The naked truth

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/09/2014 (4324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

By now, much virtual and real ink has been spilled on the Celebrity Photo Leak — which wasn’t a leak at all, but rather a theft. A violation. A crime.

Last Sunday, a user on 4chan stole and disseminated private photos of a bunch of famous women, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Kirsten Dunst and many, many others, in various states of undress. It was a deliberate, targeted act.

Of course, the discussion inevitably turned to victim-blaming. As Lena Dunham tweeted, “The ‘don’t take naked pics if you don’t want them online’ argument is the ‘she was wearing a short skirt’ of the web.”

More accurately, it’s the “she’s asking for it” of the web. There was much ‘if only those dumdum women didn’t take nudie snaps…’ hand-wringing, as though these women are somehow responsible for their own sexual victimization. How dare these women have the audacity to expect privacy and be sexual beings?

The hack has been called a scandal but, as many other writers have pointed out, stealing and distributing nude photos of someone without their consent isn’t a scandal, it’s a sex crime.

But people are funny about the Internet. It’s treated as though it’s this Wild West or virtual Vegas, where anything goes and society’s rules don’t apply. To us, the Internet is exceptional.

People are also funny about celebrities. Like the Internet, they are also exceptional. Our culture has a fraught relationship with them; we love them and loathe them. We have strong opinions about them, despite (usually) having never met them. We bemoan the fact that they take up so much space in our newspapers — there are starving people in the world, after all — yet we want to know everything about them. Including what they look like in the buff.

We don’t feel sorry for celebrities the same way we feel sorry for “regular” people. They’re “just like us” when it comes to wearing sweatpants on Starbucks runs. But when it comes to expectations of privacy and bodily autonomy? Not so much.

It’s an unwritten but widely accepted rule that famous people give up both those things because it’s “what they signed up for.” Celebrities aren’t afforded much in the way of privacy — but being a public figure too often gets conflated with being public property.

This is particularly true for famous women, who live in bodies that are publicly — and constantly — critiqued, ranked, shamed, scrutinized, objectified, policed, sexualized and so on. When a celebrity chooses to keep something about her body to herself — be it a pregnancy or a surgery or an illness or a change in weight — it’s tellingly referred to in headlines as a “secret.” The entitlement on display is breathtaking.

And it’s easy to dehumanize a famous woman because, for many people, she represents an ideal. A fantasy. A hypothetical. A sex object. That creates cognitive dissonance; after all, an object doesn’t have agency and bodily autonomy. To paraphrase media watchdog Jean Kilbourne, objectification is the first step towards dehumanization, which is the first step toward violence.

An act of violation and assault is more easily justified if the victim has been stripped of her humanity. The countless number of people who clicked on links to see Jennifer Lawrence — and then threw tantrums when they no longer had access to the photos — didn’t think of her as a person. They thought of her as an object for their titillation. She exists for their pleasure.

But, you know. That’s what she signed up for.

Except that’s not what she signed up for. Like every other human being, Jennifer Lawrence has the right to bodily autonomy. She gets to decide how she uses her body. If she chooses to bare all in a film or a Playboy centerfold, that’s her call. Similarly, if she wants to take sexy-time photos in the privacy of her own home, that’s also her decision.

Jennifer Lawrence’s body is nobody’s body but hers.

Of course, this “leak” wasn’t just about titillation; it was also about humiliation. It was about cutting these women down to size. As Roxane Gay wrote in The Guardian, “The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of 2014 — or perhaps we should call it The Great Celebrity Naked Photo Leak of August 2014, given that this happens so often that there won’t be only one this year — is meant to remind women of their place. Don’t get too high and mighty, ladies. Don’t step out of line. Don’t do anything to upset or disappoint men who feel entitled to your time, bodies, affection or attention. Your bared body can always be used as a weapon against you. You bared body can always be used to shame and humiliate you. Your bared body is at once desired and loathed. This is what we must remember. Women cannot be sexual in certain ways without consequence. Women cannot pose nude or provocatively, whether for a lover or themselves, without consequence.”

Indeed, as Gay points out, this photo theft is a chilling reminder that to be a woman is to be forever vulnerable. To be forever a target.

Some commenters have bristled at the comparison between these “leaked” photos and “revenge porn” — but they exist on a continuum.

After all, it’s not just famous women whose bodies are exploited. What’s stopping an angry ex or someone else you know from hacking into your iCloud?

Women who deal with misogynistic threats and harassment on social media — like feminist gaming critic Anita Sarkeesian, who was actually driven out of her home — are often told to “go offline.” But it’s 2014. We all live on the Internet. One can’t simply “go offline.” We bank online. We do work online. We connect with each other online. And that’s only become more true with the advent of smartphones.

To that end, we need to stop treating the Internet as exceptional and start making it a safer space for women. All women. The misogyny that exists online exists in real life, because the Internet is real life. Theft is theft, whether it happens online or off. Violation of privacy is a violation of privacy, online or off. Harassment is harassment, online or off.

How can we do that? Well, we can stop taking what’s not ours to take, for one. And we can stop sharing and clicking through on illegally obtained, non-consensual photos — which is frankly gross, not to mention unnecessary, as I hear the Internet is rife with consensual images to ogle. We can hold social media platforms more accountable for the harassment that takes place on their sites. We can force companies such as Apple, which operates iCloud, the storage system on which many of these celeb nudes were stored, to take security more seriously. Whether we’re talking about nude photos or credit card numbers, the basic conceit remains the same: if we’re going to live online, it’s not unreasonable to expect some sort of protection.

But most of all, online and off, we can remember one basic thing: that women, whether they are celebrities or not, are human beings, too.

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca