Well, here we are again. Nude photos of Ghostbusters star and SNL cast member Leslie Jones were pulled off her iCloud and posted to her website by hackers.
Jones is not the first — nor, probably, the last — female celebrity to have her privacy violated like this: Most people remember the 2014 hack that affected Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian and Lea Michele. Before that, there was “Hackerazzi,” an incident in which celebrities such as Mila Kunis and Scarlett Johansson had nude photos leaked online. Reaching further back, some of you may remember Erin Andrews, whose nude video was leaked by a man who had taken them through the peephole of her hotel room. There are whole lists of celebrities who have fallen victim to nude photo leaks — and those celebrities are almost invariably women.
You would think that it was obvious that an invasion of privacy like that was wrong. You would think we would have sympathy for the women who are violated like this.
Instead, you get people saying things like this: “If you don’t want nude photos leaked, don’t take them.” TMZ ran a poll about who was more to blame for nude leaks, celebrities or hackers, and 70 percent of the over 51,000 people who voted thought the celebrities were at fault.
To be clear, we don’t treat other transgressions this way. No one says “if you don’t want your roommate to eat the dinner you made for your boyfriend, don’t make dinner for your boyfriend.” No one says “if you don’t want to be mugged, don’t carry money on your person.”
And yet, you hear it all the time when the crime is sexual and a woman is involved. “If she didn’t want to get raped, she wouldn’t have worn that dress.” “If she didn’t want her sex tape leaked, she shouldn’t have taken a sex tape.” “If she didn’t want to be drugged, maybe she shouldn’t have let him get her drunk on the first date.”
Let’s get one thing straight: If a woman wants to take naked pictures of herself, either for her significant other or just because she looks nice that day, she is allowed to do that. Unless she’s underage, that’s not illegal. Unless she sends it to someone underage, giving it to other people isn’t illegal either. Whether or not you think it’s immoral for her to do that is your opinion, but even if you think it is, I hope that morally you also recognize that distributing a private photo publicly, whether to shame her or for sexual reasons is a personal violation deserving of condemnation.
Andrews does not travel like she used to anymore. She changes hotel rooms. She covers the peephole. She will not stay in rooms with adjoining rooms; she checks the corners of her rooms for cameras. Her feeling of security in her own skin, in her own job that requires her to travel often, has been ripped away by a creep with a camera. Her life has been irreparably changed by the actions of a man who viewed her body as a commodity that he had the right to capture and share.
Her case is special in that the photos were not only leaked without her consent, they were taken without her consent. But the same principle applies to the other women’s cases as well. Jones may have taken those pictures for herself, or to send to a significant other. Either way, they were her pictures. Taken privately, or to share with someone she trusted with her privacy. They were pictures of her body. To have them spread on her website, particularly along with a video of a gorilla, is not only a deep violation of her privacy and her body, but a personal attack on her as a person, as a black woman, which we are somehow comfortable with blaming on her instead of on the person who hacked her website.
Women are scared of this. We are scared that our exes will take pictures we sent them in confidence and post them on revenge porn websites or otherwise make them public. But we shouldn’t have to be scared. Because it should not be acceptable to anyone that pictures of our bodies we took when we were feeling good about ourselves are a tool that can be used to shame us. It should not be acceptable that sometimes our only legal protection against having our nude photographs spread on the internet is to send nude photographs to the government to be copyrighted.
“Don’t take nude photographs if you don’t want them leaked” says this to women: “Don’t trust anyone you date, because one day you might break up with them and they might decide to hurt you for it. Don’t feel safe doing something entirely legal, because one day someone may want to humiliate you, and there may be no preventing it and no way to punish them afterwards. Don’t take pictures of yourself nude, because there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who think your body is something they can share with the world without your consent.”
We need better revenge porn laws. We need something better, anything better, than "I guess you shouldn't have taken the photos" to say to women who have been attacked like this.
Women who have had nude photos leaked have gotten to the point where they have considered suicide because it feels like the only way out. Teenagers like Tovonna Holton have actually gone through with it. Making a mistake about who you can trust not to use your image to demean you should not be an offense punishable by death.
Which is the bigger offense? Trusting someone you shouldn’t — something we’ve surely all done before — or taking it upon yourself to punish someone who hasn’t committed a crime with permanent public humiliation?
So whose fault is it that Jones’ privacy was disrespected? Hers, for taking the photo? For doing something legal, which hurt no one? For having a photo which was no one’s property but hers, which was to be seen by no one but herself and anyone else she wanted to have it? Or the hackers who thought it would be a good time to publicly shame her for being a black woman who is comfortable with her body?
All my #loveforlesliej. And shame on anyone who thinks it’s her fault that someone decided to hurt her.