I Didn't Want To Write This...

I didn't want to write about this. The topic disgusts me. But it was made clear to me yesterday that I wasn't thinking straight about it, and in cases like that I feel compelled to write...

Jennifer Lawrence.

I respect her as an actress, tremendously, and as a person, tremendously. I'm actually a little in awe of her. One reason is that she is so genuinely in awe of other Hollywood stars, most of whom she has either eclipsed in fame and acclaim already, or whom she will eclipse over the course of her career. She strikes me as one of the few authentically humble movie stars out there, and she's very well grounded. That's very rare in a city that tends to inflate heads until they're balloons. And that pops more than a few of them, come to that. And any woman who suggests, on the subject of relationships, "Isn't boring so much better than passion?"--that's a woman I get. (I'll try to forgive her taste in...uck!...reality television.)

Given my enormous appreciation of Ms. Lawrence, I expressed some real chagrin that she should be naïve enough to put nude pictures of herself in the cloud, where (she had to have known) they would inevitably be hacked and spread all over the Internet, along with the photos of over a hundred other celebrities.
I wasn't blaming her for the propagation of those pictures. Or so I told myself. I was (and am) adamant that the men who did this should be caught and punished. Harshly. And I bitterly, bitterly lament that part of (especially male, it seems) human nature that is irresistibly drawn to nude pictures. I can't over-stress this. I know I'm a rare bird, but I feel tinges of guilt just Googling articles for this blog, on the grounds that in some tiny way I'm perpetuating the cult and culture of celebrity. And I would have to be put at gunpoint to Google naked pictures of her or any other person, celebrity or no.

In fact, I'm often caught completely flat-footed when pics and videos of celebrities having sex make the rounds. Paris Hilton video? Never seen it, never will, and I can assure you with absolute certainty that I wouldn't even recognize the woman if she suddenly shimmered into being in front of me. The same goes for any other celebrity whose sexual hijinks have been shown to the world. I'm apparently not of this world. Fine by me.

In even mentioning that Ms. Lawrence was somehow remiss in storing nudie pics in the cloud, I was, in fact, blaming her for what happened after she did it. By the way--even "what happened" is a weaselly kind of phrase here. "What happened" was that a woman was violated.

And what I was saying was

if only those pictures hadn't been there to begin with, this never would have happened.
if only she hadn't been stupid enough to PUT those pictures there, this never would have happened.

Which takes the blame completely off the asshats who actually stole the pictures and posted them, not to mention the millions of people who have looked at and kept them--every one of which, as far as both she and I are concerned, is guilty of a sex crime.

It wasn't my intent to take the blame off the men who did this. At all.

Credit card systems get hacked, don't they? If somebody runs up a huge bill on my Visa, am I to blame for having my Visa information stored online behind something I had trusted to be secure?  Visa doesn't think so...why should I or anyone else?

As a wise friend pointed out to me, this isn't much different from asking what the rape victim was wearing, as if that had anything to do with her rape. You can say that women shouldn't walk around seedy areas at night dressed in skimpy revealing attire. That's even true, sadly. But why is it true? Because men feel entitled to commit criminal acts. The problem here is not the woman or what she's wearing...the problem is and remains those criminal acts, and anything else we bring up sounds awfully like we're covering for them, doesn't it?

The fuckers even hacked her Wikipedia page to include the explicit images--the offline equivalent would be not just stealing the pictures, but pinning them up in every grocery store, library, and community center in the world. I can't begin to tell you how utterly fed up this makes me. It's hard sometimes to remember that not everyone acts so deplorably.

-------------

The site I frequent even more than Facebook is Reddit. It bills itself as "the front page of the Internet" and as such, anything that is anything online makes it to Reddit in short order.  Nude pictures of celebrities are no exception. Their presence on Reddit set traffic records for the site. They tried to ban the forums that these images were being posted in. It proved completely ineffectual: it was like a giant game of whack-a-mole, or like cutting off a head of a Lernaean Hydra. if you're mythology-minded. They couldn't keep up with the propagation of the images across the site. There have since been two more waves of what has been dubbed "the Fappening"; doubtless there are more to come. I feel helpless just writing that. This is not a game and it is not funny. It's a crime and it needs to be treated as such.

But Ken, haven't you always said "it's just skin"?

I have, and taken out of context you might think I have no problem with nude pictures on the net. Not true. It's not my skin, it's theirs. They own it. No one else does. No one has the right to share, distribute, or even look at such things without explicit permission. If a celebrity appears nude in a TV show, film or video,  that's by consent and much different from those images being stored in what's supposed to be a secure server.

If you're someone who has looked at these pictures, or who God forbid has copies of them, shame on you. You may as well have stolen them yourself, and if I could, I'd spread your most intimate information--images, financial records, health records, whatever might make you see sense--all over the net. I'd do it gladly, with relish. Where's Anonymous when you really need them, anyway?

Looks like they're working on it...