Jennifer Lawrence Has Been on My Mind A Lot Lately

But not in the way that you might think.

We’ve all heard about the recent phone hacking that has caused much celebrity angst. Private photos stolen and disseminated all over the internet. Very private, very personal photos, now all very public thanks to Google and other search engines.

Privacy has become an endangered commodity. No method of communication, no financial transaction, no aspect of our lives is snoop-free. We’ve grown accustomed to surrendering the smallest details of our existence for easier and faster access to virtual things and ideas that half a generation ago didn’t even exist. Our fundamental right to privacy has yielded to our fundamental need for immediate deliverance.

But lines get crossed. Emotional well-being gets devoured. Virtual selves drown humanity.

And so it is with these hacked photos. It’s all too easy for us to dismiss the damage caused by looking, however briefly. After all, celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence privately posed for these photos. They assumed the risk that the photos might one day get leaked to the public. And what’s the added harm in my viewing images that have already been published and seen by scores of thousands already? How does my looking add to the injury and hurt?

In a solid article for The Good Men Project, Why I Don’t Want to See Jennifer Lawrence Naked, author James Fell addresses the very real harm:

I want you to pause and think about how you would feel to see these photos. Think about it for the violation that it is. Again, you do NOT have their permission to see them. They don’t want you looking. Doesn’t it feel shameful to be looking? Doesn’t it feel like a form of assault? If you have a peek and consider it no big deal, it normalizes the behavior for you. It makes violating people’s privacy, in a sexual way no less, something that you don’t worry about. It makes it feel like you have the right to do so. This is not a good mindset to have. I’m not saying looking at these photos will turn you into a rapist, or even a bad person. I just want you to stop and think. We can argue just how bad participating in this privacy violation is and get nowhere. Is it a little bad or a lot bad? What is certain is: it’s not good.

Read the rest here.

Fell may or may not be familiar with the Catholic Catechism, I wouldn’t know. But his reasoning, even if not directly related, brought to mind it’s teachings on chastity and pornography:

2354 Pornography consists in removing real or simulated sexual acts from the intimacy of the partners, in order to display them deliberately to third parties. It offends against chastity because it perverts the conjugal act, the intimate giving of spouses to each other. It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others. It immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world . . .

Let those words sink in for they are critical: It does grave injury to the dignity of its participants (actors, vendors, the public), since each one becomes an object of base pleasure and illicit profit for others.

Even briefly viewing these illegally accessed images – which were, of course, meant only for “private consumption” – will result in a grave injury to all of the people involved.

Author Fell is in accord, labeling it as an “assault” on the celebrities, but also recognizing that the viewer, too, has been injured because the behavior (the violation of sexual privacy) has become “normalized.” This is behavior that Fell saw as falling somewhere between “not good” and  being “a lot bad.”

So these hacked images present us with an opportunity to think about the kind of people we – men particularly, but women as well – want to be. Will we allow ourselves to further injure others? Or ourselves? Will we dismiss our “quick peek” as a merely playful or meaningless gesture? Will we fail to recognize that we have become what we actually despise – agents responsible for the destruction of our own privacy?

Well, I guess that we should be grateful that these questions are finally being publicly raised. So there’s hope. And there’s God’s grace – we may well need it

And to answer your question: No, I haven’t looked.

Peace