On Sunday evening, dozens of women were physically and emotionally violated. Their naked bodies were paraded in a public square before hordes of nameless, faceless onlookers. Some bystanders screamed epithets at the women, calling them sluts or whores.

This might sound like a scene from a Puritan-era novel, yet the event occurred this week, when a group of hackers posted stolen nude images of female celebrities. By doing so, the thieves sent a clear message to the Internet: We own these women's bodies, and we can violate them at will.

Though the identity of the hackers is still unknown, Apple said in a statement on Tuesday that the suspects gained access to celebrities' accounts by attacking and compromising their user names, passwords and security questions.

Of the many celebrities whose private pictures were swiped, only one was a man, actor Dave Franco. The rest of the victims allegedly included actresses like Jennifer Lawrence, Alison Brie and Lizzy Caplan, and sports figures like Olympians Hope Solo and McKayla Maroney.

A spokesperson for Lawrence confirmed the existence of the photos and told Mashable, "This is a flagrant violation of privacy. The authorities have been contacted and will prosecute anyone who posts the stolen photos of Jennifer Lawrence."

Real or not, experts say the theft and publication of these images speaks to an intense obsession with controlling the female body. The feminine figure is a valuable commodity used to sell the promise of sex, and thus has more "currency" than the naked male body. But Gail Dines, chair and professor of American Studies at Wheelock College in Boston, told Mashable the hack represents something more insidious than just standard economics.

"To be unclothed in the face of people who are clothed is to be rendered powerless," she said. "This is really about humiliating women, degrading them and reducing them to…fuck objects."

Dines, author of the book PORNLAND: How Porn has Hijacked our Sexuality, said the release of the private images is behavior typical of a "porn culture" in which women are disposable objects used temporarily, and often brutally, for physical pleasure. In this worldview, women's bodies are cheap and undeserving of privacy or integrity.

This sounds like sick hyperbole until Dines starts to list the trends she observes as a pornography researcher. In certain threads, male users ask for suggestions on how to find particularly demeaning scenes, like a woman registering physical pain performing certain sexual acts, such as anal sex. Numerous commenters will direct him to a specific film and recommend a scene — down to the second.

In a kind of porn known as "facial abuse," women are often brought to the brink of asphyxiation. In one recent example, Dines recalled, she watched as a famous porn actress was choked and strangled to the point where her eyes began to roll back into her head. The scene ended with the star in tears, her running mascara mixed with the semen that had been ejaculated into her eyes.

Lest these seem like outlying examples, several researchers published a paper in 2010 demonstrating the extent of violence and aggression toward women in pornography. The study, which was published in the journal Violence Against Women [PDF], analyzed hundreds of scenes in the top adult videos of 2004-2005 and found that 90% included a physical or verbally aggressive act like gagging, slapping and threatening. Nearly all of this behavior was directed at women by men, and even when a woman was the perpetrator, she was often targeting another woman.

The men who viewed the images of naked female celebrities may not have traced their curiosity back to violent representations of sex, but Dines argues that the proliferation of free and accessible porn in recent years has changed our expectations regarding the female body. With so many graphically sexual images of women available online, dozens of nude celebrity photos may seem harmless by comparison. Some even justify browsing the pictures by arguing that men are visual creatures with a natural, benign appetite for arousing images of women.

Dines disagrees: "There’s nothing biological about this. It’s all socially constructed, and we call it misogyny."

As for the women who looked at the images, Dines contends they're responding to pressure to compare themselves with celebrities, who are frequently presented both as flawless and in possession of sexual power. Perhaps they want to emulate what they see or even strip celebrities of their importance by slut-shaming the victims.

Cordelia Anderson, an advocate who specializes in sexual violence prevention and runs the Minneapolis-based consulting firm Sensibilities Prevention Services, told Mashable the American public is increasingly confused about what is public and private where sex is concerned.

"If I consent to have sex privately in my house or take a picture, I am not consenting to thousands of strangers walking in that house with me," she said. "People don’t seem to get that. If someone were to break in and participate in that and feel they have ownership over that, what makes sense about that?"

Anderson also feels that pornography has shifted societal norms toward an aesthetic that mirrors sexual violence. When this happens online, as in cases of revenge porn, the woman — and it's almost always a woman — can be victimized over and over again by strangers.

"It's basic bullying," she said. "Look what I can to do you. Look how I can bring you down. I can violate you, and I can invite other people to violate you, too."

Though men also experience forms of sexual violence, objectifying their bodies and then degrading them publicly is not a popular or money-making practice. But as the hackers responsible for publishing these images confirmed, doing so to women — particularly famous ones — will win an anonymous thief fame.

This notoriety, of course, comes at the expense of someone else's sense of safety and security, and it's not just the celebrities who lose, said Dines: "It’s revenge porn against women as a group. We all suffer, because our bodies are made even cheaper."

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