How do you solve a problem like “the fapenning”? Since dozens of private nude photographs of female celebrities were hacked, leaked, and widely disseminated this past weekend, commentators have proposed a raft of remedies: Some have suggested that women themselves can prevent their own victimization by never snapping nude selfies at all. Others insist the American legal system must step up to investigate and prosecute the hackers. Or perhaps Apple’s lax security measures are really to blame. Still others have proposed that incidents like this one can be fixed with a collective attitude adjustment. At Al Jazeera America, for example, Lux Alptraum argues that destigmatizing sex is the key to preventing hackers from exploiting women: If women are no longer forced to view their sexuality as a shameful expression that ought to be hidden from the world, she says, then hackers will have little reason to ever pull back the curtain.

Destigmatizing female sexuality is an important project, but it is not the remedy to this problem. The central issue here isn’t that the people hacking, leaking, and sharing these photos view women’s bodies as shameful. It’s that they view women’s bodies as property.

Consider the members of AnonIB, an Internet message board where anonymous users convene to share naked photographs of women without their consent. Jennifer Lawrence’s hacked photographs surfaced on AnonIB days before they exploded across the Web; hackers have set up camp there, advertising their abilities to download private photos from the iCloud accounts of a handful of female celebrities and thousands of women you’ve never heard of. After spending a day paging through the board, I haven’t seen any users who seem to care whether their targets are shamed or embarrassed by their actions. In fact, I’m not convinced that they’re aware that women have any feelings at all. To them, women—and here, it is always women—are objects to be passed around between friends and strangers. The prospect that the women exposed might experience humiliation does not enter the discussion, because that would require women to be capable of subjective experience. People who release “revenge porn” do so in an attempt to shame women in their lives who they think have done them wrong, but the people on this board are perfectly content to violate their acquaintances, classmates, and perfect strangers with no additional interpersonal motivation. On AnonIB, women are not framed as mortified or distressed. They are “hot” or “stunning” or “so fuckable” or simply “that ass on the right” or “this firm pair of tits,” or devoid of identity entirely—just a name tied to an explicit photo.

This is a sport, and women are the trophies. Whenever a nude photograph is stolen from the cloud or extracted from an oversharing ex-boyfriend, it’s reported on the site as a “win.” As in, “Girl has an amazing body. The wins are rare but they exist. Harass her ex into giving them to you then post them here.” It doesn’t seem to matter how the photos get on the site, just that they do: Some photos surface from an iCloud hack, but others are passed along through the target’s network of acquaintances—some leakers say they received the photo from the woman while they were dating; others say they secretly lifted a photo of a friend’s girlfriend from his phone while he wasn’t looking. Women who reveal their images online by their own volition—like through a long-ago gig as a pornographic cam model—are also here, in the form of dredged-up screenshots

...

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/09/03/anonib_nude_photo_site_where_hackers_and_users_treat_women_as_property.html