What we talk about when we talk about privacy

In the midst of rising racial tensions in Ferguson and an encroaching ISIS abroad, summer’s biggest news story might just have been about a group of naked girls.

On Aug. 31, a hacker leaked photographs of over 100 celebrities, including "The Hunger Games" actress Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton, on the website 4chan. Most shocking were not the photos themselves (many of which showed women who were at least partially clothed), or that they were obtained from Apple’s ubiquitous iCloud, or even that they so quickly and unapologetically proliferated every corner of the Internet. Most shocking was the hacker’s flagrant violation of privacy and, more perniciously, the way that women’s right to privacy was uniquely targeted.

Americans haven’t always considered privacy a right. Indeed, the much-discussed “right to privacy” — a concept that explains American indignation over everything from last summer’s NSA scandal to abortion limitations — wasn’t even part of our legal lexicon until the late 19th century. In 1890, Justice-to-be Louis D. Brandeis coauthored a seminal paper entitled (you guessed it) “The Right to Privacy,” in which he presciently argued, “[T]he law must afford some remedy for the unauthorized circulation of portraits of private persons.” Still, it was not until 1965 that the Supreme Court codified Brandeis’s ideas, deciding in Griswold v. Connecticut that policing contraception violated the “right to marital privacy” and that such a right might be defined as “protect[ion] from government intrusion.”

Yet even as the right to privacy has become as central to the American democratic consciousness as the Equal Protection Clause or the right to vote, it continues to hold little water when it comes to female bodies, which have historically been commodified. We all know that sex sells, and that the female sex sells more. It is philosophically but not historically surprising that such a primal, sexist reality, which reduces women to the shape of their breasts and the flatness of their stomachs, could supersede the more compelling right to privacy.

Compare the photo scandal to a male counterpart: When three of J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories were leaked last December, the reaction instead was overwhelmingly one of indignance. While many no doubt viewed the stories, which the author had no intention of making public before his death in 2010, the overall attitude was one of deference to Salinger’s wishes; he didn’t want them seen, and so we as readers felt that we ought not see them. But when hundreds of nude photos of female celebrities went live, few felt the same way. Hell, I scrolled through a few, and chances are that you did too.

The question is why. Why do we put our own right to view naked photos of these women — most of whom are funny, smart and enjoyable to look at even with their clothes on, in outfits they curated for public viewing — above their right to privacy? Why have we invented a right to see that holds more weight than a Constitutional right not to be seen?

Surely, you might argue, those who send nude photos or make sex tapes are simply asking for a public relations scandal, no? Perhaps. But there is a big difference between posting nude photos anonymously on a website and being discovered, say, and sending private photos to your significant other on a private device. The intent of the former is to be seen; the intent of the latter is for one specific person to see.

Ultimately, it boils down not to sex but to consent. We are simultaneously scandalized and fascinated by these photos not because they contain naked women, which are never more than a Google search away, but because they contain women who did not consent to be seen naked. Or at least, not by us. When shared without permission, nude photos become about much more than bodies. They become about power. Power that we, the viewers, hold. Power that the hacker holds. And power that men have held and continue to hold over women in modern America.

Ultimately, the right to privacy is a protection against the abuse of power by institutions that are bigger and stronger than the individual. For women — even those as critically acclaimed and financially successful as many of the leak’s victims — that institution is sexism, plain and simple. And that is an institution, indeed.

Cameron Langford is a politics major from Davidson, N.C. She can be reached at cplangfo@princeton.edu.