The Atlantic Report: Jennifer Lawrence Shames Nude-Photo Thieves

Megan Garber reads Jennifer Lawrence's response to the Fappening in Vanity Fair and, faced with an incongruity, sputters and mouths this fall's mantra, "consent."

The incongruity in question is Lawrence's vehement disgust with the leak of her nude photos in contrast with the cheesecake photos that accompany the article. The writer is confused about how an actress marketed as an object of lust is then subject to unethical lustful objectification. The picture that makes Garber wax philosophical is here.

The picture itself—bird, baubles, breasts, "both"—carries its own telling tension. On the one hand, you have a story in which Lawrence, the smart, sassy celebrity, refers to the spread of images of her body as a "sex crime."
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But then: There's that image. Which features—really, focuses on—that pair of buoyant breasts. It's another strain of nude photo, the classic kind if not the fully classy kind, the kind that has been running in Vanity Fair and its fellow celebrity magazines for decades now. The crucial difference between this and the leaked images, of course, is that this one isn't fully nude and that, more to the point, Lawrence approved its publication. The power dynamics here—and the moral and legal dynamics, too—come down to consent.

In other words, the stripper defense. Because a stripper, by commodifying her sexuality, claims to control her sexuality, she can be shocked and horrified when the response to her sexuality is outside the boundaries.

Is Lawrence the Barack Obama of Hollywood actresses? It seems there is no superlative quality that can't be affixed to her (generally undefined) image:

[About Lawrence's protest:]This is heady stuff, and good stuff. Lawrence is talking about ethics. She's talking about law. She's talking about, essentially, decency in the age of digital reproduction. And she's also, of course, talking about the tensions that inevitably exist in a world mediated by images.
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[T]he compound message [of the VF picture] is this: "Do not look at my breasts!" and also "Oh, hey, here are my breasts." Lawrence is, with one image, saying both of those things. But she's saying much more, too—about magazines, about fame, about images themselves, about the tensions everyday women navigate as they both react to, and participate in, a media-driven culture.

Wow! This gal is a regular James Franco!

But I think the most important quote from Lawrence is this:  "It does not mean that it comes with the territory." The second "it," of course, means having one's nude pictures looted.

Unfortunately, it does come with the territory. We are twenty years post-Pam Anderson sex tape, thirty years into the Celebrity Skin era and forty since Hustler published photos of Jackie Onassis sunbathing nude. Before that, Joan Crawford's stag pictures and Tijuana Bibles. Naked female celebrities have been a hot commodity since long before Lawrence was born.

I saw a funny response to the multi-layered hoax in which someone threatened to release naked photos of Emma Watson. Watson, the writer said, probably thought, "But I haven't taken any nude photos."

Victim-blaming? Well, that's someone else's definition. My point is, similar to The Atlantic's discussion of long acting reversible contraception, that traditional morality had already taken care of this problem.

The issue is in this Lawrence quote:  "I can’t believe that we even live in that kind of world." We do, Ms. Lawrence, we do--and it's nobody's fault.

I've discussed it before:  The traditional attitude towards women was that they were to be protected from the ugly, mean world. Early feminism answered that women are just as capable as men at handling the ugly, mean world.

What Lawrence represents is the dominant contemporary thought:  The ugly, mean world must change because it hurts women.

That's not far from what the traditional arrangement said all along. But tradition is realistic; we can't change the world but we can create a haven. To be safe, we must be aware of danger.

The progressive vision is that the borders of the haven are actually prison walls and demands that we go beyond them. When the world outside the borders is found to be hostile, progressives believe that there is some magical switch somewhere that can change it. Only villainy prevents that switch from being flipped.

This is the same attitude that we see often in the world of the chronically sick or, more obviously, the world of fat acceptance. Doctors can cure the ailments, they can operate on obese people, but they refuse to out of prejudice or laziness. Someone is all-powerful and can change reality.

Perhaps this is why Lawrence and the mainstream media are so dense about the way these pictures were unearthed and distributed:

That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it.

The pictures were distributed by hosting sites. Reddit's administrators, for example, didn't receive the pictures and then post them to their front page to boost clicks. And, while the "hackers" that leaked the pictures are unknown, it appears that they worked for their own prurient pleasure, not for financial gain.

But such arguments are probably disingenuous. Scolding the public for viewing the pictures is useful for more "rape culture" hot air, but targeting hosting websites is more effective than raging at the wind.

In the long run, harping on the major arteries of web discussion like Reddit can force them to employ more content monitors. Content monitors, having acted as goalies against incoming "illegal" nudes, will inevitably go on to police discussions. "Inevitably" because it's already been happening--nary a day goes by on Reddit without a controversy regarding politicized deletions and shadowbans.

Ultimately, like Gamergate, what we have here is the practice of the old saw, "Never let a good crisis go to waste." Lawrence isn't a legal theorist or a culture jammer or anything but a young woman who took a risk and lost. It's the same story that thousands of young women have experienced in the digital age, only her embarrassment has a global reach.

What's puzzling is that we're not allowed to say that the world will probably always be a rotten place and that it's best to plan for that. Garber, Lawrence and the rest of the chattering class forget that you can't shame the shameless.