Sex is Dead: Deepfake Porn and the Rape of Identity

So you take some photos - just ordinary things, like a trip to the park with the kids, a night out with friends, a snapshot at the beach which happened to come out as a perfect windswept portrait. You share them on facebook so your family can see. They gradually filter down into the archive of your account where you forget about them completely. Several years pass.

A phone call from a friend. “Do you realise that...?” “What?! You can’t be serious?” You check out the webpage. Sure enough. That’s your face. But it’s not your body. And you have never even seen the other people on the film - never mind engaged in a sexual orgy.

It’s called deepfake porn. Someone took those old pictures of you and used a computer algorithm to generate a 3D model of your face to cut and paste into a sexually explicit film.

Discovering that you have been the unconscious subject of a deepfake porn film would no doubt come as a shock. Just reading about it may well provoke a sense of disgust. Perhaps more shocking, is the fact that there is currently no law criminalising this kind of thing. Revenge porn - sharing private, intimate images of an ex-lover - is illegal. Using non-private, non-intimate photos from public ‘spaces’ online is not illegal, even if they are used to create sexual material. It is a case of technology being developed and used faster than the law-making process can adapt.

But is this actually wrong? And just as importantly why is it wrong? It seems to me that the answers to these questions are not as obvious as might first appear. And the fact that they are difficult to answer is culturally and politically illuminating.

First of all, western society has declared the reaction of shock and disgust inadequate as a basis for assessing right and wrong. Shock passes with ongoing exposure. Disgust is a matter of personal taste. The first time you see and taste marmite you are taken a back; some people like it, some are disgusted by it. Is porn really any different? The moderator of one deepfake porn site was quoted as saying “I don’t care that much. This is entertainment that does not carry violence”. In his circle of acquaintances, this is quite unexceptional and attractive. It is an acquired taste but they have acquired it. Shock and disgust are already absent. What is true at that individual level can also be true at the level of society as a whole. Once upon a time, all pornography was hidden on the top shelf and in seedy cinemas, frowned at as a social evil. Now it is freely available and frequently presented as normal, even essential to, a healthy sex life. Shock already dissipated. Tastes already changed.

If you like, you can view this via the Freudian-Marxist framework which forms so much of the rational basis for contemporary liberal thinking. According to this well-worn narrative, instinctive reactions of shock and disgust in the sphere of sexuality are simply the shadows of outdated sexual taboos. They are hang-overs from the oppression of a traditional Christian moral framework. That being the case, it is actually desirable to take the cultural iconoclasm to the next level: bring on the deepfake revolution! We do not respond to Mary Whitehouse’ personal shock and disgust by legislating against indecency. We deal with the Mary Whitehouses of the world using satirical mockery.

If shock and disgust are ruled out, can we say that this is wrong on the basis of the harm it causes? Discovering that you have become the subject of a deepfake movie can of course be devastating. Initially, however, the victims are often completely unaware that their images have been used. Prior to the shocking discovery they do not actually experience any personal harm. In fact, they could remain unaware of the fact for the rest of their lives that their face did the rounds on some obscure erotic website. Peculiarly, deepfake porn creates victims who might never experience any actual harm, material or psychological. Perhaps it is helpful to draw a comparison with voyeurism. Voyeurs violate their victim’s right to privacy to obtain intimate or revealing images. A crime has therefore been committed even if the victim remains completely unaware. Whilst victims of voyeurism and deepfake porn might experience identical feelings of violation, it is much more difficult to articulate how the deepfake victim has been violated. Using ‘public’ photographs does not violate privacy - in fact many of us ‘borrow’ anonymous public domain photos quite routinely (I will pick this up again below).

Again this would be more clear cut if such movies were created with the intent of using them to cause harm through blackmail or distribution with the intent to humiliate. But what if the perpetrators do not have any intention of causing harm? Typically, they do not even inform the ‘subjects’. The manufacturer quoted above stated that it was done as a source of ‘entertainment’ which, in his opinion, involved no violence towards - no violation of the rights of - another. Again, whilst his reasoning may initially provoke disgust, on reflection it is quite consistent with normative cultural standards. 

