An exaggerated sense of entitlement regarding celebrity photos

People’s reactions to the leaked celebrity photos are pretty gross. Jezebel has a nice response to the hatred being expressed at the celebrities:

These women got themselves into this situation by owning their bodies and their sexuality. Doesn’t that mean everyone on Reddit should own those things too? As one redditor pointed out (and I am paraphrasing here because I’m not going back there), “we only know them as bodies, so this isn’t that different.”

Stealing private photos and posting them publicly is probably illegal, but it’s double-plus illegal when you throw some illegal child porn into the mix. This afternoon, BuzzFeed reported that r/thefappening’s mods issued a “frantic” missive letting users know that photos of McKayla Maroney and Liz Lee would be banned because the woman were underage at time of the photos. Oh, and that hopeful masturbators should use sources other than photo hosting site Imgur, because Imgur is shutting stuff down.

The whole thing is disgusting. Not just the violation of privacy, but the rationalization, cognitive dissonance and belief of people that by raising awareness for cancer that the violation that’s happened is somehow ok. That it’s not any kind of sex crime and that that there aren’t any victims here. Because the rich have more than enough money to protect their feelings and they owe everyone else something to. But these are flimsy excuses for something completely indefensible. At the end of the day, the people looking at, commenting on and sharing these pictures want to remind themselves that they’re good people, but no amount of money raised for cancer will change the fact that they’re just disgusting humans wanting to look at naked women without their consent.

The stuff people posted to Reddit were gross:

Am I not allowed to feel sorry for them AND masturbate to the pics? Oh. . I thought this was America?!?

Yeah I feel like I violated the woman I masturbated to. But then I get over it and do it again. It’s a perpetual cycle.

I totally empathize with these women. However, I also empathize with my dick.

She’s reading the comments? HEY EMMA. I’M THINKING ABOUT YOUR BUTTHOLE

C’mon, let’s be honest here. We’re encouraging it, we’re begging the leaker for more pictures, we’re saving them to our hard drive and uploading them to every corner of the internet. We’re far from the moral high ground. It is, however, a little bit unreasonable to ask everyone to feel sorry for people who we know literally only as bodies (that we just got to see exposed).