Blame celebrities for nude photo leaks? Might as well be a rape apologist

There is at least one photo of me nude. It’s full frontal, too.

My mom took it in 1973. I was two years old.

Apologies to anyone who threw up in her mouth a little at my first paragraph. I can tell you with a fair amount of conviction that there are no adult nude photos of me, though I can’t be 100% positive. There was that weird condo we stayed in once.

There is a big kerfuffle right now because apparently multiple celebrities’ iCloud accounts containing nude photographs of themselves have been hacked, and the photographs subsequently scattered to the four winds.

Apple says neither its iCloud nor its Find My Phone services were compromised. Rather, these individual accounts were hacked with brute force attacks—basically, guessing usernames and passwords until you hit one. (Generally automated programs do this, not unkempt slobs eating Hot Pockets in their moms’ basements manually trying at keyboards, though they may be the ones who wrote the programs.)

Now, any rational thinking adult—and I realize such a description may exclude a great many celebrities—should be able to put it together that if s/he can access his/her iCloud account at any browser with the right credentials, then anyone else could do the same thing. Consequently, though cloud storage is a great thing, there are probably some things you ought not put there. Like tax returns. Or sealed legal proceedings. Or anarchist manifestos.

Or photographs of your vagina.

Now incredibly, for me to suggest that keeping nude photographs of yourself in cloud storage is not a smart thing to do is victim blaming, according to some shrieking malcontents people.

That some would apparently make this another front in the rape culture war is spastically, numbingly stupid. You shouldn’t put nude photographs of yourself in cloud storage for the same reason you shouldn’t leave $1,000 in cash in sight in your car in a parking garage. What’s the problem? They’re both locked up, right? If the cash gets stolen from your car, is it the thief’s fault? Certainly—but you shouldn’t have left it in sight.

If calling these involved celebrities out for doing something dumb is victim blaming, then so is that.

You want to take photographs of your vagina? That’s fantastic. Go for it. Don’t put them in the cloud.

You might also like:

• Sometimes there are thunderstorms in “The Cloud”
  Longtime readers may remember that this blog started and lived about its first nine months on blogge…
• New $10 bill to feature a dead woman representing democracy #TheNew10
  The U.S. Treasury has announced that the new $10 bill, to enter circulation in 2020, will feature a …
• As we fall all over ourselves to discuss Sotomayor’s sex and ethnicity, let’s keep these two things in mind
  Barack Obama recently nominated Sonia Sotomayor, who has a vagina and was born to poor Puerto Rican …
• The Pile
  Half our garage has been storage space for most of this year. We are also renting what I consider to…
• How about just taking the photo you want?
  Ever visit PhotoShop Disasters? It’s one of my favorite stops on the intertubes, featuring examples …