Over the weekend, a flood of nude pictures of various female celebrities were leaked by some hacker(s) and posted to the wretched dregs of the internet: 4chan. From 4chan, they spread like wildfire, and the hacker(s) charged people bitcoins for access to the photos. Eventually these photographs ended up on Reddit, and it became known as “The Fappening”.

It’s as if nude pictures of these women were placed on billboards around the country against their will, but these billboards are actually well-lit screens and everyone has at least two of them on hand at all times. Even more dire is the context in which these photographs were taken — intimate, private moments of extreme vulnerability with their respective partners.

While reading the coverage of this terrible invasion of privacy of celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Lea Michele, Kirsten Dunst and Brie Larson, I came across a Sept. 1 article from The Verge, written by T.C. Sottek called “Say hello to men who hate the NSA but love invading the privacy of women.”

We are all adults here, so I’m going to go ahead and say that a lot of men in this situation are finding pleasure in these leaked photographs. That’s very bad. These women have experienced a complete and total invasion of privacy against their will. We’ve just entered the realm of cyber sexual abuse.

Sottek makes the poignant observation that the “internet is written in ink,” and that many of the men who tend to complain (publicly via Twitter) about NSA-related privacy infringements are the same men blaming the celebrities – these human victims – for their private information being released to the public. Apparently the right to privacy only belongs to men.

Cyber sexual abuse, like any other form of cyber violence is now a problem because so much of our lives are lived through connected devices and in our outward representations of ourselves on the world’s stage. It’s now evident more than ever that things which happen in real life are naturally mimicked in our digital lives, resulting in less accountability and more harm. Less accountability comes from the freedom to become anonymous, and the harm should be self evident: now Jennifer Lawrence has to walk through her life knowing that a large portion of the male population has already subjected her vulnerable naked body to their feverish male gaze. They have objectified her as a result – as if notable women didn’t already have enough objectification to deal with already.

So why am I writing about this? Isn’t it better just to leave the issue alone and let the buzz die down so fewer people go out into the cacophony of trolls and misogynists and try to find and view these naked images? Well, there’s an important distinction to be made about the victims, which a lot of men do not seem to understand: it is not their fault.

A lot of arguments against the taking of nude pictures have arisen, and a lot of people are trying to assign blame to these women for expressing their sexuality in a (formerly) safe manner with presumably trusted loved ones. The idea of a woman able to freely expose her body in any manner of her choosing flies in the face of centuries of patriarchal society and misogyny.

 Another argument in favor of shaming these women for a private decision to photograph themselves revolves around the idea that being famous has a cost. When a person is famous, something happens in our media-lit eyes that magically gives us the right to know everything about them. These stars are successful, glamorous, and they are an amalgamation of a lot of the things we want in life – people to care about our lives, financial freedom and stellar leisure activities. The objectification of women is already a noted pattern in society and its reflection in media, and when someone becomes a pretty face on every tabloid, a household name and a glamorous star after mass exposure to a media audience, women lose a lot more in the fight than men do every single time. Yes, these celebrities have marginally better lives than the vast majority of the world, but they still deserve basic human rights like everyone else.

My point is not to shame anyone for viewing the imagery. I myself have not seen the photographs in question because I respect the privacy of these women, and I don’t really go around the Internet looking for naked women anyway, if you catch my drift. If you’ve seen these women in the nude already, it doesn’t matter, even though you were complicit in her abuse. What matters is that you do not continue to support this situation’s growing intensity. These women have been forced to be literally bare for the world to see. What we can all do is open up a dialog about how cyber sexual abuse is now a reality on a scale never before realized.

Van Badham possibly said it best when wrote a Sept. 1 article in the Guardian, “Mass communication was in no way agreed to by the lovers, who had every right to believe their security would not be compromised. Actors and other entertainers may certainly offer their image to public consumption as their professional practice, but what they are not trading is their intimacy.”

The lines between “real life” sexual abuse and cyber sexual abuse are fading away, just like the lines between “real life” bullying and cyber bullying. It’s time that society takes these cyber crimes just as seriously as the crimes which happen in real life, as they damage in different yet equally intense ways. So let’s call this sordid affair what it really is: sexual abuse, plain and simple.