Here’s the non-war portion of today’s Morning Jolt:
Friends Don’t Look Friends’ Private Nude Pictures.
Pretend for a moment that you know Kate Upton personally.
[Many male readers of the Morning Jolt are suddenly distracted.]
This is the most modest photo of Kate Upton I could find.
Correction, pretend for a moment that you know Kate Upton personally and the two of you are just friends.
If you knew Kate Upton personally… you wouldn’t look at the pictures that were copied from her private account, showing her nude, right? The pictures hacked off her phone are a violation of her privacy, and while you may not be a criminal for looking at them – although some people want it to be a crime – looking at someone else’s private photographs that were not meant for your eyes is not a nice thing to do.
Oh, you might be tempted… but you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t, because Kate Upton is your friend in this imaginary scenario, and that would be a terrible thing to do to a friend. Also, the world really doesn’t have a shortage of pictures of Kate Upton almost nude – say, the July 2012 cover of GQ — and she didn’t have any problem with anyone looking at any of those.
Here’s why you should avoid looking at those hacked Kate Upton pictures: Someday, you may meet Kate Upton! Sure, it’s not particularly likely, but it’s possible. If you do meet her, and she brings up how awful it was back in September 2014 when her personal pictures were hacked and spread all over the Internet, wouldn’t you want to say, with a clean conscience, “yes, that was awful, I can’t believe someone would do that to you” and not have a nervous twitch indicating that you looked at them?
Really, gentlemen, hasn’t Kate given us enough happiness? Doesn’t she deserve this little bit of decency on our part?
SM notes that our international media sure have picked a convenient time to become adamant about the right to privacy online:
We live in a time where everyone’s private data is compromised daily. People are well aware of the NSA program named Prism that listens in on their dirty phone chat or has access to their webcams broadcasting intimate moments. The celebrity obsessed culture that produces the same curiosity over their nude bodies is run by a media complex more interested in Barack Obama’s tan suit than this massive invasion of privacy or war breaking out all over the world.
Yet no one notices these great offenses when it’s done to the public at large or people they ideologically agree with, or just happen to really like their movie. Why is Jennifer Lawrence’s private data any more important than say Donald Sterling, or Mitt Romney, or more importantly, yours or mine?
Here’s the thing, and the moral betters in the media at large are really going to hate this; People are going to look at the leaked pictures. There’s no grandiose explanation of a larger culture of sexism or war on women and “rape culture” at work here. People are going to look at the pictures because it’s a familiar face, they’re free and it’s one or two clicks. Real issues of sexual abuse however are more complicated than one image of breasts and can’t be explained in listicles or gifs. To contrast, currently in Rotherham, England, there is an actual culture of rape. But because that doesn’t involve the actress from The Hunger Games, the media ignores it. Who has less say in their rights being violated? An actress uploading nude pictures with technology they’re unfamiliar with or a child repeatedly and physically brutalized in unimaginable ways while the world at large ignores it because of political correctness?
Our Tim Cavanaugh with some good wisdom for these good-looking celebrities: “Only [former IRS official] Lois Lerner can truly make data vanish.”
S.E. Cupp: “I’m very sorry we don’t live in a world where celebrity nude photos are un-hackable. But until we have technology that is 100 percent impenetrable, doesn’t it only make sense to say that if you don’t want your nude photos stolen, don’t take nude photos with technology that makes their dissemination easy or store them on technology that can be hacked?”