Phone Hacking

I imagine most of the people reading this are familiar with the fact that around 100 celebrities found that private nude photographs of theirs found their way onto the website 4chan and, from there, to the rest of The Internet. Having long-enjoyed the access the Internet provides to pornography, I'm in a position to say that this is an entirely different animal from anything else you'll find on garden-variety website. Nude images and films of celebrities are nothing new. In the past, it was something achieved with a telephoto lens or a leaked sex tape. Lawsuits would occasionally be filed and other times licensing agreements would be met, but that was about the extent of it. These things could be prevented by not going outside naked or by destroying sex tapes if one felt the need to make them in the first place for whatever reason. Motives of the perpetrators were different as well. Paparazzi, unscrupulous houseservants, burglars, and the like, were motivated by money. Money cannot explain this phone hacking business, however, because these pictures are freely available on the Internet. No, this was essentially the bastard child of the traditional nude celebrity photos and revenge porn.

If you are not familiar with revenge porn, it is essentially when an ex in possession of sexually explicit images of a former lover disseminates said images on the Internet in order to damage said former lover out of one form or another of extreme hate. There are places online where such material is collected and displayed, sometimes with information regarding victims included. Porn is a descriptor here only because of the sexually explicit nature of the content. While the goal of pornography is simply to sexually arouse the viewer, the goal of revenge pornography is simply to hurt the victim. Those who view it are doing so in order to feed off the hatred that inspired the act of disseminating it. They revel in the humiliation, the misogyny, the voyuerism, and slut-shaming inherent in such material. What the images hacked from these celebrities' phones have done is take revenge porn to a whole new level. There is no longer any one man enraged at any one woman. The misogyny has taken flight with the very concept that any beautiful woman's most intimate moments ought ever be her own utterly gutted and gelded. 

If we're ever going to get a grip on the problem that this incident represents, we need to stop looking at it as pornographic in nature. My longest standing celebrity crush is one of the victims. She has a film that features her as naked as I could possibly wish to see her. In this film, she is well photographed, well-lit, and generally presented in the most attractive manner possible. Why on Earth would I want a grainy cell phone picture of her naked? It is inferior in every measurable way except that she gave consent for it to be seen by anyone in the case of the motion picture and consent to very few people to see it in the case of the hacked photo. Voyuerism is popularly understood to be the act of enjoying seeing somebody else naked, but that's not technically accurate. A voyeur only enjoys it if the victim is unaware of being observed. It is the lack of consent and the feeling of power and control that is the turn-on. If that sounds exactly like rape, that's because it is. Once that is understood, something like a full understanding of the problem is at hand.