Let’s Be Clear: If You Steal and Post Other People’s Nude Pictures, You’re a Douchebag

by Calico Rudasill, Sssh.com Porn For Women. 

In the ongoing discussion about this past weekend’s mass hacking and posting of nude pictures of celebrities, there’s no shortage of advice being handed out by know-it-alls, including my favorite bit of obviousness: ‘If you don’t want naked pictures of yourself to show up on the Internet, don’t let people take pictures of you while you’re naked.’

Read on…

My hunch is that the vast majority of the people doling out that particular piece of advice are men who nobody wants to see naked, so it’s easy advice for them to give – and to which it’s easy for them to adhere. Their wives aren’t about to take naked pictures of them; these women would die of embarrassment if anybody but themselves had to suffer the vision of their man’s pudgy, lumpy nakedness. Some of these same guys might be tempted to take nude selfies and send them to women who aren’t their wives, I suppose, but if they do, those women will just want to delete the pics as quickly as possible, not post them to the Internet.

For the Jennifer Lawrences and Kate Uptons of the world, however, it’s a different story; damn near everybody wants to see them naked.

Kate and Jennifer’s lovers, whatever their motivations, can certainly be excused for wanting to capture more than just mental images of their partners, and women like Jennifer and Kate can certainly be excused for indulging them – or for wanting to document their youthful loveliness for their own purposes, for that matter.

As we age, pictures of ourselves from our youth are a great way to inspire nostalgia and memories of the good ol’ days, and someday Kate Upton won’t look like the way she does now; that’s just the sad reality of life. As a 44 year-old, I can honestly say that one particular picture of myself back from in the early 90s – wearing a bikini, bottle of beer in one hand, giving the camera what I thought was a ‘sexy look’ – has gradually transformed from a source of embarrassment to a source of pride. Where I used to look at it shudder at the memories of how awkward and difficult that time in my life was, now I look at it and think: “Damn; I looked good.”

If women like Kate and Jennifer want to look at current pictures of themselves for similar reasons, or to include homemade porn as part of spicing up their love lives, they have the right to do so. They also have a right to keep all of that completely private, away from the prying eyes of celebrity-obsessed, drool-emitting, Internet-based cretins who have no respect for anybody’s boundaries.

I’m not sure there are, or ever will be, legal or technological mechanisms to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the future. What we do have at our disposal, however, are the tools to make sure that anybody who participates in the dissemination of illicitly-obtained celebrity nudes (and illicit non-celebrity nudes) gets branded as what they are: complete and utter douchebags.

That’s what bothers me more than anything in this, really: the fact that guys like this so-called hacker “OriginalGuy” do what they do largely for the attention that they receive, and that so much of that attention is positive. OriginalGuy reportedly posted that his hack was “the result of several months of hard work” and that there were “several other people in on it” that he needed to count on to “make this happened”, and took a minute to thank all his “supporters.”

That’s right; a guy who can’t keep straight when to use the past or present tense is being hailed as a hero of some sort by a bunch of similarly pathetic losers, all because he has the requisite lack of shame to put a bunch of strangers’ private lives out in the streets. Nice, eh?

We probably can’t stop idiots like OriginalGuy and like-minded clods from invading our privacy, and we probably can’t reasonably expect people (including celebrities) to stop taking naked pictures of each other, but what we can do is be clear about who is who in this whole mess. The celebrities are victims with whom we can and should sympathize; the people stealing and posting the celebrities’ pictures are douchebags.

Yes, it really is that simple.