Pop quiz: You like Jennifer Lawrence. You think she’s really, really hot. You find out someone apparently hacked into her iCloud account and stole some nude photos of her. You:

A. Seek them out immediately – she shouldn’t have taken the photos if she didn’t want people to see them.

B. Are too aghast at the violation of her privacy to even consider looking at them, because you’re a decent person.

This isn’t one of those tests where there are no wrong answers. Option B is the right answer. There are a lot of multi-faceted, morally ambiguous issues in our world today. This isn’t one of them. 

Having something in your possession isn’t an open invitation for someone else to steal it. If someone stole a piece of jewelry from my house, I wouldn’t be at fault for owning the jewelry. Yet my Twitter timeline on Monday was dominated by guys making jokes about how they’d be furiously masturbating in the near future. 

And that’s the difference. These were sexy young women doing something privately that implied ownership of their bodies and their sexuality. A lot of Internet culture (I’m looking at you, 4Chan and the seedier elements of Reddit) seems to find that an offense which deserves to be punished with an extreme invasion of privacy.

Let me expand that: We live in a culture that often wants to punish women for having sex. There’s an invisible line women are supposed to toe: not a whore, but not a prude either – rather, they’re supposed to occupy some vague in-between space that no one can quite clarify. If they’re not in that in-between space, there’s a backlash.

According to the internet, Taylor Swift’s boyfriends break up with her for not putting out, but she’s a slut for having so many boyfriends in the first place.  

According to the Internet, the celebrities who had their photos leaked shouldn’t have taken those photos in the first place. They are stupid for not seeing this coming. 

Here’s the thing. There is nothing wrong with taking a nude photo to share with someone you trust and having that photo stored on a private device. It is not stupid to assume that people have enough respect for you as a human being to not break into your cell phone and steal your photos.

It is stupid to assume you are entitled to see all of another person’s body just because you find that person sexy. It is stupid to blame that person for the surrounding controversy instead of the people who stole the photos. It is stupid to look down at a woman for her sexuality and confidence while simultaneously getting off on it. 

Internet culture as it exists now is steeped in that stupidity. Too many people have failed the quiz at the top of this article – and failed to be decent people.