Hacked Hollywood: The prying game as hackers lay bare female stars’ photo secrets

The recent leak of nude photos of Hollywood actresses is the work of ‘grubbly little misogynists’ who placed a higher value on the images as they were in the public arena without the women’s consent, says Suzanne Harrington

HAVE you looked at the leaked internet images of Jennifer Lawrence? She is, as you know, one of a hundred or so famous women whose private online accounts were hacked, and whose private images — that is, nude photos — were illegally uploaded without their knowledge or consent. The other women include actors like Kirsten Dunst and Kate Upton. So have you had a peek?

If you have, is this perpetrating sexual abuse? Helen Lewis, writing in The New Statesman, calls it “terrorism against women.” She writes, “It is a function of successful terrorism that the media becomes unavoidably complicit in spreading the terror. There is no way to report the story without increasing its potency. We cannot stop looking.”

In this context, the stealing and non-consensual sharing of private sexual imagery is absolutely terrorism against women; whether it’s the assumption that the private lives of women in the public eye are actually fair game for everyone who fancies a look, or whether it’s an ex-partner uploading private photos in an act of revenge porn, it makes women at best uncomfortable, at worst, frightened and humiliated.

Since this latest rash of photos were made public — Lawrence’s got the most attention, as she is currently the most famous — there has been all kinds of nonsense commentary around safer passwords, securer systems, and the wisdom of nude images in the first place.

FFS. We live in a digital age. We do everything online. Suggesting to women that they refrain from taking private nude photos is the digital equivalent of telling women not to go out in a mini skirt if they wish to avoid sexual assault. Private consensual exchange of private erotic material that does not remain private is hardly the fault of the woman in the picture.

It is the fault of the individual hacker — a word which sounds almost glamorous, like ‘pirate’, or ‘storm trooper’ — but in reality means a grubby little misogynist working alone; these individual misogynists are the drones of a larger rape culture, where mainstream gossip sites like Perez Hilton published the photos, saying they were “too big to ignore,” “no big deal” and “HOT.” (Hilton later took them down and apologised, but, one imagines, to save face rather than out of any genuine concern for the sexual privacy of anyone else).

The media blog Gawker reported that the photos had been stolen incrementally by various hackers — the supposition is that they are exclusively male — who then privately share the stolen images with each other, in a kind of digital bedpost-notch ritual where the private nudity of women in the public eye is most highly valued.

It’s not like you can’t find naked ladies on the internet. If your thing is famous naked ladies, there are plenty of those too. The ‘prize’, therefore, is famous non-consensual naked ladies, which this group of hackers share the way serial killers share victim trophies. And all it takes is for one hacker to become a leaker, and the images go global.

If the woman you hacked is famous, you may, however, get in trouble. In 2011 a Florida man was charged with hacking the computers of 50 celebrities, including that of Scarlet Johannson, and posting private nude images online. Convicted of identity theft, wire tapping and unauthorised access to a protected computer, he got ten years.

For the more risk averse and less digitally-skilled but just as misogynistic, there is common or garden revenge porn. This is where an ex-partner — male, obviously — posts a private nude image of his ex online. This can be accompanied by the woman’s contact details, so that the first she knows of her ex’s actions is unwanted sexual solicitation from strangers. In some cases in the US, no legal action has been taken because police have said that as the image was once consensual and shared, no theft took place. No, just degrading, dangerous and abusive behaviour against a woman.

In McAfee’s 2013 survey Love, Relationships & Technology, one in ten ex-partners threatened to upload nude images of their ex online, with 60% carrying out this threat. The overwhelming majority of perpetrators were male, with a view to shaming and humiliating their ex.

And then there are creepshots, which are perhaps the rapiest of them all. These are sexualised photos of women taken without their consent; the perpetrator follows the woman (often young or underage) in public and takes photos of their bodies without knowledge or consent, for later uploading and online leering with fellow creeps.

American actor Mary Elizabeth Winstead was one of the women hacked along with Jennifer Lawrence. She tweeted, “Knowing those photos were deleted long ago, I can only imagine the creepy effort that went into this. To those of you looking at photos I took with my husband years ago in the privacy of our home, hope you feel great about yourselves.” To which a man on Twitter called @zaiger replied, “I felt great after I came.”