Posted by Joshua Tyler | Published
Elon Musk’s censorship-free AI Grok recently unveiled a photo editing feature that allows users to take existing photos and edit them in any way they want. People being people, everyone on X immediately started using it to turn photos of fully clothed women into bikini photos.
There have been cries, tantrums, and a rush to seek victimhood from those bikini’d, but they should be ignored. “Put a bikini on it” could save the entire internet.
The End of Internet Innocence
In the early days of social media, people used it enthusiastically to share pictures of their lives with family and friends, letting them know how they were doing. As it grew and changed, they also started to talk about it for other reasons, like getting ideas for a certain outfit or bragging about a cool place they visited.
That ended at least a decade ago, when attractive people discovered that they could monetize their bodies by posting pictures of themselves looking hot. This has led to a variety of negative consequences, one of the worst being the increase in depression, suicide, and self-harm among teenage girls who wish to measure up to the fake beauty standards of Instagram nookie girls who pretend they wake up looking good.
As bad as that is, to me, what’s worse is that modern wedding photography is dishonest. No one posts pictures for innocent reasons; that’s dead, but everyone posting is still pretending to be sharing their friends’ photos.
Now, the internet is full of posts of attractive women who show pictures of themselves baking tube top cakes and pretend that people are following them because they love cakes. That’s a lie. They know it, we know it, everyone knows it. That fact makes it worse than a lie; it is enlightening.
Fighting Gaslight With Bikinis
The term “gaslighting” was inspired by a 1944 film The Gaslight. In this film, the man deliberately changes his wife’s surroundings, dims the lights, hides things, and denies the obvious changes, then insists that he considers it, systematically destroying her confidence in her feelings until she doubts her sanity. The modern definition of the word is a form of mental manipulation that causes a person to question their memory, perception, or reality by repeatedly denying or distorting the truth.
The modern social media landscape has become a gaslighter, and those cleavage chefs are just one example. All over the place, from gym bros pretending to post kinky pics to motivate people when they’re really just looking for wedding money, to female techies posting “my day at work” videos in tight tank tops and pretending they’re only doing it to help people understand how to eat badges.
“Put a bikini on it” reveals the reality of what the internet is now; it rips off the mask that hobby farmers wear to hide the insanity of what they do. It hurts that almost no one deserves it, because no one who isn’t part of the gaslighting machine posts public, unsecured photos online. They can’t, because they are ruined by gaslighting farmers.
The only way left to stop gaslighting, is to put a bikini on it.
