Gage Skidmore/Zuma

There’s a picture of myself that I had saved on my desktop for years; I suppose we could call it a caricature. A little more than a decade ago, someone on a Nazi messageboard pulled a photo of me from social media, then updated it with some antisemitic flair: a little cartoon rat sitting on my shoulder, a yellow Judenstern pinned on its tiny body. Referencing what Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust is meant to be a humiliation; the goal isn’t hard to figure out, given that the whole star patch thing is near-medieval in both its imagery and its aims. Unfortunately for the messageboard user, the rat was adorable, making the overall effect of the illustration really, really cute—like I had a lovable ratty little sidekick. I kept the image for a long time, until I eventually lost it to the sands of time and the need to clean my computer’s desktop.

“Generative AI has fueled a surge in deepfake abuse.”

Of course, there have been other, much worse, manipulated images of me out there, which I’m deliberately not describing because it would probably please their creators. As long as the social internet has existed, some of its users have wanted to deface, sully, and degrade images of women. The methods used to effect that outcome range from the slapstick—hello, Herr Rat—to the truly vile. When I first started working at the feminist website Jezebel, a semi-common practice from troll messageboard users was to masturbate on a writer’s photo, then email her a picture of the results. In 2014, the site dealt with a barrage of disgusting and graphic photos in our comments, often featuring pictures of female corpses. The same year, scores of celebrity nude photos were hacked and leaked online, with a subreddit dedicated to sharing the photos left up for almost a full week—making violation of both the living and........

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