A couple of months ago, nude photos of Jennifer Lawrence were leaked online. Naturally, the photos caused an uproar: The quirky, down-to-earth actress had seemed impervious to gossip, until now.
Much closer to home, a sex tape of former Atenean AJ Ramos and Abby Santiaguel found its way to the Internet in early October, prompting the hashtag “#ADMUScandal” to trend nationwide on Twitter. While it hasn’t been confirmed whether the video was released with consent or not, the two have taken action towards privacy by deactivating their Facebook accounts.
At a time when we are bombarded with sexual images everyday, incidences like these still shock us. We can’t help but talk about them, use them as material for gossip. But beneath this surface-level reaction is the reason behind our discomfort: The blatant invasion of privacy. As Lawrence says of her situation to Vanity Fair, “It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime.”
Perhaps it’s because of the very pervasiveness of sex in media that causes us to take these incidents lightly. Sex scenes in movies and on television, for instance, have become increasingly explicit; they’re unavoidable. For example, in spite of last season’s incestuous rape scene—and other seasons’ general uncensored sex scenes—I, together with Game of Thrones’ millions of viewers, am still going to watch all its future episodes.
The fact that many have turned their own sex tape scandals into career-making moves may have desensitized us to sex tapes and nude photos as well. Case in point: Kim Kardashian (and her family) shot to fame in 2007, after her sex tape with her then boyfriend was released without her consent. In the local context, Hayden Kho’s three sex videos leaked in 2009 put the actor and doctor in the spotlight.
It’s the commodification of sex that has led us to forget that the people on our screens are just that—people. We forget that when explicit photos and videos are released without consent, rights have been violated and a crime has been committed. In her leaked photos, Lawrence wasn’t just a character in a television show, she was herself.
It’s confusing when, in the same issue of Vanity Fair that she called out what was done to her as a crime, Lawrence posed for a topless photo, her breasts floating above water. Here, we have two instances of Lawrence naked. The difference between her nudity in a magazine and her nudity on her phone is consent. She may be in the entertainment industry, but as Megan Garber of The Atlantic said, “Lawrence wants us to look at her—on some level, she needs us to look at her. But she wants us—and she needs us—to do our looking in the way that she specifies.”
While the authorities are currently investigating Lawrence’s case, that of Ramos and his Santiaguel is unclear. Hard facts about whether they had mutually consented to release the video would be impossible to acquire at this rate, but I’ve already resigned myself to this being a rumor-mill situation. What is more disturbing, to me, is that in spite of the hashtag, the tweets that accompany it are more amused than scandalized.
It bothers me that there is a possibility that the release of the video could have been non-consensual on someone’s part, and no one seems concerned. We have been desensitized to sex, and it has made us belittle violations of privacy. It appears that it has also caused us to see these violations as a joke.
