I'll always remember where I was when I heard the Challenger exploded, and I'll always remember that I was in a Minneapolis hotel room when the Internet exploded.
"How on Earth did some creep find nude photos of all these actresses?" I thought. "Oh. Did they seriously upload them to the Internet? Seriously?!"
That was the sum of my thinking. Whoever hacked these women was a creep, a criminal, a despicable piece of shit. And his unwitting accomplishes were imbeciles for needlessly granting 6 billion probable creepy criminals unlimited free attempts at ruining their lives.
And then I learned that I was wrong. And stupid. And a misogenist.
My twitter feed clogged with people hammering home some sort of perverse pseudo-feminist point, conflating the right to upload nude selfies with the right to walk through a park unraped. Such analogies seem, to me, counterproductive. Here's another.
Yes, a perfect analogy...if I covered my cash in honey and had Bernie Madoff manage it at Lincoln Savings & Loan. That's my ethical expectation of the Internet and all its denizens. What's yours?
In this feminist discussion, it is unhelpful to claim that the need to bank is analogous to the need for actors to upload crotch shots. Mind you, this statement is from a technology writer. One might think that she would use this as a teaching moment. ("Attention, impaired! Don't store anything sensitive on the Internet! And don't turn on cloud syncing of photos! If you have, here's how to turn it off.") Alas. That doesn't feel as good.
The guy who invaded these folks' privacy is scum, and I hope he's found and prosecuted. The people who rushed to see the pictures are also scum, frighteningly entitled scum. I am not among them. I don't want to see the pictures. It's morally wrong. And it's creepy.
But let's stop conflating using a bank with a famous person storing photos of their genitals on the Internet. One is necessary. The other is needless and obviously, vomitously stupid.
I, for one, will never see Jennifer Lawrence the same way again. I feel horrible for what she's going through, but I also feel disappointed in her. Not because she took naked selfies. Not because they became public. Because she isn't nearly as bright as I thought she was. Perhaps her idiocy will serve as a helpful cautionary tale for us all, but it won't if we move rhetorical mountains to deny the idiocy and flail at points that aren't there.
Postscript: Kate Upton, I see exactly the same way.