It’s been trendy lately to talk about how differently we now treat women, particularly famous women, than we did in the aughts. We talk about how today, we understand that it was wrong for tabloids to harass Britney Spears and publish all those upskirt photos and ask teen pop stars on live TV if their boobs were real.
There’s a specific moment, though, when we saw that much-remarked-upon evolution tip into reality, the purity culture of the 2000s coming up against the feminist outrage of the 2010s and crumbling.
The grossly named Fappening occurred on August 31, 2014, when one hacker’s stash of nearly 500 celebrity nudes (including Jennifer Lawrence, then at the height of her fame) leaked out to the mainstream internet. The previous decade had a playbook in place for talking about leaked photos of naked stars. You talked about them as something titillating for you, the viewer, to look at without apology, and something shameful for the woman (it was always a woman) pictured to apologize for.
For some media outlets, it seemed only natural to continue the playbook of the 2000s into 2014. “#JenniferLawrence phone was hacked her #nude pics leaked Check them out in all their gloriousness,” tweeted Perez Hilton, publicizing a post that reproduced the uncensored pictures of Lawrence.
But instead of getting the traffic windfall he might have expected, Perez was slammed with outrage across social media. He had to apologize for his post and replace it with a censored version.
As Hilton and his cohort scrambled to catch up, the rest of the media was allying itself fiercely on the side of the hacking victims, denouncing anyone who looked at the leaked nudes.
It’s hard to say exactly what swung the discourse quite so hard against the hackers this time around. Perhaps it was the ubiquity of camera phones, which had made nudes so inescapable: that feeling that it could happen to you. Perhaps it was because the media at the time was obsessed with Jennifer Lawrence, like everyone else was, and they wanted to be on her side. Perhaps the collective hive mind had just decided the time had come for feminism to trend upward.
Whatever the reason, the press had now established a new narrative it could use to talk about sex crimes in the social media era, especially sex crimes that involved famous and beloved actresses. Three years later, it would put that knowledge to use to break a series of stories about Harvey Weinstein as the decade-old Me Too movement re-energized itself.
Me Too saw reputational losses and criminal charges wielded against powerful men who for decades had been able to get away with sexual violence with impunity. It was able to do that because of what we all learned from The Fappening.
—Constance Grady
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