When "No" Stops Mattering: The Psychology of Stolen Consent
Welcome back to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston. Today, we're tackling something that's been keeping me up at night, the systematic erosion of consent across both our digital and physical lives, and the profound psychological harm that's causing. We're going to talk about some disturbing trends. AI tools being used to create nonconsensual sexual imagery of women, infants, and children, the mass theft of creative work and academic research to train AI systems, the exploitation of vulnerable people for social media content and clout chasing, and how manosphere ideology is teaching an entire generation that consent is optional.
Leslie Poston:These might seem like separate issues, but they're all part of the same dangerous pattern, the dehumanization and objectification of people in ways that are psychologically devastating. This is heavy material, but it's important that we understand what's happening and why it matters for our collective mental health and human dignity. Tying all of these examples together is the reduction of people to objects, data points, content, or images to be manipulated without regard for their autonomy. In psychology, we refer to this as objectification. Decades of research, including foundational work by Barbara Fredriksen and Tomi Allen Roberts on objectification theory, show it causes profound harm.
Leslie Poston:Objectification reduces empathy, increases tolerance for exploitation, damages the objectified person's sense of self, and erodes the objectifier's capacity for ethical reasoning. Consent is the psychological foundation of dignity, autonomy, and personhood. It's specific, informed, and revocable. When technology systematically circumvents consent, it's not just a legal or ethical problem. It's an assault on the psychological conditions necessary for human flourishing.
Leslie Poston:Bandura's work on moral disengagement helps us understand how people rationalize these violations, convincing themselves that the harm isn't real or that the victim somehow deserves it or consented to it. Let's start with one of the more disturbing trends, one you may have seen in the news in the last month. And that trend is men and boys using AI tools like Grok to create sexualized or nude images of women, infants, and children without their consent. When confronted, perpetrators are arguing that a woman or child simply being on the Internet constitutes consent. Let me be absolutely clear.
Leslie Poston:It does not. Posting a photo of yourself or your family online is not blanket permission for someone to create sexualized degrading or violent imagery of you. Consent doesn't work that way. The psychological parallels people are drawing to sexual assault is not hyperbole. Both involve using someone's body or representation for gratification without permission, and both constitute profound violations of autonomy and dignity.
Leslie Poston:Research on image based sexual abuse, a term coined by scholars Claire McGlynn and Erica Rackley, demonstrates that victims of nonconsensual deepfakes report trauma symptoms nearly identical to those experienced by sexual assault survivors. Violation, loss of control over their own image and identity, shame they rationally know isn't theirs but feel anyway, and hypervigilance about where their image might appear next. The fact that the violation is digital doesn't make it less real or less harmful. The trauma is embodied. Victims experience the same neurobiological stress responses, the same disruption to their sense of safety, the same struggles with trust and intimacy.
Leslie Poston:And when children are targeted, which is happening, we're talking about the public production and normalization of child sexual abuse material. The perpetrator's justifications reveal how technology is being weaponized by humans to circumvent existing ethical and legal boundaries and how some men and boys are eager to exploit those gaps for sexual violence. They're using techno solutionism to bypass moral responsibility, as if the very existence of a technology's capability somehow justifies its use for harm. These perpetrators are also employing neutralization techniques. Originally theorized by Sykes and Matza, they deny responsibility, saying things like, the AI did it, not me.
Leslie Poston:They deny injury, saying things like, it's not a real person. It's just pixels. They deny the victim, saying things like, well, she put her photos online. So they condemn the condemners, saying things like, oh, everyone does it. And they appeal to higher loyalties with phrases like, I'm just showing what's possible.
Leslie Poston:Each of these is a cognitive distortion that allows them to commit the harm while protecting their internal self image. Then there's the issue of how large language models, image generators, and other AI systems were trained. Companies scraped billions of works without consent or compensation to the people who created them, including research papers, books, articles, artwork, code, and music. This represents what scholars Nick Cauldre and Ulysses Mejias called data colonialism or extracting value from people's intellectual and creative labor without reciprocity or respect. Like historical colonialism, it treats certain people's resources as available for the taking, their autonomy as irrelevant, and their personhood as subordinate to profit.
