Todd Ramlow is an adjunct professor of women’s studies.
This month, a number of female celebrities’ cloud accounts were hacked, and sexually explicit images of them were spread online.
Photos purportedly of Hollywood’s female elites, like actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton, turned up on Reddit and started a media firestorm earlier this month. For a while, the controversy calmed down. But now, hackers have released even more pictures of other female celebrities.
Most disturbingly, a group of internet users started an anonymous website threatening to release nude photos of actress Emma Watson. The threat came in response to the powerful pro-feminism speech she made last week at the United Nations Headquarters. Thankfully, the situation turned out to be a hoax, but given today’s climate, it felt very real.
In the wake of these hackings, much has been said about internet security, privacy rights and the voraciousness of celebrity/gossip media: Perez Hilton posted some images and later took them down and issued an apology. TMZ reportedly attempted to buy the rest of the images.
But what’s largely been left out of these discussions is the ways in which such incidents demonstrate the maintenance, proliferation and pervasiveness of what feminist scholars and activists have long referred to as “rape culture.”
For example, the circulation of these images attests to the sexist presumption that men have the right to access women’s bodies, whether nude images of celebrity women or real women on our campus. The images were posted and traded on sites like 4Chan and Reddit, which were rife with misogynist writers who dominated nearly all the exchanges.
Women, so this logic goes, are to be objectified, consumed and disposed of however men see fit. If you think I’m exaggerating or stretching to make a connection, spend some time scrolling through the comments on any of these sites.
The more direct connection here to rape culture is in the tired game of victim-blaming in the aftermath of the hack. Shock jock and talk-radio host of “The Regular Guys,” Larry Wachs tweeted: “Hey @itsjenlawrence. Maybe you shouldn’t pose nude if you can’t handle the public seeing it. #dumdum. And don’t step on downed power lines!”
Wachs is certainly not alone in making these kinds of comments, though his language is much milder than many of the posts and tweets that blame celebrity women for their own exploitation.
Victim-blaming has many faces: It can be defense attorneys questioning the sexual histories or wardrobe choices of rape survivors, or GW’s former University president suggesting that an undergraduate woman needs to be more aware of her alcohol intake so she can “punch [a guy] in the nose” if he tries to rape her.
Celebrity women are being shamed for embodying a sexualized ideal they did not create, and are being blamed because the embodiment of that ideal is unattainable for the vast majority of men.
Whether the unattainable celebrity or the former girlfriend/lover/wife, these women are exploited, degraded and pilloried in public for rejecting sexist presumptions of male entitlement. Who should be ashamed?