Whether you are thinking about Hollywood love-scenes and the adolescent lyrics of the latest pop anthem, the serial pursuit of casual ‘one night stands’, or the agony aunt pages in newspapers and health magazines, it is hardly necessary to point out that the treatment of sex and pornography as entertainment is widespread in Western culture. Though we might not have thought much about it, borrowing faces - without consent - is also widely acceptable. In recent months there have been a string of deepfake movies parodying Donald Trump. Currently doing the internet rounds are countless manipulated images superimposing a cold and be-mittened Bernie Sanders into a variety of comical historical settings. In the case of famous people, the surface level of fun and banter rarely manages to hide the underlying intent to mock and discredit - in other words, to cause deliberate ‘harm’ to the individual’s political identity.

Pushing this a bit further, even a degree of sexualisation can pass without comment in the interests of humorous satire. If someone transferred shivering Bernie ‘the Iceberg’ Saunders into a photograph depicting a Woodstock free love scene it would produce more chuckles than raised eyebrows. It is unlikely that it would be considered a crime. Questions of sexual consent would not appear relevant enough to ask. So the deepfake porn manufacturer’s claim that “it does not carry violence” sounds a bit contrived until you try to articulate what normative standard he has actually violated: we routinely accept that non-intimate facial images can be ‘borrowed’ and manipulated for entertainment without consent.

Considering the issue of sexual consent further will lead deeper into some of the dynamics at work. Consent is the litmus test with regards to sexual crime, with the potential to turn a one night stand into a long term prison sentence. The difficulties in defining how the facial ‘donor’ has been violated revolve around the fact that she is not actually being asked to do anything sexual without giving her consent. However, while she is the most visible she is not the only victim here. Behind the superimposed face is the face of the individual who is actually performing the sexual activity. Her face is hidden, obscured. Of course it is never possible to know with any certainty whether the smiling participants in a pornographic film are actually consenting. But in a deepfake movie there is no way to see her facial expressions. There is not the slightest indication at all as to whether she is engaged in this movie-making willingly. Is she enjoying it or is she in pain? Is she fearful? Is she consenting? The first message which deepfake pornography communicates, powerfully if implicitly, is that sexual consent does not matter.

If this first ‘message’ becomes apparent by asking whether the borrowed face is being used to hide the identity of a victim of serious criminal abuse, to highlight the second ‘message’ it is necessary to lower the tone even further. What if the borrowed face is superimposed on the dominant figure? Now we have a rapist or child abuser hiding behind the anonymous mask of an innocent person’s face. A second message which deepfake pornography communicates, powerfully if implicitly, is an outright affront to justice: it is possible to give full expression to the darkest, most violent sexual perversions without fear of being identified or facing consequences.

Whilst the possibilities just noted are disturbing I believe that deepfake porn communicates a third implicit message which, whilst initially less shocking, actually exposes deep and powerful  undercurrents. Hiding the face of the person engaged in sex, with the face of an anonymous stranger, makes the identity of the sexual ‘partner’ completely irrelevant. The third message which deepfake pornography communicates, powerfully and explicitly, is that sex is not something you do with another person, it is something you do with an object.

Those profiting from the porn industry do not want attention drawn to the links between pornography and sex trafficking, or to the way in which they present women as nothing more than objects to be sexually dominated by men. Deepfake porn offers sexual ‘entertainment’ in which the irrelevance of participant’s identities is proclaimed in absolute terms. There is no name to be listed in the credits because the star of the show doesn’t actually exist. She is not a woman. It is a digital composite. The next step - and the technology for creating things like forensic facial reconstructions already exists - is to do away with the facial donor altogether, instead programming the computer to produce realistic faces according to the fantasies of the user, with an added disclaimer like those that occur on movies: “This is a work of fiction... Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental”. Forget any reassuring notion that your partner will accept your imperfect body ‘warts and all’ - society is well on the road to a dystopian world in which loving sex is replaced by designer porn.

