They want to replace women with AI

The 5-year anniversary of MYAM

This week marks my fifth anniversary of writing this newsletter.

By now, maybe you know the story. I was a broke single mom, working for my local paper, making below the poverty line. In 2020, the editor-in-chief fired me after GOP leaders in the state complained about my writing and I opposed the publication of a really bad op-ed.

You can read the full story here.

In the days that followed, I was terrified about how I would pay my mortgage and buy groceries. But Substack reached out and offered to ensure that I would make a decent income if I focused on writing my newsletter full-time. And that is what I did.

Now the newsletter has more than 72,000 subscribers. And together we laugh about dinguses and take on the hot garbage strewn waste of this America. In the years since it launched, I’ve published a NYT bestseller and put out two seasons of a podcast that has over 200k downloads.

So many of you all write to tell me that this newsletter challenges you, or helps you see things a little clearer, and gives you hope. Or sometimes it just gives you a laugh that helps you think that we can make it through all of this. And we can.

It’s important for this newsletter that I write from a red state where there are no media jobs, not really. It’s important that I’m a single mom, a journalist and an activist. Voices like mine are rarely represented in newspapers or opinion columns.

And it’s important that I have 20 years of experience living in and reporting on the Midwest. In the aftermath of my firing, every potential new employer told me I would eventually need to move — away from the place and perspective that makes this newsletter unique.

Thank you for continuing to be here. Thank you for supporting this newsletter and the voice of a fierce, unapologetic feminist in red-state America.

Pictures of AI “actress” Tilly Norwood on the Instagram page set up for her by unnamed humans.

Tilly Norwood isn’t a real actress. She’s an AI puppet conceived of by AI production house Particle6 and its subsidiary talent studio Xicoia. She can’t think or feel or even talk without human guidance. But Particle6 CEO Eline Van der Velden has a vision that Norwood will be the first of many AI actresses, stating that she wants Tilly “to be the next Scarlett Johansson or Natalie Portman.”

In response to the news about the creation of an actress so fake and so pliable, the Free Press published an essay by Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, thirstily declaring that, “Tilly Norwood doesn’t need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances.”

It’s not likely Norwood’s career will extend much beyond the horny imaginations of AI slop creators and the libidinal minds of sweaty economics professors. But it matters that one of the first AI bots forced upon us as a new vision of the future is a woman. It matters that in the cultural imaginings of men, she’s a pliable virgin.

Society doesn’t want real human women.

Our administration is staffed by the human equivalent of Norwood. Women who have contorted themselves into a Fox News fever dream of perfection. The internet is filled with women who perfectly perform motherhood and marriage, while wearing aprons and feeding chickens. GLP-1s have greatly increased access to thinness, making it easier for women to shrink and sculpt themselves into yassified models of perfection. All my ads on social media are about weight loss or beauty or how to self-optimize. Everything is designed to keep me in constant search of perfection, never once resting, never once being satisfied.

America doesn’t want to see real women.

Real women are being forced out of the workforce and, as a result, are losing access to economic freedom and agency. Women are losing reproductive rights and, as a result, are losing their ability to choose the lives they want to live. SNAP benefits are being cut, which hurts women the most, as they’re the ones most likely to stay and raise their children; they are the ones who earn less, because the gender pay gap is growing. Access to health care is also getting more and more restricted. This, too, impacts women the most, because they’re more likely to stay home to help aging parents, sick kids, disabled kids?

Tilly Norwood’s company heralds her as a problem-solver. But this robot only solves a problem if you see humans as a problem. If you see people with full lives and sexual agency as a problem. And her debut comes at a time when women — especially Black, queer, trans, and immigrant women — are being pushed out of public life, not through culture wars or jeans ads, but through laws and policies designed to make existing that much harder.

And it is harder. Things are harder now than they were five years ago when I started this newsletter and even one year ago, when I published my feminist manifesto about equality and relationships. People are less likely now to subscribe to a feminist newsletter that looks at how we build inequality into our daily lives and how oppression happens, personally and politically.

But this newsletter has given us the space and platform to raise money for trans rights and abortion access in Iowa. Together, we’ve built a community that doesn’t always agree, but we do know that we will all be in the same Mad Max truck together in the end. And what we are fighting for is the value of our lives, our voices, and our homes.

This community is a reminder that every voice matters, especially in the face of a government and a movement that want us to be quieter, nicer, more put together, with a bit more lip filler, and could we just be more demure, focus on our protein goals, and enter our soft girl era. And I will be doing none of those things.

I am looking forward to the next five years. Unless Tilly Norwood develops a real talent for making long-form jokes about Pete Hegseth.