Felony Bitchforks

THE INVESTIGATION OF LUCY LETBY comes to Netflix 4 February. Unprecedented access, footage and insight into the conviction of a British neonatal nurse who was found guilty of murdering seven babies.

In 2017, a Cheshire Police detective sat down with two doctors for less than ten minutes. He walked out convinced he had a murder case against neonatal nurse Lucy Letby. This is how Operation Hummingbird began.

THE THREAT ‘PORN TECH’ POSES TO OUR SHARED HUMANITY Excerpt of the transcript of Esther’s brilliant talk at our event last weekend in Sheffield. “Porn perpetuates rape myths and is driven by sexist and racist norms and assumptions about sexuality. Online porn sites use algorithms to drive consumer preferences for content involving sexual and physical violence, dehumanisation and humiliation. AI porn and sex robots are trained on videos and images from online porn, along with related content scraped from the internet. The public debate about AI training models used in porn seems to focus on deepfakes and “revenge porn” rather than the misogyny inherent in porn itself. Acts like beating people, urinating on them or exposing them to faeces have been described as torture by human rights organisations when carried out against detainees by state agents or tolerated by states. But when the same acts are inflicted on women in porn and prostitution, these human rights organisations describe them as ‘work’ carried out by ‘choice’. There’s a class bias in the public discourse that has accepted this for years and only demands action now that technological development has resulted in the circulation of misogynistic, manipulated and dehumanising images of ‘respectable’ women. Porn directors promote the connection between sex and violence, because viewers find it more arousing. The cruelty is the point. Camera angles rather than a woman’s pleasure determine the sexual positions featured and the acts directors prefer to film. Expressions of fear, discomfort and pain are a routine feature of their output. Injuries inflicted during filming are often edited out because it would interrupt the fantasy, just as the use of lube and condoms would. When I was in the sex industry I was beaten, suffocated, spat on and worse, and injured by buyers many times. A British businessman who ran corporal punishment websites based in Hungary caned me 100 times as an “introduction”. Most of the women he used in his films were recruited by his agents on the streets of Budapest and rewarded with drugs. If a cyber-brothel in Berlin is full of sex robots wearing torn clothes and covered in fake blood, it’s because there are pornographic films online involving rape and real blood. It just wasn’t cool to talk about this and what happens to the women and girls in these films. I experienced almost every practice inflicted by the CIA at Guantanamo and elsewhere. In documents about Guantanamo, the CIA acknowledged that the forceful, sexualised torture techniques it employed, which are used by many other states against detainees and prisoners of war, were used for the purpose of behaviour control. Men paid me to be a crash test dummy so that they could claim superior knowledge of ‘modern sexual practices’ when seeking to inflict similar punishment on their female partners. Sex robots are likely to fulfil a similar role. Men can perform acts on sex robots that would kill or seriously harm women in real life. Strangulation? Repeated forceful sex or the insertion of objects that cause serious injury and even death? No problem. This leads to a significant risk to the women they have sex with in real life….” Link to the full text in the next tweet.

You were never raped, you are a lying grifter who wants my people dead. Stop pretending you have any association with us. I will spit on your grave

You were never raped, you are a lying grifter who wants my people dead. Stop pretending you have any association with us. I will spit on your grave

Labour changed Britain for women: delivering the Equal Pay Act, Sex Discrimination Act, maternity rights and flexible working. This International Women’s Day, we’re continuing that work, to build a more equal future and to empower women in every corner of the country.