I have seen a large preponderance of men and women make excuses for the men who do these things by stating, in no uncertain terms, that the females “deserve” it for being “stupid.” This is a perspective so intellectually and ethically bankrupt that I shudder to consider how prevalent it is. What about holding us guys accountable for our actions? What, we can’t be expected to refrain from hacking into celebrity’s phones, stealing their nude photos, then gawking at them online all day? What are we — animals? Children? Robots? Imbeciles? Even the slightest expectation of decency and decorum is too much? 

I checked Drudge on Sunday night and saw the urgent headline screaming from the top of the page: “Hollywood Stars Exposed in Massive Nude Photo Leak.”

It’s not exactly the most weighty world news, so I didn’t click on the link or read anything about it. But the following morning I logged into Facebook and Twitter to find both sites overwhelmed by people frantically sharing or excitedly commenting on the stolen images of famous actresses, most notably Jennifer Lawrence.

It was at this point that I got up to speed on the story, and discovered that, apparently, some thief/creep/creepy thief hacked into the iCloud server, pilfered dozens of nude photos from various well known women, and distributed them online. And when I say “distributed them online,” I mean he put them on one message board, and let millions of other creeps spread the stolen property across the vast expanse of cyber space.

It’s both unsurprising and disturbing that it’s unsurprising that so many adult males have either shared these images or publicly announced their intention to find them. I’m not sure if I can successfully interject any common sense into all of this, but I have to try.

So before you go foraging through Google for the newest batch of naked celebrities (too late, I know), please keep a few things in mind:

1. The internet is not an alternate dimension where the laws of morality, ethics, and basic human decency are magically suspended.

The internet is what happens when you go on your computer to find information, or to communicate, or to view a video of a three-toed sloth crossing the street in Costa Rica. At no point in this process do you forfeit your humanity. You are a human being doing things on the internet, and those things often impact, to some extent, other human beings. So whatever you do or say on the internet, it’s just like you’ve done it or said it in real life. Why? Well, because this is real life. This is not a dream. It is not a fantasy. This is real, I am real, you are real, everything that happens here is real.

Now that we’ve established this, hopefully we can all agree that intentionally looking at the stolen images of women is exactly equal to hiding in the bushes and staring at your neighbor while she undresses. There is no fundamental ethical or moral difference between the two acts. You might feel like it’s different, but it isn’t. The fact that it occurs on the internet doesn’t suddenly and mysteriously alter the nature of the act itself. It is what it is, you’ve done what you’ve done.

But this incontrovertible principle seems to be lost on so many. That’s why they clamor like schoolboys on Twitter and Facebook about their eagerness to see these pictures, but they’d likely never take to social media to tell the world that they’ll be climbing up a tree tonight to spy through someone’s daughter’s bedroom window. In both cases they are violating a person’s privacy. In both cases they are seeing what they were not meant to see. In both cases they are taking pleasure in witnessing a woman at her most exposed and vulnerable. Both actions are wrong, both actions are voyeuristic and cruel.

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