By Friday, Mr. Cruz had moved from defending his wife’s honor to defending his own, calling a tabloid report that accused him of extramarital affairs “garbage” and blaming the Trump camp for the story. Which means that soon the Twitter mob will probably stop scrutinizing Heidi Cruz and start in on the rumored mistresses.

In this strangest of primary seasons, women exist primarily in terms of their relationships to the men they marry or question or critique. They can either be beauties or beasts or “the love of my life.” They can be “crazy” or “losers,” “fat pigs” or “dogs.” They can be mothers and daughters. They can be the currency with which you buy voters’ belief in your machismo and alpha-maleness, or they can be the sand you kick in the face of a “New York bully.” In every case, whether they are assets or liabilities, they are objects. In no case are they people.

What’s the political significance of a naked lady? When the Utah ad went public, it wasn’t long before the predictable calls to leave candidates’ families out of the fray were joined by charges of slut-shaming, and the insistence that a grown woman can pose as she wishes; that as long as it’s her choice, it’s empowering.

Melania Trump might have chosen to pose for GQ, but there’s nothing empowering about the way her husband’s opponents have repurposed her modeling portfolio as revenge porn. Which is precisely what Mr. Trump has done with Megyn Kelly’s GQ shots. Neither woman deserves to suffer for having made the choice to get in front of a camera.

MY guess is that neither one will. Twenty years ago — or even as recently as 2004, when the Federal Communications Commission fined CBS $550,000 after Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl halftime “wardrobe malfunction” — to be female and naked was to be afraid. But now, our biggest reality TV star is Kim Kardashian, a woman who spun a sex tape into gold, a woman who posts nude selfies, then twirls on her haters, while her fans come roaring to her defense, claiming that she has subverted the male gaze because she’s the one creating the image and she’s the one sharing the shot.

When a collection of naked celebrity pictures were spirited out of the cloud, then leaked to the public in 2014, it was the hacking that shocked people, not the existence of the pictures. Not even a Disney princess like Vanessa Hudgens had her career derailed by repeated leaked nudes.