“I didn’t tell you that you could look at my naked body.”
Jennifer Lawrence, perhaps the one of the most notable victims of the massive celebrity photo hack last month, is finally speaking out about what happened to her. In this month’s issue of Vanity Fair, she discusses her sadness, fear, and anger about the whole thing, and in an amazingly refreshing move, doesn’t offer a single apology. One might recall the Vanessa Hudgens photo “scandal” from a few years back, and also recall that Disney forced her to call this a “lapse of judgment.” Hudgens may have been made to hang her head in shame, but JLaw does nothing of the sort: “every single thing that I tried to write made me cry or get angry. I started to write an apology, but I don’t have anything to say I’m sorry for. I was in a loving, healthy, great relationship for four years. It was long distance, and either your boyfriend is going to look at porn or he’s going to look at you.” Female celebrities are no longer bound by the age of the purity ring and the shame of sex before marriage – and Jennifer Lawrence is living proof.
Too long have women’s bodies belonged to the media, and too long have women been forced to make excuses and feel shame and agony over what people are writing about them, or worry about the future of their careers when things like this happen. And that’s not to say Ms. Lawrence didn’t. She certainly feared for what would happen to her career when the images came out – “I was just so afraid. I didn’t know how this would affect my career” – but it can’t hold Katniss back, and it won’t stop this 24-year-old Oscar winner from doing what she loves. Lawrence scolds those who have looked at the images, and rightfully so: “It is not a scandal. It is a sex crime. It is a sexual violation. It’s disgusting. The law needs to be changed, and we need to change. That’s why these Web sites are responsible. Just the fact that somebody can be sexually exploited and violated, and the first thought that crosses somebody’s mind is to make a profit from it. It’s so beyond me. I just can’t imagine being that detached from humanity. I can’t imagine being that thoughtless and careless and so empty inside.”
In the piece, Lawrence also painstakingly describes having to call her father and inform him of what was happening. It’s something she would not wish on anyone, and implies that she would rather have traded all the money from The Hunger Games than had that conversation (though her father was apparently playing golf and in a good mood). It certainly hasn’t been easy, but things are looking up for her: “Time does heal, you know. I’m not crying about it anymore. I can’t be angry anymore. I can’t have my happiness rest on these people being caught, because they might not be. I need to just find my own peace.”
The full story in Vanity Fair hits stands on October 14 and is over 3,000 words – and perhaps that’s not even half of what is needed to touch on the injustice – but Lawrence does so with eloquence and grace, and has set in motion a change for young women in Hollywood who have been shamed or abused because of similar incidents: “I was afraid that by sitting and doing nothing, that made it seem OK for other women and girls to just let it happen to them, because it isn’t.” After watching the Emma Watson photo hoax unfold last week when she spoke about feminism at the UN, it’s painfully clear that misogyny is alive and well, but voices like Lawrence’s and Watson’s are making an effort to change that. “It’s my body, and it should be my choice,” Lawrence says. And she couldn’t be more right.