It’s a bad day for the dig­i­tal age. The past few weeks have seen not one, but two con­tro­ver­sies cen­tered around ​“leaked” images of women, and the public’s pre­sumed right to play voyeur. First, an anony­mous assailant stole and post­ed a bar­rage of nude images of female celebri­ties — every­one from it-girl Jen­nifer Lawrence to gym­nast McK­ay­la Maroney, along with pret­ty much any oth­er female human who could be con­sid­ered even remote­ly ​“famous” in 2014 — on Red­dit. Then, just this week, video of Bal­ti­more Ravens run­ning back Ray Rice punch­ing his then-fiancé Janay uncon­scious was post­ed on the web­site TMZ. The fact that Ray Rice had beat­en his wife was already pub­lic knowl­edge, and was wide­ly report­ed on this past Feb­ru­ary. But where the reports had only poured gaso­line on the ground, the video lit a match. It’s inspired wide­spread social media out­rage, count­less think-pieces (includ­ing, uh, this one), at least two hash­tag protests, and Ray Rice’s firing.

Our appetite for 'scandal' is never-ending. But turning women’s suffering into titillation is never the same as social progress. If we truly believed that victimizing women was wrong, we wouldn’t need photographic evidence of it to be outraged.

On the sur­face, these two inci­dents are very dif­fer­ent. One is a mat­ter of theft and sex­u­al assault, the oth­er a mat­ter of domes­tic vio­lence. The theft of the ​“celebri­ty nudes” com­pris­es a crime in and of itself; the Ray Rice video doc­u­ments a crime in progress. Yet they do have one cru­cial thing in com­mon: These images are being released against the will of the women depict­ed in them. Their pub­li­ca­tion has caused these women suf­fer­ing. And many peo­ple have glad­ly com­mod­i­fied that suf­fer­ing, in the name of the public’s ​“right to know.”

Janay Rice respond­ed to the video with a wide­ly pub­li­cized state­ment on Insta­gram, in which she con­demned those who post­ed and com­ment­ed on it.

“No one knows the pain that the media & unwant­ed opin­ions from the pub­lic has caused my fam­i­ly. To make us relive a moment in our lives that we regret every day is a hor­ri­ble thing,” she wrote. ​“If your inten­tions were to hurt us, embar­rass us, make us feel alone, take all hap­pi­ness away, you’ve suc­ceed­ed on so many lev­els,” she added.

Janay Rice’s choice to frame her­self as par­tial­ly respon­si­ble for the inci­dent is prob­lem­at­ic. (“We regret?” Wasn’t one of you uncon­scious?) Sim­i­lar­ly, her stat­ed inten­tion to stay with her abu­sive hus­band, to ​“show the world what true love is,” is fright­en­ing for any­one con­cerned about her safe­ty. But it’s a bit rich to ask a woman who’s cur­rent­ly in an abu­sive rela­tion­ship to parse it as if she were a fem­i­nist anti-vio­lence advo­cate stand­ing out­side of the rela­tion­ship and pass­ing judg­ment. In fact, it’s some­thing that even actu­al fem­i­nist anti-vio­lence advo­cates in abu­sive rela­tion­ships fre­quent­ly can’t do. Abusers are, among oth­er things, expert manip­u­la­tors, adept at deploy­ing guilt and blame to excuse them­selves. Janay Rice’s belief that she was respon­si­ble for her own assault, or that tol­er­at­ing her husband’s abuse is a way of demon­strat­ing ​“true love” is not a per­son­al fail­ing, it’s a symp­tom of abuse.

And it’s entire­ly rea­son­able for Janay Rice to feel humil­i­at­ed, scared or re-vic­tim­ized by the video’s pub­li­ca­tion. Any­one, male or female, abused or not, would flinch at hav­ing their most vul­ner­a­ble moment exposed pub­licly, and against their will. And Janay Rice’s sta­tus as a domes­tic vio­lence sur­vivor com­pli­cates things sub­stan­tial­ly: Her body, her pain and her choic­es have sud­den­ly been placed at the cen­ter of the nation­al con­ver­sa­tion. Her Insta­gram state­ment was met with enlight­ened com­men­tary such as ​“shut the hell up!!! Weak ass lit­tle girl!!! How dare you, excuse your HUS­BAND’S behav­ior for a check??!’” Her hus­band, whom we know to be abu­sive, has now lost his job, and there’s every chance he’ll turn his anger and blame on her. Her trau­ma has become an excuse for con­ser­v­a­tive com­men­ta­tors to go on air and frame her as a vil­lain who ​“repeat­ed­ly attacked” her husband.

