What can we learn from the "Fappening"?

Jennifer Lawrence is a victim. All of the women included in the recent mass celebrity nude photo leak are victims, just like someone whose house is robbed is a victim of robbery. Outside of the statements released by various PR and legal teams, that word “victim” hasn’t come up much. Partly because it is sympathetic, and a lot of people decline to sympathize with rich celebrities as a matter of principle. But also because it is exculpatory. Much of the coverage of what the internet has saucily dubbed “the Fappening” has been laced with judgment. Judgment that a bunch of public figures were foolish enough to store their naughty pics online. And more than that, judgment that they took the naughty pics in the first place.  

The iCloud leak should definitely serve as a cautionary tale, but the celebrities’ actions are far from unusual. All over the world, millions of people use the internet every single day. Many do so with a false sense of security, assuming that their passwords and “friends-only” filters are sufficiently protecting their private information from malefactors and thieves. The rest of us, to varying degrees, are gambling. We know that should some hacker somewhere decide to access say, our social security numbers, bank statements, addresses, phone numbers, and any personal photos that may be floating around, they would be able to do so quite easily. We knew the risks involved when we made that information available online. We decided it was worth it, given the remarkable convenience we enjoyed as a result. In much of America, to opt out of such risks is downright eccentric, perhaps even impossible. The moment we fill out the paperwork necessary to open a bank account, or start a new job, it will be archived in an online database and vulnerable to hacks.

This is all to say that anyone criticizing these women on the grounds of technical naivete is probably a damn hypocrite.

Some have made the argument that they should have been more careful, given their celebrity status. To that, I would like to point out how obnoxious it is when a celebrity acknowledges her fame, and how refreshing it is when she carries on as though she were an ordinary schmo. Like when an actress is photographed leaving the gym looking a sweaty mess because she can’t quite believe that a bunch of paparazzi would actually be interested in documenting her workout routine. Furthermore, many of the pictures are several years old, and pre-date big time fame.  

But this isn’t really about hating on someone for not understanding the Cloud. As Jason Segel says in “Sex Tape” (or at least in the trailer for Sex Tape, I didn’t watch that mess) “No one understands the Cloud. It’s a fucking mystery”. This is about punishing famous women for exploring their sexuality and having the gall not to share it with us.

We feel like these actresses transgressed, and as a result we are now entitled to these images whether they want us to see them or not. It’s the same principle as revenge porn. Revenge porn is a serious problem which is being addressed somewhat but not nearly as actively as it should, because of the same biases affecting the victims of the leak. We are still a long way from living in what Dan Savage would call a “sex-positive” society, and as a result, we can’t quite rally around a woman who displays her naked body in that way. We waver on the line, saying “yeah, it was shitty that her ex-boyfriend exposed her like that, but what was she doing taking those pictures in the first place?”

What she was doing was appreciating her body. She was seeing her naked self in the mirror, liking the way it looked, and capturing the moment on film.

A lot of people have taken naked selfies. A lot of people have sent those naked selfies to a significant other using a technology that would make it possible for an obsessive creep to intercept them. And I would wager that a lot of the people who so proudly haven’t might just change their tune if they woke up tomorrow morning looking like Jennifer Lawrence.

These pictures were taken privately, and saved, which means that in a lot of cases they probably had a positive association for these women. They were reminders of a moment of self-esteem, or of feeling sexy and desired by someone they liked. Like all pictures they preserved a memory, in this case a memory characterized by confidence, arousal, fun, and trust. The leak took all of that and turned it into something that they needed to be ashamed of. That’s a fucking bummer.

I think that we can all learn from this incident in the sense that we all learned from the Snowden leaks: information that is saved or shared digitally is never really secure. But there is another important lesson here, and I fear that the puritanical coverage of the event will serve only to obscure it: just because a woman is comfortable with her sexuality does not mean that her sexuality belongs to anyone who wants it. A woman’s sexuality belongs to herself, and whoever she consents to share it with. When these women took these pictures, they did not consent for them to be publicly available. The fact that they took naked pictures in the first place does not count as consent, nor does it deprive them of the right to make that choice. These are simple ideas, which we ignored the moment the pictures became available, because we are a society that still believes that a woman’s body (especially when she has the audacity to appreciate it on her own terms) belongs to us. Let’s all take a moment to reflect on how fucked up that is and try to keep it in mind the next time a bunch of private photos get hacked.