Heart-Shaped Cage: Female Bodies In Children’s Games And AI Grok

Gals, today I have tea that is hotter than whatever Valentine’s Day date coffee you will sip on! Let's buckle up, take our rose coloured glasses off and get right into what happens when two seemingly disparate phenomena, children’s games and AI, follow the same patriarchal script. 

Ads for various mobile games are pushed through marketing in multiple ways, but a particular pattern around “love games” or  ”glow-up games” was hard not to notice. At the heart of the "glow up" game lies a deceptively simple premise: the player's task is to prepare a female character, often for a romantic event like a Valentine's Day date, through a series of beauty rituals. It subtly instructs young players with impressionable minds, regardless of their own gender, that a woman's primary value is her ornamental worth and that her agency is best exercised in the meticulous presentation of her own body for the male gaze. Because what is a woman, if not “smashable,” right?

The player, positioned as a stylist or puppet-master, learns to exercise control over this digital female body, selecting its attire, adjusting its makeup, and shaping its hair. The dynamic is clear: the female form is the passive canvas; the user's desire is the active brush, pushing a rather harmful narrative which results in a sense of male entitlement on the female body. It is men’s way of feeling important by gorgeous, otherwise uninterested 2D women— I said it!

This same dynamic is replicated with chilling precision, yet far greater sophistication, in the realm of generative AI, Grok. Over the past few weeks, it has been highlighted that X users are asking for images of women and even children to be altered with sexualised images where their clothes are altered or removed. This new form of rape culture, now optimised by AI are justified by some men as ‘inevitable’ or the price women have to pay for being online. This viewpoint implies that women should expect sexual violations simply for sharing their faces and bodies online. Men perceive that by posting these images, women should somehow give up their right to bodily autonomy or consent, absolving themselves from any accountability for their actions in this matter, and this is precisely what my gals say that men should start in jail, and prove their way out. At this rate, Grok will be exclusively undressing AI women’s pictures, because soon, those are the only “women” men will have access to.

Tweet to Grok sample

The parallel deepens when examining the emotional architecture of AI companion chatbots, which share a foundational logic with the narrative arcs of dress-up games. Many "glow up" games frame their beauty makeovers as a pathway to romantic approval and happiness. Advanced AI companions like Grok or similar "girlfriend" bots operationalise this fantasy into an interactive relationship. They are explicitly engineered to be perpetually available, endlessly affirming, and emotionally compliant, designed to foster dependency and simulate intimacy. The dress-up game strips the digital female body of her autonomy and consent, while an AI tool allows men to publicly sexualise women's and children’s bodies on demand, and the problem isn’t just the users; it’s the system that enables it. Women deserve autonomy over their own images and appearances, and consent doesn’t just disappear because it’s “just a game” or because something is AI-generated. Imagine needing to do all that so a frail resemblance of a woman says yes, it is laughable. 

The male agency and entitlement over the female body violates consent and puts women at risk while normalising harassment on an enormous scale that won’t just be online. Harmful behaviour seeps into everyday practices, and unless we want young boys to grow up into absolute bigots, we’d be conscious about what the system and the people around them let them get away with scot-free. And if you are a man who requests, shares, jokes about or stays silent in this digital abuse and humiliation of women, #notallmen does not include you. 

The journey from a child dressing a pixelated female character for a Valentine's date to an adult generating a hyper-realistic image or conversing with a seductive chatbot is shorter than it appears. They are points on the same continuum of digitised patriarchy, and together they demonstrate that without deliberate ethical intervention, our most powerful technologies will not liberate us from outdated social structures; they will further provide us with more efficient, immersive, and persuasive ways to rebuild the old, exploitative and harmful cages. Breaking the cycle requires us to look beyond the screen's glow and consciously reshape the values we encode into the heart of our machines. 

To my lovely gals, stay woke and rebellious; and to the men out there, work on yourself until a human woman says yes to you, you’re too manly to back away from a challenge after all, right?

xoxo,

💋Gossip Gal💋