JLaw's leaked nudes: For men who hate women, the violation of privacy is part of the thrill

If you’re a straight guy looking for “fapping” material, the internet is your friend. It’s awash in freely available pictures of naked women of every size, shape, color, age, or hairstyle you prefer. And if you want more than pictures, the internet is happy to oblige, offering up videos featuring women of every description engaging in every sex act you can imagine, and then some.

You might think this would be enough.

But for some straight dudes, it evidently isn’t. They don’t just want to look at the mind-bogglingly enormous selection of women out there who have agreed to pose naked, or even perform explicit sex acts, on camera.

No, they also want to look at women who haven’t agreed to have their nude photos put on the internet. Hence the popularity of “ex-girlfriend” or “revenge porn” sites, filled with pictures that are (or at least purport to be) of ex-girlfriends who never wanted the pictures they shared with their then-boyfriends posted for the world to see.

Hence the popularity of “leaked” celebrity nudes.

The latest celebrity nudes scandal revolves around a gigantic collection of personal pictures stolen from the supposedly secure online accounts of an assortment of female celebs (and a couple of guys).

The most famous of the celebs in this current batch are Jennifer Lawrence – Jlaw – and Kate Upton; there are many others, including alleged pics of comedian Aubrey Plaza and gymnast McKayla Maroney, which internet “detectives” are scurrying to prove are real. Maroney is only 18; if the alleged pics of her are real, and weren’t taken very recently, they’re arguably child porn.

The pics were first released by an anon on internet cesspool 4chan, and they have found a welcome home on the slightly more respectable internet cesspool Reddit, where they have been posted and reposted, sometimes retouched and color-corrected, and celebrated with enthusiasm by hundreds of thousands of Redditors.

Indeed, the leaks have inspired a new subreddit, TheFappening, which has managed to gain 100,000 subscribers in a day. Evidently Reddit’s admins have no problem with a subreddit distributing stolen celebrity pics, including some that may well be child porn.

Naturally, Reddit being Reddit, some of new members of TheFappening are trying to distract from their odiousness by suggesting that those downloading Jlaw’s stolen pics also … donate to a charity fighting prostate cancer. Either that or start up their own prostate cancer fund – to make sure they get credit for their donations.

Sorry, guys, that doesn’t make what you’ve done ok. And if you’re truly concerned about prostate cancer, why on earth did you wait until you needed some good PR to launch a fundraising effort?

Over on the Men’s Rights subreddit, meanwhile, one concerned fellow attempts to stand up for the hidden victims in the scandal: men. No, really.

Even some of the commenters feel obliged to point out that, er, the hacker almost certainly is a dude —  not just because the leak originated at 4chan, or because the overwhelming majority of the pics are of women, but also because, you know, women can’t STEM.

The strangest reaction to the scandal from an MRA that I’ve run across so far comes from the new Twitter account of A Voice for Men’s PR gal Janet Bloomfied (the one she created, in violation of Twitter’s rules, to get around her recent ban). After mocking celebs for taking private selfies or posing for their partners, Bloomfield posted a topless, headless picture of, presumably, herself, commenting “Is this me? Maybe. I text nothing I don’t want shared. #DontBeDumb.”

Apparently Bloomfield doesn’t quite understand the difference between posting nude photos of yourself and posting pictures of other people that have been obtained and posted without their consent. This isn’t particularly surprising, as MRAs in general seem to have trouble understanding the finer points (and the blindingly obvious points) of consent.

The enthusiasm with which so many male Redditors – and skeezy dudes in general – have greeted this latest leak of celebrity pics makes one wonder if it is not the celebrity of the women in question that is the draw but the lack of consent. After all, there are plenty of other celebrity nudes out there that the celebrities in question consented to have taken and published.

For a lot of those downloading and/or posting the pics of JLaw and Kate Upton and the rest, I suspect the real thrill comes not from seeing the nude bodies of these particular celebs – which, after all, are pretty similar to the nude bodies of porn actresses that can be found everywhere online – but from the violation of privacy that these pictures represent.

There is a real sadism here, driven in part, I suspect, by resentment that many female celebrities don’t agree to appear nude in their movies or to pose nude or topless for magazines. Sharing these stolen nudes is a way to punish JLaw and other female celebs who have so far refused to share every inch of their bodies with their male, er, fans.

It’s a toxic stew of entitlement, resentment, and misogyny. And no amount of donations to prostate cancer research will make up for it.