The Sexist Man And The Perpetual Female Victim

Let’s define the term irony, shall we? After all, begging the public to get over the recent nude celebrity hack by writing about the nude celebrity hack seems a bit self-defeating and counter-productive. But then again, what do I know. I’m just a guy.

Just a guy. Anything I say regarding culture and sex and sexsim must toe the recent surge of psuedo-feminism, a vocal bunch that fights hard to convince anyone who will listen that society is dangerous and unfair and evil to anything and anyone without a penis. Should I stray from walking that line, God forbid, I may be branded with that dreaded “S-word.” And there’s no coming back from that.

So I’ll walk that line. It’s safe there. Critical thinking is replaced with mindless head-nodding, manufactured empathy, and automated concurrence by any man regarding sex in society, many of whom ironically go through this charade in the hopes of getting laid.

True story.

This type of thinking will allow me to look at The Guardian headline’s byline of “Why are there almost no men included on the list of celebrities whose privacy has been violated?” and totally gloss over the word “almost” in that rhetorical question.

Almost. Yes, there were men’s pictures released in the hacking. But we don’t give a shit about them. Because this is about the women. It must be. To bring up the inherent sexism in that statement would be to point out a hypocrisy that I simply refuse to acknowledge. James Franco. Justin Verlander. Their penises were splashed across the internet, just as much victims themselves as were their female counterparts. Again — we don’t give a shit about them. Hell, part of me is upset that they had the nerve to pose in those pictures, Verlander with his wife, and Franco with whoever the hell he was sleeping with that week. The nerve of those guys. Their existence in the pictures detracts from the perpetual victimization of all things female.

Fuck those guys.

This is about the women. As The Guardian article stated, “ The only time naked photos of men get leaked onto the internet is when they ham-fistedly leak them themselves.” Did you catch that? The visualization of the stupid male, like a chimp with a smartphone, too dumb to take naked selfies the proper way. When a male has his naked body cast into cyber-eternity, it’s hisfault. He was too dumb to be safe and download it to a secure i-cloud. Hell, he was practically begging to be publicly humiliated.

Shame on him.

The more I think about it, I’m not even sure what the appeal is. Naked women. Flesh. It’s not like I’ve been bombarded with visuals of nearly-naked women since puberty in an attempt to get me to buy whatever the television tells me I need to buy to be happy. I mean, I’m not going to bring up the societal inundation of all things sex in a society that now tells me I’m a chauvinistic pig for being turned on by it. “Personally, I have never understood the appeal in looking at naked photos of people who I don’t know,” reads the Guardian.

Umm… yeah… me neither.

I’m a 21st-century male. I don’t get turned on by seeing a naked women who I don’t know. I’ve completely disengaged the part of my brain that gets sexually aroused by all those things my pesky evolution has left me with. When I sit down to coffee with a female who wears a low-cut top and spends the duration of the conversation leaning forward, I look her in the eyes and her eyes only.

Cuz I’m that fucking good.

I’ve heard it suggested that anyone viewing any of the leaked photos is committing a sex crime. I’m willing to overlook the fact that labeling the viewing of naked celebrities as a “sex crime” completely waters down and bleaches the term, diminishing its value for when we actually need to use it at the appropriate time. You know: rape, sexual assault, molestation. I refuse to acknowledge that using “sex crime” as an umbrella statement for everything from hacked celebrity selfies to child molestation is dangerous and actually has the reverse-effect of making the public more apathetic toward the term. I won’t go there, because to go there would mean to break away from the pack and be labeled a sexist. No sir, not me.

This was a complete violation of privacy. Nobody can dispute that. But it was a violation against the women. And the women only. The men involved just happened to Forrest Gump their way into the pictures, and deserve any ridicule they might get. The women — most of whom have slung sex to sell movies wearing little more than the nothing they’re wearing in the hacked photos — are the victims. We must overlook the role sex plays in society and the much bigger question that it presents, and disregard the cookie-cutter molds men have been fit into, that we label intrinsically sexist, thus making society intrinsically sexist, because otherwise we’d be left without a victim.

And we cannot have that.

Much like the term “sex crime” we must water down the term “sexist” to the point that it’s thrown around so often it loses its truly important meaning. Like we did to “feminist.” There are more slaves today than there were at the height of race-based slavery. Sex slaves. But the fact that we now know what Jennifer Lawrence looks like sans clothing is the real travesty. Genital mutilation is occurring throughout parts of the middle east, young girls having their clitoris removed so that they can never enjoy the disgusting act of sex. But fuck, man… Jennifer Lawrence. She’s famous! THIS is what must trigger outrage.

I’ve endured my self-neutering, and I’ve never felt better. I no longer look at an attractive female when she walks by. I’d never tell a female “you look nice today,” because that right there is harassment. She’d have to walk away wondering if I’m stalking her, living in fear of any man because I had the nerve to compliment her.

Nope. Not anymore. These naked photos? Let’s presumptuously assume it was a man who hacked them, because even though he’s too dumb to take a naked selfie properly, he is insidious enough to hack into a cloud and extract pictures of famous people, diabolically spreading sex on the internet.

What nerve.

No, I’ll not bring any of this up. Thinking too much makes my head hurt. I’m just a guy, afterall. The same idiot TV commercials and sitcoms make me out to be, ruining whatever plotline in which I find myself, until the female graciously saves me, allowing me to live another day. I live in a day when masculinity is labeled an oppressive state, and I can’t allow that.

I’ll just continue to toe the line. The alternative would label me a sexist, and, like I said, there’s just no coming back from that.

This post originally appeared at Medium.