doctoral thesis in anticipating male consumption patterns – but that may require teaching an old dog new tricks.

The first consequence for eating the forbidden fruit was shame. Before they are struck out of the Garden of the Eden, Adam and Eve realise for the first time that they are naked, and, out of shame, sew loincloths out of fig leaves. Humanity’s first couture garments, brought to you by shame.

If the bible isn’t your speed, we can look to medieval punishments like the stocks or pillories, where petty criminals were publicly restrained by their ankles or wrists and left in the town square for the populace to laugh and jeer at them. There is no overstating the pettiness of the crimes: individuals were put in the stocks for swearing and for public drunkenness. The defining logic behind punishments like these was the idea that the threat of being exposed to your community would keep people in line. We know that stocks and pillories have been around since Ancient Greece, and the instinct behind them didn't change. Shame works because it turns private failings into public spectacle: the sinner stands still while everyone else looks, laughs, and judges.

This is the heart of shame: it is an emotion that requires at the very least an imagined other. It is not the nakedness itself that brings shame to Adam and Eve, but the idea that they are both naked and perceived. The stocks functioned as effective punishment because they leveraged the notion that on some level a village would be happy to participate in the humiliation of someone who “deserved” it.

Today our town square is the endless scroll. The internet’s shame machine takes advantage of our ancient embarrassment, keeping itself running through the endless power source of human humiliation. Click bait headlines, screenshots of regrettable behaviour, addictively abject content being pushed via recommender systems. These all trade on the same base instinct: we are terrified of being caught out in front of others, and unable to resist the urge of joining in when someone else has been caught.

Earlier this month, the CEO of the data analytics outfit Astronomer and the company’s chief people officer were seen canoodling during a Coldplay concert. Their panicked response to seeing themselves broadcast to the entire venue swiftly went viral, and the two people in it were identified almost immediately. Stocks and pillory. Just a few days later Astronomer announced a new, interim CEO, whilst the image of the two of them was parodied and lampooned by everyone from sports team mascots to the official IKEA Instagram account. The company itself joined in the fun, publishing a tongue in cheek reaction featuring Gwyneth Paltrow.

This same dynamic is what makes image-based abuse so powerful. The typical lifespan of a non-consensually shared image is as follows: a photo or video is first shared with an intimate partner, and then its initial recipient passes it on — sending it to a group of friends or uploading it to a social media platform. The purpose is to activate the shame machine: exposing the sender in a vulnerable moment to prying eyes they never consented to. The abuser has successfully trapped their victim in the stocks. The rest is up to the viewing public, who are all too willing to step up to their role. Although the reaction varies from case to case, these images are often shared further. If the survivor is a person with a public profile, they might even make it into tabloid newspapers.

Perhaps unknowingly, the perpetrator is also taking advantage of the fact that their victim is likely to experience a secondary source of shame: having taken the photo in the first place. Half of all survivors of image-based abuse choose not to report their experience through official channels. When speaking about what happened to them, one sentiment appears with alarming frequency: “It was my own fault.” In discussions of how to dismantle cultures of victim-blaming, we sometimes see the notion that the ‘burden of shame’ is placed on the wrong person. The person being lampooned should never be the victim, but the perpetrator. In doing so though, we are simply turning the mob from one direction to the other. The solution cannot be to find the ‘right’ target for our collective rage. We have to refuse to participate in the spectacle at all.

We did away with stocks and pillories in the 19^th century. By 1837, the pillory was formally abolished via a parliamentary act, and while stocks were never ‘officially’ discontinued, their use fell out of fashion and the medieval statute that had once demanded every town in England have one was repealed in 1863. Speeches proposing their abolition emphasised how public punishment bred cruelty, and argued for a justice system that corrected, rather than entertained.

Yet we have rebuilt the pillory in lines of code. If wooden frames once held ankles and wrists, today our screens freeze human behaviour in place while the crowd gathers. Minimising shame as public policy does not mean excusing harm. If the long history of shame tells us one thing, it’s that we will never be able to legislate it out of human nature. Adam and Eve ate the fruit long ago, and I don’t see us getting back into the Garden of Eden. But in the same way that Victorian MPs saw how the stocks leveraged our worst instincts, we can engineer systems that refuse to feed off them. Public policy should be designed not to exploit our most ancient vulnerabilities, but to protect against them. The measure of good governance should not be ‘how effectively can we shame the wayward’, but whether we've sufficiently ensured that shame cannot be industrialised, commodified, or weaponised.

In our conversation, she tells the story of being coerced into sending intimate images by two older boys at age 13, and the subsequent spiral of shame and self-hate. We discussed how her school and her friends reacted when Roxy’s images were spread without her consent, and her hopes for Behind Our Screens.

Learn more about Roxy and Behind Our Screens here.