BRENDAN O’NEILL: The gobsmacking hypocrisy of commentators crying over the leaking of celebrity pictures.

If the hacker had found a video of a famous woman being hateful he would have been hailed as heroic rather than branded a pervert. In recent months, you see, the private text messages, emails and telephone conversations of various well-known people have been leaked and pored over with widespread media approval. We have watched as the woman who leaked football chief Richard Scudamore’s private and embarrassing emails was celebrated for her bravery rather than denounced for her lack of respect for a man’s privacy. We heard the world cheer in unison as former American basketball boss Donald Sterling was expelled from his sport over an entirely private phone conversation he had, which was secretly recorded and leaked. More recently, some of the same media outlets now outraged by the leaking of private photos from female celebrities’ mobile phones were only too happy to republish and sternly condemn less-than-PC private text messages sent by two British football officials on their mobile phones.

There is currently fury with anyone who says that if these female celebs did not want their naked photos to be seen, then they shouldn’t have taken them in the first place. This is indeed a very stupid and intolerant thing to say. Yet the exact same thing was said of the above cases – that if you didn’t want your private offensive comments to be seen or heard by others, then you should never have said them. As a Washington Post columnist said in response to the Donald Sterling case: “If you don’t want your words broadcast in the public square, don’t say them … Such potential exposure forces us to more carefully select our words and edit our thoughts.” How is this any different to the horrible idea that if female celebrities don’t want their naked bodies seen in public, then they shouldn’t ever photograph them?

Female sexual expression is sacrosanct, and should be kept within bounds determined by the individual woman. So if she supplements her college funding with porn shoots (even if it was entirely superfluous) and wants to keep that part of her life separate from the rest, then by golly everyone ought to abide by her unexpressed desire.

On the other hand, male heterosexual expression, or the expression of unapproved opinions regarding race or sex or whatever, is forbidden and even private expressions ought to be rooted out and the offenders publicly shamed.

A call to “respect privacy” is just a smokescreen for the actual philosophy informing the commentators’ responses.