Why don't male celebrities fear leaked nudes?

Amy McCarthy asked this question in a recent article for Bustle. It’s not a difficult question to answer.

Here are two hints:

  1. In our culture, women experience an alarming level of street harassment. Street harassment is defined as:

“Unwelcome words and actions by unknown persons in public places which are motivated by gender and invade a person’s physical and emotional space in a disrespectful, creepy, startling, scary, or insulting way.”

Examples of street harassment include sexually explicit comments, sexist remarks, homophobic slurs, groping, leering, stalking, flashing, and assault. In a 2014 survey commissioned by Stop Street Harassment, it was found that 65% of all women had experienced street harassment.  The report reveals that 20% of all women had been followed, 23% had been sexually touched, and 9% were forced to do something sexual.

If you or someone you know is tired of dealing with street harassment, Stop Street Harassment has resources available that may be of assistance.

  1. We live in a Rape Culture. No, that doesn’t mean that we live in a culture where people love to rape.  Rape Culture is more insidious than that.  What is Rape Culture?

In a rape culture, people are surrounded with images, language, laws, and other everyday phenomena that validate and perpetuate, rape. Rape culture includes jokes, TV, music, advertising, legal jargon, laws, words and imagery, that make violence against women and sexual coercion seem so normal that people believe that rape is inevitable. Rather than viewing the culture of rape as a problem to change, people in a rape culture think about the persistence of rape as “just the way things are.”

Rape is non-consensual sex.  If you engage in sexual activity with someone without their consent, that is rape.  If you engage in sexual activity without consent, you are imposing your will onto another person with no regard for their rights or wishes. You are denying their very humanity. Rape is a form of sexual assault that affects 1 in 6 women and 1 in 33 men in the United States (source).  Roughly 98% of the time, female rape victims were sexually assaulted by male perpetrators and 93% of the time, male rape victims were sexually assaulted by male perpetrators (source).

Yes, men are raped too.  Yes, men experience street harassment.  Women however, experience both at far greater rates.

The answer to the question posed by McCarthy?

We live in a culture where people feel entitled to women’s bodies.

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For more information on men’s entitlement to women’s bodies, see here, here, and here,

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Why don't male celebrities fear leaked nudes?
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