IT’S been a weird few weeks on the internet. There are, of course, a lot of people online who believe privacy is an illusion, that public people, even the most minor of celebrities, belong to them.

Most of the time, but not always, it’s men deciding they have the right to shame women for their sex lives while ogling their bodies.

Much of this comes from the idea that lonely, angry men and boys are “owed” women as rewards for being “nice” or cleaning their room or whatever. Quite often, when the supermodel of their fantasies isn’t handed to them, these pathetic man-children react in anger. Those people are the reason the horrifying concept of “revenge porn” exists.

There was a high-profile incident recently when a jilted ex-boyfriend of Zoe Quinn, an independent game developer who made a game about her battle with depression, posted on Wordpress that she’d cheated on him.

That outraged some corners of the internet, because one of the men she allegedly slept with wrote for the gaming website, Kotaku. He hadn’t reviewed Quinn’s game, but somehow a bunch of angry guys decided there was high-level corruption in games media — and only they could stop it. To “teach her a lesson”, they hacked Quinn’s social media accounts, made some fairly extreme threats to her and her family and then published her home address and naked photos of her online.

About a week later, Anita Sarkeesian, who reports on Tropes Vs Women in video games, posted the next video in her series.

Because she dared suggest anything negative about games, and reportedly doesn’t consider herself to be a gamer (and, obviously, no one outside a culture could possibly report on the broader social meaning of its art), she received some vile threats that mostly revolved around her being raped to death. The threats towards Sarkeesian and her parents became so bad that she had to leave her home.

This was about the time of the mass leaking of nude photos of more than 100 female (and a couple of male) celebrities.

The event started on 4chan, where most bad things on the internet start, moved over to Reddit and then bled on to the rest of the internet. The pictures, you will remember, were of actors including Jennifer Lawrence and Kirsten Dunst, and gymnast McKayla Maroney, who was under age when the photos were taken.

One of the interesting things about the photo leak was the initial reaction from many on social media: some talked about how public figures shouldn’t expect privacy, but many more blamed the women for taking the naked photos in the first place.

Reactions such as “well, if they didn’t want their naked photos put online, then they shouldn’t have taken them” are about as helpful as “if they didn’t want their TV stolen, then they shouldn’t have had one”.

The photos weren’t intended for public consumption, they just happened to be stored in the cloud by an automatic back-up service.

They were something private that had been done in their own homes for either themselves, or for those people they were intimate with.

Blaming the victim for choosing to take photos of themselves is a mistake that simply reaffirms the concept that women need to take the responsibility to not be raped, rather than putting the onus on those who commit sex crimes to just not commit the crime.

And that’s what I believe this was: taking those photos and putting them online wasn’t just theft but a sex crime.

Here’s the thing: women’s bodies don’t belong to anyone but themselves. No one owes anyone sex, nor should anyone shame others for having consensual sex.

If someone steals a photo of someone else’s naked body, and shows it to you without the victim’s consent, you don’t have the right to it, nor should you seek it out for curiosity.

These three incidents are both tied together and caused by the same toxic culture that treats women as objects.

And that culture is only fuelled by the weird power the internet’s veil of anonymity has to make men feel it’s acceptable to threaten rape at the first sign of a disagreement with a woman.

We shouldn’t have to be saying “imagine if it was your mother/sister/wife”, people should just treat others with respect.

Then again, after this latest wave of incidents, it’s hard to have much faith in humanity.

ALICE CLARKE IS A FREELANCE JOURNALIST. TWITTER @ALICEDKC