To be clear, ginning up a nude photo that purports to be someone it isn’t is gross and terrible behavior. Yet in our rush to defend the congresswoman’s honor, we may be doing more harm than good. While this particular nude photo was just a nasty hoax, we live in a time when snapping a naked selfie has effectively become a rite of passage. There are certainly other, genuine naked photos somewhere out there — if not of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, then of other politically ambitious young women. So the question shouldn’t be whether young women who are talking or thinking about running for office have snapped naked pictures — at least some of them almost certainly have — but why these images should be discussed at all.

In recent years, as smartphones have made high-quality digital photography a standard feature in most of our lives, posing for naked portraiture — and sharing the results with others — has become common behavior. A 2014 survey conducted by Cosmopolitian.com found that 89 percent of the survey respondents had snapped a naked selfie; the previous year, a study out of Purdue University reported that 46 percent of its college age participants had sent someone a naked photo of themselves.

Although naked photos are a gender neutral pursuit, it’s women who are primarily the targets of shaming campaigns around sexting. When nearly 500 nude celebrity photos surfaced on the message board 4chan in 2014, just a handful of men were included in the collection; it is women, not men, who are the most common victims of the nonconsensual sharing of nude images (a crime commonly known as “revenge porn”). And while the most notorious sexting politician is a man, it took multiple explicit ph otos, including allegations of sexting with a teenager, for Anthony “Carlos Danger” Weiner’s political ambitions to get completely derailed. By contrast, congressional candidate Krystal Ball became the subject of scandal after appearing, fully clothed, in a photo from a costume party in which a dildo was involved as a jokey prop in her husband’s attire.

And so, tempting and justified though it may be to cry foul over Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s fake photo, a better use of this moment would be to forcefully affirm the idea that these photos — be they real or fake, consensually distributed or stolen and posted online without consent — don’t matter. That the surfacing of a nude photo says nothing about a young woman’s talent, skills, or her commitment to public service — and volumes about those who would attempt to shame her through an extreme violation of her privacy.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the women I knew from my nude modeling days have any aspirations to run for president. But I hope that one day we’ll discover that the aphorism we tossed about with abandon has finally been proven false: that our country is, in fact, ready to elect a president who has posed naked, because our country has finally accepted that the division between competent women and sexual women is one that does not exist.

Lux Alptraum is the author of “Faking It: The Lies Women Tell About Sex — And The Truths They Reveal.”

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