Gender, Commodification, and Female Body Agency.
Any type of social analysis of this event needs to begin with a look into gender, commodification and female body agency. The nature of this sort of crime can't truly be understood without mentioning that this hack targeted female celebrities and their personal nude photos.
Our culture consistently commodifies and sexualizes women's bodies. Advertisements consistently use women's bodies (both whole and dissected bodies; over-emphasizing sexualized body parts) to entice the consumer and promote them as the prize for using their product. This is just one of a myriad of example in which our culture perpetuates that women's value is only in their bodies. Specifically, women get the message that their value is in their body as both a sexual object for male pleasure, and as vessel for the next generation in the form of child bearing. Because of this, women's bodies get commodified and understood by men as being openly accessible to them as both a goal and a reward for various types of participation in society. Thus, not only do men feel entitled to women and their bodies (especially in public), the invisibility of male privilege results in a state of false consciousness where men feel emasculated by female civil liberties and gender equality. Due to this type of false consciousness, many men feel (and are taught) that when they are emasculated, their manhood can be regained through sexual violence; often times rape and sexual assault...an assault like the hacking of personal nude photos.
Secondly, this attack on female celebrities can be viewed as a form of cultural punishment for having the agency, autonomy and body positivity to create those pictures in the first place. As mentioned before, women's value in our culture is, in part, found in the sexualizing of her body. In our culture, that sexualizing is not for her own pleasure. If it was, more girls would be openly taught to masturbate and not to feel shame for being sexual or wanting to have sex. This shame is a part of the virgin/whore dichotomy that identifies that sex is only acceptable for women when it is in the confines of a committed relationship (usually marriage), for the purposes of reproduction. Therefore, not only is women's value primarily located in their bodies, but it is also identified as the source of her moral character. So when a woman exhibits sexual agency over her body, and rejects body shame through the creation of nude photos, the action is so outside the cultural norm that the woman needs to be sanctioned, punished through the criminal distribution of those photos. Through the stealing and the distribution of those photos a woman loses the agency of her body she once had by creating them. The most extreme ( and hypocritical) example of this sanctioning and shame is the attempted use of these pictures in an art gallery project that commented on the dangers of computer hacking. On top of which, female celebrities have been victim blamed for having taken those pictures in the first place. Attempting to shame women into following misogynistically restrictive cultural practices.
Privacy and the Celebrity Culture
To some, embracing any form of celebrity means that the individual person's privacy is forfeit; that being a celebrity means that you're life is open access to the public. This sense of public entitlement to the lives of celebrities has its origins in the way that "reality tv" (as a medium/genre) has blurred the line between celebrity and civilian; where there is no required talent or skill to become famous. This line is then further erased through the implementation of social media allowing anyone to be the stars of their own videos. Thus, a lot of the criminal acts levied against celebrities (such as this one) are attempted to be justified by some as a desire for transparency. In reality, this is a symptom of the larger voyeuristic culture and the desire to have a close intimate connection with those in the public eye.
Final Thoughts
There needs to be a wide spread public understanding that the hacking and distribution of these images is considered a sex crime and needs to be prosecuted as such. There also needs to be a broad understanding that anyone who searches out and or views these images are an accessory to the same sex crime. Much like other types of sex crimes, the blame should not be placed at the feet of the celebrity victims but on the person(s) responsible for the hack and (more broadly) our culture for the inability to give women sexual/body agency and female celebrities any semblance of privacy in their lives.