This isn’t con­cern. It’s pure voyeurism; treat­ing a woman’s body and trau­ma as pub­lic prop­er­ty. Janay Rice’s life is already dan­ger­ous­ly out of her own con­trol — even if her hus­band nev­er hits her again, she will always know that he could hit her. Giv­en that abusers fre­quent­ly keep going, or esca­late the abuse after a rela­tion­ship ends, she will always have to live in fear — and we’ve respond­ed by tak­ing even more con­trol away from her. For the peo­ple scold­ing Janay Rice and call­ing her ​“weak,” their own tit­il­la­tion, their own right to be scan­dal­ized by domes­tic vio­lence, mat­ters more than the life or safe­ty of the woman who sur­vived it.

The ​“Fap­pen­ing,” as the mass pho­to theft has been termed, was more open­ly about tit­il­la­tion. The point of the leaks was, nom­i­nal­ly, to pro­vide peo­ple with pornog­ra­phy. But they, too, were about con­trol: By steal­ing and post­ing them, the women involved were being forced to act as porn per­form­ers against their will. The theft sent a mes­sage that they had no right to con­trol their own bod­ies, that their lives were always open for us to use as we liked. And they, too, pro­vid­ed the smug sat­is­fac­tion of sham­ing: Of telling women that they wouldn’t be vic­tim­ized if they didn’t take naked self­ies, of telling the world that women who were ​“too” sex­u­al, or sex­u­al in the wrong ways, would invari­ably be met with ​“pun­ish­ment” for their sins in the form of sex­u­al assault. As Aman­da Hess has not­ed, the online econ­o­my of ​“revenge porn” and hack­ing for nude pho­tos is essen­tial­ly about ren­der­ing women as prop­er­ty, an ​“orga­nized net­work of peo­ple who seek to exert pow­er over women and girls by reduc­ing them to life­less bod­ies and hoard­ing them in their hard drives.”

But that sense of enti­tle­ment isn’t con­fined to Inter­net creeps trad­ing pic­tures. Indeed, even seem­ing­ly respon­si­ble com­men­ta­tors have argued that we’re enti­tled to the images of Janay Rice’s trau­ma — some even sug­gest­ing that the release of the tape is ulti­mate­ly done for her own good. ​“Poor woman,” wrote Petu­la Dvo­rak in the Wash­ing­ton Post. ​“Domes­tic vio­lence is, above all, embar­rass­ing… But there will be a greater good out of her per­son­al pain.”

And there it is again: The assump­tion that Janay Rice’s ​“per­son­al pain” is less impor­tant than our own edi­fi­ca­tion or reac­tion to it, that her ​“per­son­al pain” is some­how beside the point, when in fact, her pain is the entire point.

It’s true that there have been some pos­i­tive con­se­quences of the video’s being leaked. Ray Rice has been fired, where­as the print reports of his assault only led to him being sus­pend­ed for a few games. There’s been a nation­wide con­ver­sa­tion about domes­tic vio­lence, which may lead to more vic­tims seek­ing help and form­ing escape plans to get out of their rela­tion­ships. (This is the ​“greater good” to which Dvo­rak refers.) Attempts to blame Janay Rice for the attack are much hard­er now that we can actu­al­ly see what hap­pened. But the fact that there’s some social ben­e­fit doesn’t ren­der the com­mod­i­fi­ca­tion of Rice’s pain accept­able; after all, there was social ben­e­fit from the ​“Fap­pen­ing,” too, in the form of high-pro­file social and cul­tur­al push­back against vic­tim-blam­ing and slut-sham­ing. But that doesn’t mean that the Fap­pen­ing was a good thing.

And then, there’s the fact that none of this would be nec­es­sary if our cul­ture were less per­mis­sive of domes­tic vio­lence. We already knew that Ray Rice attacked his wife, long before this video sur­faced. If the NFL had a zero-tol­er­ance pol­i­cy toward rape and abuse, he would have been fired in Feb­ru­ary, when it hap­pened. If we were already talk­ing about domes­tic vio­lence, and edu­cat­ing our chil­dren about the cycle of abuse as a mat­ter of course, we wouldn’t need high-pro­file abuse cas­es in order to spark that con­ver­sa­tion. If we didn’t blame vic­tims, we wouldn’t need to see taped ​“proof” of the assault in order to believe that it hap­pened, or to believe that Janay Rice didn’t deserve to be abused.

In that kind of world, Janay Rice would also have sub­stan­tial­ly more moti­va­tion and capac­i­ty to leave her abuser; she’d have less encour­age­ment to blame her­self for his actions, and more hope that she would be sup­port­ed as a sur­vivor, rather than being called a ​“weak lit­tle girl” or turned into enter­tain­ment. She could go from abuse to free­dom, rather than going from an abu­sive part­ner to an abu­sive world.

Our appetite for ​“scan­dal” is nev­er-end­ing. But turn­ing women’s suf­fer­ing into tit­il­la­tion is nev­er the same as social progress. If we tru­ly believed that vic­tim­iz­ing women was wrong, we wouldn’t need pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence of it to be out­raged, wouldn’t even need to con­cen­trate that out­rage on spe­cif­ic cas­es. We could focus less on indi­vid­ual women, and more on chang­ing the world for women as a whole.