Leslie Poston:The psychological harms here are multiple and serious. There's invisibility and erasure, your work existing in the system, but you don't matter as a person. There's powerlessness. The scale of the extraction makes individual resistance feel futile, contributing to a phenomenon related to Seligsman's theory of learned helplessness. There's economic precarity.
Leslie Poston:Your livelihood is undermined by systems built on your unpaid labor. And there's loss of creative control. Your work can be reassembled in ways you would never endorse. For researchers, writers, artists, and other creators, this constitutes an identity wound. Your life's work has become raw material for someone else's profit machine, and you're expected to just accept it.
Leslie Poston:Eric Erickson's work on identity and meaning making helps us understand why this is so psychologically damaging. For many creators, their work is integral to their sense of self and their contribution to the world, their legacy. Having it stolen and repurposed without acknowledgment threatens their core identity. The psychological impact includes demoralization, anger, a sense of futility, and for many, a chilling effect on their willingness to share their work publicly at all. Some creators describe experiencing what psychiatrist Robert J.
Leslie Poston:Lifton termed psychic numbing, a protective emotional shutdown in the face of an overwhelming violation. Others experience moral injury, the deep soul wound that comes from witnessing or being subjected to acts that violate our core values, a concept originally developed to understand combat veterans trauma but increasingly recognized in civilian contexts. Social media has created a disturbing genre of content where people film others, often those experiencing homelessness, mental health crises, poverty, or other vulnerable moments, and then post that content for views, likes, and clout. This is different from documenting actual threatening or harmful behaviors for accountability purposes. This is exploitation, masquerading as documentation or entertainment.
Leslie Poston:The psychological harms are significant and multifaceted. There's the theft of dignity, people in their most vulnerable moments becoming spectacle for others' amusement. There's reinforced stigma, poverty, mental illness, and addiction becoming content for mockery rather than problems that deserve compassion and solutions. There's double victimization. Already marginalized people lose even the privacy of public space.
Leslie Poston:Goffman's work on stigma and the presentation of self helps us understand how being filmed and mocked in vulnerable moments damages both social identity and self-concept. For audiences, there's a learned voyeurism happening. We're being trained that the suffering of others is entertainment and that people who are in crisis are content to be consumed. This works to help erode our collective empathy and normalizes the dehumanization of vulnerable populations. Research on compassion fatigue as described by Charles Figley helps explain how repeated exposure to other suffering, especially when framed as entertainment rather than a call to action, can potentially decrease our prosocial responses rather than increase them.
Leslie Poston:So there's a risk that we may become desensitized, not more caring, if we don't have the psychological tools to counteract this effect. The person being filmed never consented to become content. They're just trying to exist, and someone else decided their existence was fair game for exploitation. This represents what Goffman would recognize as a violation of civil inattention, which is what we call the social norm that allows people to coexist in public space without becoming objects of scrutiny. When that norm breaks down, public space becomes hostile, and vulnerable people lose yet another resource, the ability to simply be in the world without harassment.
Leslie Poston:Content creators who engage in this practice often rationalize it through moral licensing, a psychological phenomenon where people give themselves permission to do something questionable because they view themselves as generally good people overall. They might tell themselves that they're, quote, raising awareness or documenting reality when they're actually extracting engagement value from that other person's suffering. Meanwhile, the algorithmic reward systems of social media platforms reinforce this behavior through variable ratio reinforcement schedules, the same psychological mechanism that makes slot machines addictive. The creator never knows which video might go viral, so they keep producing more, and the audience never knows which might be the most entertaining, so they keep watching more. Perhaps the most dangerous long term cultural shift is happening in manosphere communities.
