Celebrities: They Sext Like Us, Ctd

by Dish Staff

The photo leak scandal wages on. Alyssa Rosenberg raises an eyebrow at some of the advice these celebrities have received:

The theft and release of the photos are callous enough. These periodic violations suggest a sense of extreme entitlement to famous people’s bodies, a contempt for the idea that people in public life have the right to define any zone of privacy and a sense of glee about the possibility of exposing famous individuals as human and vulnerable.

But the response to these sorts of leaks comes with its own sort of cruelty. Rather than casting a jaundiced eye at large corporations that fail to keep their clients’ data safe or railing against the impulse to pry into other people’s intimate lives, we see sentiments such as the one expressed by New York Times technology columnist Nick Bilton. “Put together a list of tips for celebs after latest leaks: 1. Don’t take nude selfies 2. Don’t take nude selfies 3. Don’t take nude selfies,” Bilton tweeted on Monday.

As tech reporter Kashmir Hill pointed out in Forbes, this kind of response is the digital equivalent of abstinence-only sex education, which is divorced from the realities and expectations of contemporary relationships. And it shares a smug moralism with that sort of thinking: Anyone who experiences a bad outcome from bowing to a partner’s request (much less acting for his or her own pleasure) deserves it and ought to be held up as a cautionary lesson for everyone else.

Amanda Hess compares the controversy to one of an earlier era:

…BuzzFeed‘s Anne Helen Petersen has proposed that Lawrence should counter the incident by laughing off the violation and acting as if she’s so devoid of hangups that it’s impossible for anyone to truly embarrass her. Petersen—author of the forthcoming Hollywood history Scandals of Classic Hollywood—advises Lawrence to hew to the example of Marilyn Monroe, who was affronted with a similar “scandal” when topless photographs she had posed for pre-stardom in exchange for a flat $50 fee were later republished without her consent in a 1952 pinup calendar.

Petersen notes that, in the face of the puritanical Hollywood climate of the early 1950s, Monroe was able to overcome the potential stigma of the photos by not “denouncing the images” but instead taking “control” of the narrative by facing them with her trademark sexy giggle and wink. Monroe told the press that she was “not ashamed” of the photos and had “done nothing wrong.” Then, she flipped the incident into a self-deprecating joke: “I’ve only autographed a few copies of it, mostly for sick people,” she told the the Saturday Evening Post. “On one I wrote, ‘This might not be my best angle.’ ” By laughing it off, Monroe contributed to “what came to be known as the ‘Playboy philosophy,’ that sex is only dirty when suppressed,” Petersen writes. …

What Petersen doesn’t mention is that Monroe never agreed to be the face of Playboy’s ostensible revolution—in 1953, Hugh Hefner bought photos of Monroe from that same old nude shoot and published them in his magazine’s first issue without her consent, and without paying her a dime. (With his Playboy fortune, Hefner later bought the funeral plot next to Monroe’s crypt, ensuring that they’d be laid side by side forever—again, not her call.) Similarly, Lawrence never agreed to share these images of her “beautiful body” with the world. Why would anyone want her to shrug that off?

Update from a dissenting reader:

Alyssa Rosenberg calling the advice to “just say no” to sexting the same as abstinence-only education is laughable. A better example is unsafe sex, which (at least in my book) is poor judgement and not the result of some act of shaming by society. Really, nobody is telling these narcissists celebrities to not Instagram, Tweet, etc. Just use some reasonable judgment. Be aware that you’re going to be a target for this kind of thing. I mean, is your life really going to start to suck if you can’t take nude pics on your telephone?  ’80s me is puzzled.