Deepfake porn promotes a form of sexuality in which both men and women are dehumanised; women are simply objects, men are simply consumers. The only thing that matters is the sexual pleasure of the consumer. It offers individualistic sexual self-expression in a fantasy world which is unrestricted by the constraints of loving or relating to another person. If the goal of the ‘Sexual Revolution’ was to liberate people from the oppression of repressive religious standards, then deepfake is quite the success story. It is hard to imagine anything which could be further removed from the traditional Christian ideal of sex (as an activity reserved exclusively for the context of lifelong interpersonal relationship) than the complete relational vacuum of a deepfake sex life. Indeed, can it even be called a ‘sex life’? If this is not the death of sex, it is at least the death of sex as a meaningful phenomenon.

All of this said, the very concept of deepfake porn has produced a strong ‘disgust’ reaction among friends who do not share my Christian-informed analysis of society and culture. It is an issue which brings us together on some level. I believe that the issue of identity is key to this. Contemporary society treats gender and sexuality as perhaps the most fundamental element of personal identity. This is rather a unique situation as there is really no precedent in history for linking sex and identity the way that modern Westerners do! Most people are unconscious of where this concept of identity originated. Nevertheless, it has come to be accepted almost universally.

If sexuality is the strongest psychological influence on the way we understanding identity, our faces are the strongest physical influence. If someone were to steal an image of my arm or my leg, or even my genitals, and superimpose them onto pornographic material using deepfake technology, you would not recognise that it was me. These parts of my body are largely anonymous. But my face and my identity are inseparable. Who am I, if I am not the face looking back at me in the mirror? Imagine looking in the mirror and seeing somebody else’s face! Adapting to life after losing an arm or a leg would be difficult but adapting to life after a face transplant would take it to another level completely.

Indeed, we tend to link these two aspects of identity - psychological and physical - quite instinctively. Notwithstanding the assertions of countless magazine sex columns, sex is, generally speaking, a face to face activity. In a sexual relationship between two real people, you identify the human being you are having sex with by the mouth that you kiss, the expression in the eyes, the lips you listen to, and so on. Even for the most promiscuous of dedicated repeat one-night-standers, some face to face conversation is essential in establishing the element of consent and the prerequisite emotional context for sex. If, in the setting of a long term, committed sexual relationship, the face of a past lover should flash into the memory, it would be a troubling intrusion. Contrary to the implicit rationale of deepfake porn, the physical identity - the facial identity - of our sexual partner is of extreme significance.

So what of the person whose public facial photos are taken? Deepfake porn does not violate them in a physical way. It is difficult, though maybe not impossible, to argue with consistency that it directly causes harm or violates privacy. What it does, without question, is to violate a woman’s identity. In taking her face, it takes her identity and imposes it, not just onto an entertaining film, but into a sexual context she has not chosen. It loads her public identity with sexual activities and partners she did not choose. It robs her of the possibility of exploring the sexual dimensions of her own identity, the identity which she, and others, instinctively connect to her face. The person who steals my credit card might have a great time but it will come at my expense; likewise, deepfake porn is a kind of identity theft in which victims can end up paying an extortionate emotional price for the fraudster’s ‘entertainment’. If the victim sees the resultant movies, it will impose onto her self-identity a sexuality which is defined by the objectifying fantasies of a man who does not care who she is, without her consent. To my mind this amounts to nothing less than the psychological rape of a woman’s identity, and it should be treated as a serious crime.

I would be very grateful if you would consider signing one or both of these petitions and sharing them with your own contacts.

The first is aimed at encouraging government to prioritise this serious issue. It is written in general terms because official ial government petitions are not allowed to address specific cases. It can be found at https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/567793

Since initiating that petition I have become aware of a personal petition, initiated by a victim of deepfake porn called Helen Mort. You can find it here: https://www.change.org/p/the-law-comission-tighten-regulation-on-taking-making-and-faking-explicit-images

*I am writing this as a Christian but with the intention of communicating constructively with others who do not share my faith. For that reason I have tried to speak of sexual activity in a matter of fact way which does not always reflect my personal moral stance.