Leslie Poston:This is what you hear about as red pill, pickup artist, podcast bro dialogues, and incel spaces, places where young men and boys are being explicitly taught that consent is an obstacle to overcome rather than a requirement to respect. This ideology reframes women as objects with sexual marketplace value rather than as human beings with autonomy. It teaches men and boys that women's boundaries are, quote, shit tests to bypass, that the word no is last minute resistance to overcome, and that manipulation is seduction, and coercion is persistence. These communities reinforce each other's boundary violations and celebrate those who successfully violate women's consent. This is a textbook example of selective moral disengagement, where individuals and groups develop elaborate justifications for harmful behavior that they would otherwise recognize as wrong.
Leslie Poston:The psychology here is deeply concerning to me. Young men are developing entitlement schemas, cognitive structures explored in research on narcissism and sexual entitlement by researchers like Neil Malamuth, Sarah Murnin, and Antonia Abbey. These schemas include the belief that they deserve access to women's bodies, attention, and emotional labor. They're learning to dehumanize women and view them as targets rather than people, a process that research shows involves both denying human nature, like our emotions, warmth, and individuality, and denying human uniqueness, like our rationality, autonomy, and moral agency. This is not abstract.
Leslie Poston:This is psychological conditioning that increases the likelihood of real world sexual assault, harassment, and abuse. Research on sexually aggressive men by psychologists like Mary Koss and Sarah Mernan consistently finds that men who hold adversarial attitudes toward women, who believe in rape mythology, who show a lack of empathy, and who feel sexual entitlement, are significantly more likely to commit sexual violence. Manosphere ideology deliberately cultivates every single one of those risk factors. The communities function as echo chambers, where through a process of group polarization as described by Sunstein, members' views become more extreme than they were individually. New members arrive through a content pipeline that starts innocuously answering fitness questions, offering gaming tips, or maybe solving some frustration or confusion about dating.
Leslie Poston:And then through repeated exposure to increasingly extreme content and social reinforcement from the group, they adopt beliefs that normalize coercion, deception, and violation. The parasocial relationships they form with manosphere influencers combined with the social identity they derive from group membership make these beliefs increasingly resistant to outside challenge. It's creating a generation of men who genuinely don't understand why consent matters, who've been taught that women don't really mean what they say, who believe that taking what they want is masculine and that respecting boundaries is weakness. The real world consequences show up in rising reports of, quote, stealthing, which is nonconsensual condom removal, increased sexual coercion on college campuses, and the normalization of behaviors that meet the legal definition of rape, but that perpetrators don't recognize as such because they've been taught that, quote, real rape only involves strangers and violence, not the coercion and boundary violations that they commit. These aren't the only areas where consent is being systematically undermined.
Leslie Poston:Consider facial recognition technology being deployed in public and commercial spaces without anyone's permission. This is creating surveillance creep, the gradual normalization of constant monitoring. The psychological impact includes ambient anxiety, the chilling of free expression and dissembly, and what Zuboff termed the division of learning, which is where institutions know more and more about us while we know less and less about what they know and how they use it. Voice cloning and AI impersonation now allow anyone to steal your identity and your voice. This threatens our identity integrity, or our stable sense of self, and our ability to control how we're represented.
Leslie Poston:When anyone can make a cloned version of you say anything, the line between self and other between your actual identity and someone else's fabrication becomes terrifyingly porous. Data brokers sell your most intimate information, medical conditions, precise location data, purchasing habits, web browsing history, even predictions about your mental health and pregnancy status, all without your knowledge or consent. This represents what Nissenbaum called a violation of contextual integrity. Information you shared in one context, for one purpose, with certain expectations about who would access it, is repurposed and sold for entirely different uses. The psychological impact includes a sense of violation, vulnerability, and the rational recognition that you have no meaningful privacy.
