My slut-shaming comment was addressed to the OP, as it immediately followed another of his comments. No one prior to you in this thread had said “don’t upload them”, so it really was slut-shaming that was happening there. You weren’t doing it, but instead were making a tangentially-related statement.
Correct. Did you have some valid argument that doesn’t suppose a perfect world?
One of my favorite browsing books is a 1933 edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette. For every laughable bit about how your staff should treat house guests, there are some eternal verities. One of them is that no young woman should ever, under any circumstances, write a letter or note that she would not want read in front of her family.
Nowhere - *nowhere *- does Ms. Post say she can’t dance like a naked whore in front of her husband. Nor is that implied. But the sensibility of not committing personally compromising things to paper - or any 21st century equivalent - is not challengable, IMHO. At best, the 2014 sensibility would be to do such things only with people who have earned lifetime trust and do it in ways that cannot easily be stolen and disseminated around the globe.
This is true for your slightly frumpy next door neighbor, your daughter (or son), your boss or any fairly ordinary person. Taking nude selfies that will end up all over the webs should you lose your phone or have it hacked is just stupid.
But if you’re a celebrity and there are likely thousands of people actively trying to steal your phone, hack your cloud storage, etc., and such exposure is likely to demean your “person and figure” and damage your future earning potential… it’s just unbelievably fucking stupid.
Jennifer Lawrence can do whatever she wants in private, with anyone she trusts enough to do it with. But as a young, hot, rising actress of considerable talent who does not do nude work and might not ever, having nude photos for her current BF’s titillation on a low-security device is mind-bogglingly stupid.
Yes, “in a perfect world” and all - but in this world, people do steal phones, hack accounts, and publicize anything ‘dirty’ they can find. So.
I feel bad for the victims here (and let’s blame the real culprits here - the people who STOLE the images and then distributed them!) but I also wish they’d been proactive and not taken the pictures in the first place.
You’d think young actresses would see this situation arise and make a mental note NOT to play around with nude selfies. But this line of thinking does not seem to catch on, unfortunately.
It does smack of slut-shaming. But if similar pictures of male celebs were floating around, people would be saying THEY were morons for taking the pics in the first place as well, so I don’t know if a double-standard is clearly being applied here.
Nothing to do with morality or shaming, but I think it’s odd that having nude pictures of oneself went from deviant to default, in such a short time. I guess if we’d all had daguerreotype cameras in our pockets in the 1800s it would’ve happened a lot sooner.
The time will come when some celebrity from showbiz or royalty will say “publish and be damned, ask me if I care” and the fans will stick with him/her. **Smapti **has a good point, put aside the nudity/sex thing for a moment, this sort of thing reflects the broader issue of how we the public feel entitled to the celebrity’s entire life and existence for our pleasure, including the pleasure of tormenting. In a planet of decent people we’d say: So what, the only person who did wrong here was whoever hacked/leaked. OK and maybe the guy who coded the system to leave these vulnerabilities. But no, because we have instead a world of creeps who want to leer: “oooh, lala, not such a Good Girl, are we, nudgenudgewinkwink?”.
I do NOT fault the celebs for taking the nude pics at all in the first place. It’s your absolute right to take them. If anything, I’d say they were misinformed as to how secure they were. You have the right to have sex on your dining-room table, but you should really lock the door and draw the shades, not presume nobody will walk in or look into the window.
( Plus this also means we regular folk now have an even harder time convincing our SOs to do nude pics for out private use. 
)
Y’know, I’d like to think that things like this could be collaterally used to rein back in the sharing/access defaults on all devices and apps to be maximum-privacy. But then watch people whine about how that ruins the very fabric of always-on connectivity and of the Cloud, which is presumed to be indisputably good. We’ve placed ourselves under 24/7 GPS-located surveillance and given total strangers the contents of our address books and picture albums, just so we can play Candy Crush and hold unproductive meetings in realtime. (I am myself a fan of having my document/image processing software be resident in my computer and capable of full function while not connected to anywhere, and the data stored on MY drive. Yeah, I’m growing old…)
IIRC there was a spate of kids sending nude pictures to SOs - which got spread all over after the breakup. So it’s a dumb idea even when no one breaks into a phone.
Now we have a whole industry to deal with this problem.
And that goes double for elected officials tweeting pictures of their junk also.
Go in prepared. If you wish to take nude pictures of yourself, assume someone unauthorised is probably going to see them at some point. If you’re not okay with that, do not proceed.
Go prepared! If you walk around at night, assume someone is likely to rape you at some point. If you are not okay with that, stay home or do not proceed without a trusted male escort.
Sounds ridiculous? A couple decades ago (and in much of the world today) this was considered common sense.
Viewing and distributing unauthorized pictures of a person is a sex crime. All kinds of ordinary acts out people at risk of sex crimes. That’s why we throw the book at sex offenders and track then for life. It would only take a few good prison sentences to take the fun out of it.
nm
Wow. That is a pretty crass comparison.
This is 2014. Taking/storing pictures on a phone with security that is not bulletproof (actually, closer to laughably bad) should be the default assumption for everyone. This should go double for celebrities. It’s not victim-blaming so much as it’s “Be on guard with sensitive material and your phone/the cloud.”
That’s not a controversial opinion and throwing rape comparisons into the mix is, again, pretty damn crass.
Yeah, blaming the victim never gets old. :rolleyes:
Oh there’s plenty of whacking (off) going on. And not just the hackers.
Surprising that this even needs explaining, 'init?
That’s an absurd analogy. There certainly are streets where no woman,man, or anything short of a superhero should go walking alone at night because of a very high likelihood of an illegal act being committed upon them. There are also many very safe streets where nobody needs to worry.
The issue is that the internet is all one big street, with all the 10s of thousands of pervs there at once, knowing their crime is hard to find and prove.
OK, everybody, quick thought exercise:
Change “nude pictures” to “bank account information”, “work documents”, “medical history”, “travel entry documents”.
Does it change our default position? Does it reaffirm it? Or are we saying right now *"no, THAT’s ***not **equivalent, it’'s fundamentally different".
People, whether private schmos or celebrities, are not wrong to expect basic human decency and ethical behavior from others, and that when asked to trust technology or people there should be a reason to rely on that trust. You do NOT expect that having your information in files ostensibly under an access password leaves you as exposed as would leaving your valuables in plain sight in the front seat of the car. But we still DO put the valuables in the trunk and lock it, don’t we? And that’s only trivially harder to get to than the front seat for a determined thief ,but we’re not blamed if they’re stolen from there.
You’re kidding, right?
They are different because pictures on a phone are NOT stored with any kind of encryption or protection. One of the tech articles I read about this yesterday was a writer wondering why a mass leaking didn’t happen sooner.
Risk isn’t a yes/no issue, it is a probability spectrum. Identifying behavior that is more risky is not blaming the victim. There is no comfort in the moral highground of “it shouldn’t have happened” when you are a victim. We all have to make choices that determine the amount of risk we take to have a meaningful life.
Not really, no. You’re missing the specifics, I think, and their application to the present day.
Hey, you’re the one who said it was an eternal verity. And the specifics you gave seem to modify your ‘eternal verity’ only slightly.