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First of all, taking nudes is fine period. There doesn't need to be a qualification at the end of that. Every person has a right to use their own image however they want. If someone wants to take nude photos for a partner, that's fine. If that person wants to take them because they like the way they look nude, that's fine. If someone wants to take them just because, that's also fine. This kind of "as long as you're smart about it" sentiment stems from the idea that women shouldn't ever make record of their identifiable naked bodies because to do so is inherently pornographic, shameful, and immoral. She has to "be smart about it" because otherwise (people will think) she's a whore. The inevitable follow-up to that kind of backwards thinking is that if they are careless enough, shameless enough, slutty enough, or stupid enough to do so, they lose the right to be treated as a human being and instead become a sex object. For far too many people, it no longer matters that she intended the photos remain private. She had the audacity to make them without "being smart about it" and putting more security in place, so she loses the right to privacy and the right to her outrage that her privacy was violated.
"[This is] not a scandal. The actresses and musicians involved did nothing immoral or legally wrong by choosing to take nude pictures of themselves and put them on their personal cell phones. You may argue, without any intended malice, that it may be unwise in this day-and-age to put nude pictures of yourself on a cell phone which can be hacked and/or stolen. But without discounting that statement, the issue is that these women have the absolute right and privilege to put whatever they want on their cell phones with the expectation that said contents will remain private or exclusive to whomever is permitted to see them just like their male peers. The burden of moral guilt is on the people who stole said property and on those who chose to consume said stolen property for titillation and/or gratification."
- from forbes.com
Perhaps Jennifer Lawrence, our beloved starlet, did take these photos in the context of a sexual relationship with someone and therefore they were intended to look sexual. Perhaps she took them because they commemorated an evening that has some significance to her, unrelated to her state of dress. Perhaps she took them because she thought she looked good in them and wanted to remember that confidence. Perhaps she took them for any one of a dozen more reasons on which we can only speculate. It really doesn't matter. As mentioned above there is nothing immoral or scandalous about her choosing to do so for whatever reason. She can do whatever the hell she wants with her body on her camera; THAT DOESN'T GIVE US THE RIGHT TO ACCESS IT. She may very well have intended to look sexy for someone, but she didn't intend to look sexy for random, unknown everyone on the internet!
The problem with the analogy my friend made (and many more like it I've seen in the past several days) is the fact that when driving a car, you are in direct control of the vehicle and you have chosen to be in that position. So yes, if you get tipsy and drive and wreck your car, you are responsible. Jennifer Lawrence and others stored those photos privately and had no intention of ever making them public. Yes, perhaps they could have put them somewhere more secure than where they were on the cloud, but that's still not really the point. The degree of security or lack thereof (supposedly everything on the iCloud is encrypted) is not relevant. Someone hacked into her account, stole photos, and published them without her consent. I cannot emphasize that phrase enough! And I don't like it when people describe this incident as a leak, because that implies it was accidental. It wasn't. This was a malicious crime attacking Lawrence's image and privacy, along with nearly 100 others'. It's not analogous to being a tipsy driver because Lawrence wasn't in control of what happened. It is more like being the person hit by the tipsy driver, and as icing on the cake, you the sober driver get blamed for the accident because you sell cars.
It lifted my spirits and gave me hope to see one of my friends respond on that Facebook post with: "There is no difference between this and somebody peeping through a window and taking pics of your sister or S/O. This person is indeed a sex offender. They purposely targeted these people. If somebody peeped into your sister's room and took pics of her and you could just sit there and pass judgement by saying "Maybe she shouldn't have had windows" or "maybe the blinds should have been closed" or "what business did she have being naked?", then all you're doing is blaming the victim instead of blaming the offender for being a sleazy sack of shit."
I've seen several people excuse what happened by talking about how the iCloud or cell phones in general aren't considered private and so content taken from these places doesn't require the creator's consent to be used. That is just 100% false. Apple lays out what personal information they will keep and how it will be used in their privacy policy, which never mentions the use of photos at all and does state that personal information of any kind - typically name and contact information - will only ever be shared for marketing purposes (that is, companies marketing products toward you, such as in targeted advertising) product development (such as market research), or so that Apple may contact you (with updates or contest winnings, etc.). It is not part of their policy to use you and your image or information however they see fit by publishing it all over the internet. Even if it were, that's not what happened here. Furthermore, there was recently a Supreme Court decision declaring cell phones private property. This was put in place to protect citizens from cell phone searches without a warrant, but the point remains that we as a nation have recognized that cell phones contain private information that needs to be protected. The key in all of this is the concept of consent.
One of the best articles I've read in regards to the issue explained it like this:
Nobody blames the victim when someone steals their credit card number. Nobody ever says, "Well, if you really didn't want your private information exploited, you shouldn't have owned a credit card." Yet, whenever someone's private photos or videos are distributed without their consent, the onus is suddenly on them. [...]
I suppose the idea is that, while most everyone has a credit or debit card, relatively few have nude or sexually explicit images of themselves. In addition to everything else that's wrong with that attitude, the assumption is ridiculous. A recent survey found that 54 percent of college students admit to having sexted before they even turned 18--and before Snapchat came along. Notice the word, "admit." When a security firm cracked into 20 real life, factory reset smartphones, they were able to recover over 750 photos of nude women and 250 photos of "what appears to be the previous owner's manhood." Photos of the owners' kids outnumbered nudes by just 50 percent. And those were Android phones. Apple users are twice as likely to sext. Face it, America: cyberspace is littered with your dick pics. You have no room to judge.
I know we have all seen these types of stories before, so it's not really surprising that some creep out there decided to spend his/her time violating someone else's privacy because he/she wanted to see a naked celebrity. And I know that's part of why people think this shouldn't be a big deal, "She had to see this coming!" Thing is, inevitability isn't an excuse for shitty behavior. The fact that this is such a common occurrence should piss us off more, not less. This person specifically sought these photos out and distributed them for pornographic purposes, against the will of subjects. When did we become a society that shrugs or laughs off sexual exploitation saying, "Next time, she'll know better than to take those photos!" What will it take to get us to say, "What a creepy asshole! We have to find him before he does this again!" Why aren't we outraged?
Why aren't we sympathetic? For me, That's the most heart-wrenching, rage-inducing part about all this. Even if the act wasn't a crime (as it is), surely we could agree it must be deeply upsetting to the victims and they deserve our compassion, not our amusement or scorn. This poor woman, and dozens of others like her, already spend so much of their lives being scrutinized by millions of strangers. They are now faced with the knowledge that millions of eyes have looked over their completely revealed forms without consent. spent hours fantasizing about their bodies, obsessing over their images. I'm sure objectification happened before this too, but at least those were photos Lawrence and her compatriots knew about. They prepared and presented themselves in a way they felt comfortable being represented. Even if they've appeared nude in films (J Law hasn't, she wore a body suit for X-men or did you think she really has scales all over her body?), they had control as to what was shown and how. And prior nudity doesn't mean they've lost all right to future privacy. That's the same logic that leads some people to believe it can't be rape if she agreed to sleep with him some other time before now. Consent is a one-time use product that applies only to the specific instance for which it was issued. And now these women are nonconsensually, unpreparedly bare before millions. Do you know what we call it when someone is sexually assaulted or sexualized without their consent? Harassment. Rape.
We're better than this. Aren't we?
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Note: I primarily address the situation as it relates to Jennifer Lawrence because she's the biggest name associated with it, and is the person most commonly discussed. The same points apply to everyone involved, however. We all have a right to privacy, famous or not, female or not.
Emphasis to quotations above is not original. It was added for the purposes of this post.
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