Leslie Poston:An early example of this happening could be seen in Facebook's erosion of boundaries between family, different friend groups, and work connections in the early two thousands, and it's only gotten more pervasive over time. Think about the emotional manipulation built into algorithmic systems designed to maximize engagement without your awareness of how you're being influenced. BJ Fogg's work on persuasive technology and Nir Eyal's hooked model laid the groundwork for tech systems that exploit psychological vulnerabilities, variable reward schedules, and social validation needs to keep users engaged. You didn't consent to having your dopamine system hijacked, but that's what happened. Children's data is harvested through educational apps and games their schools require them to use.
Leslie Poston:Parents and children have no meaningful choice or control. This normalizes surveillance and data extraction from childhood, shaping a new generation's expectations about privacy and autonomy. Sherry Turkle's research on children's development in an always connected environment shows concerning impacts on identity formation, the capacity for solitude, and the development of authentic relationships. Workplace surveillance technology monitors every keystroke, every moment of productivity, every bathroom break. This creates panopticon effects as described by Foucault where constant surveillance challenges behavior and self perception.
Leslie Poston:Workers experience increased stress, decreased autonomy, and the internalization of the surveillance gaze. They begin to monitor themselves as they imagine the system monitors them, a form of psychological control that persists even when actual monitoring isn't occurring. In each case, technological capability has raced ahead of ethical infrastructure, legal protections, and societal norms. Powerful actors exploit that gap while teaching the rest of us that this level of violation is just how things work now. Resistance is framed as naive, unrealistic, or Luddite rather than as a rational defense of human dignity and autonomy.
Leslie Poston:What we're all experiencing is a consent desensitization process. As consent violations become normalized across contexts, our internal alarm systems get recalibrated. Each consent violation makes the next one seem more acceptable. The old analogy that the frog doesn't notice it's boiling until it's too late definitely applies here. This relates to what we call moral disengagement creep, where each small compromise in values makes the next compromise, quote, easier until we find ourselves tolerating or participating in things we would have once found unconscionable.
Leslie Poston:This creates several serious psychological consequences. Of course, there's learned helplessness, which we've talked about, the sense that there's nothing we can do anyway, so why bother resisting? Seligman's research showed that when organisms learn that their actions don't affect outcomes, they stop trying, even when effective action becomes possible. We can see this paralysis around technology like that being used in Wegmans grocery stores now with their new AI facial recognition surveillance. People seem to think I know they're tracking me, but what can I do about it?
Leslie Poston:Then there's ambient anxiety, a constant low level threat to our autonomy that we carry everywhere. That we carry everywhere. This chronic stress has documented impacts on our physical health, our cognitive function, and our emotional regulation. We're all living in a state of constant low grade threat assessment, which is exhausting and corrosive. For those complicit in these systems, whether as employees who build them, moderators who enforce inadequate policies, or users who participate in violation, there is a deep moral injury.
Leslie Poston:Jonathan Shay and Brett Lit's work, A Moral Injury, describes the psychological damage that comes from perpetrating, witnessing, or failing to prevent actions that violate deeply held moral beliefs. You may know what you're doing is wrong, but the system demands it or rewards it, and the cognitive dissonance and shame become unbearable. Some people resolve this by leaving the system. Others resolve it by changing their own values and convincing themselves that what they're doing isn't actually wrong or harmful, and that creates its own psychological damage. We're experiencing relational damage and eroded trust in institutions, technology, and in each other.
Leslie Poston:Eric Erickson identified basic trust versus mistrust as the foundational psychological task of infancy, but trust continues to matter throughout your life. When we can't trust that our images won't be weaponized, our work won't be stolen, our data won't be sold, our vulnerability won't be exploited, we retreat. Sharing less, risking less, and connecting less. And this means the social fabric phrase. Perhaps most dangerously, we're witnessing the normalization of violation itself.
Leslie Poston:When consent becomes optional in one domain, it becomes more optional in others. So when we accept that our creative work can be stolen images manipulated, data sold, vulnerable people exploited for content, we're accepting a framework that devalues human dignity and treats autonomy as negotiable rather than fundamental. This is what Hannah Arendt warned us about in her work on the banality of evil, not dramatic moments of conscious wickedness, but the gradual normalization of dehumanization through bureaucratic systems and social conformity. The impact is both digital and real. Trauma from nonconsensual deepfakes manifests in physical symptoms like panic attacks, insomnia, and hypervigilance.
Leslie Poston:Economic harm from intellectual property theft translates to a real inability to pay rent, feed your family, and continue your work. Men and boys trained by the manosphere commit real sexual assaults against real women and children. Children surveilled through school technology internalize real beliefs about privacy and autonomy that shape their development. The digital and the physical are no longer separate realms. They're increasingly intertwined aspects of our single lived reality, and harm in one domain creates harm in another.
Leslie Poston:I'm gonna be real with you. I struggled with how to end this episode. As you know, if you're a regular listener, usually, I try to leave you with hope or with some clear action steps with some kind of sense that we can fix whatever topic we're discussing. But fighting the erosion of consent is actually quite difficult. Opting out comes with real costs, and speaking up puts you at real risk.
Leslie Poston:Individual resistance against massive corporate, government, and cultural forces can feel futile. So why don't we talk a bit about what resistance can actually look like when it's difficult? Understanding what's happening is itself a form of power. Now that you can recognize consent desensitization and moral disengagement when you see them and have a name for them, you can't unsee it. The systems that violate consent rely on your confusion and your resignation.
Leslie Poston:Naming the mechanisms repeatedly helps rob them of that power. Your anger about this is rational and appropriate. If you're angry about what we discussed today, that anger is valid. It is the correct emotional response to being violated. Don't let anyone gaslight you into thinking you're being dramatic.
Leslie Poston:Small acts of refusal accumulate. Every boundary you hold, no matter how small, matters. Every time you refuse to share someone else's humiliation, every time you call out excuses for nonconsent, and each time you support a creator whose work was stolen, you're keeping a moral framework alive. You can't fight alone, but you're not alone. Support organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fight for the Future, freedom from religion society, and other groups fighting image based sexual abuse and the erosion of consent.
Leslie Poston:Find the issues that matter most to you and show up however you can. Legislative change is very slow, but it only happens at all because people refuse to accept that violations are inevitable. So keep putting the pressure on your congressman. That is still one leg of a multi leg stool. Refuse to let violations become invisible.
Leslie Poston:Document them. Talk about them. Be the person who says this isn't okay when everyone else stays silent. Bearing witness matters even if it makes you feel awkward and overly perceived. Teach the next generation differently.
Leslie Poston:If you have influence over young people, teach them about consent in all its forms. Teach them that a technology's capability doesn't make something ethical. Teach boys that respecting boundaries is strength, and teach girls that their no is a complete sentence. The culture shifts that will take us somewhere better start with what we're teaching our kids to value. The forces eroding consent are powerful and deeply embedded in our systems.
Leslie Poston:You will have to choose your battles, but resistance doesn't have to be perfect to matter. Every time you refuse to participate in dehumanization, every boundary you defend, and every time you insist consent is not optional, you're making a choice about what kind of world we get to live in. The systems that violate our consent want us to feel powerless. Refusing to accept that framework, even if you can't fully escape the system is itself an act of resistance. Your consent matters, and your humanity is not negotiable.
Leslie Poston:Thanks for listening to PsyberSpace. I'm your host, Leslie Poston, signing off. Until next time, as always, stay curious, stay aware, and get vocal about keeping the human in humanity. If you think a friend would like this episode, go ahead and send them the link. Subscribe to the podcast so you never miss a week.
Leslie Poston:If you like the podcast, give us a few stars on your favorite listening platform or on Google. And if you keep monitoring the website, PsyberSpace.com, you'll see a growing library of research as I get permission to post it being added there so you always get the research that drives the information we share in these podcasts, and you know it's not AI's law. Thanks for listening.
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