This was gonna run somewhere late, but the Labor Day holiday put me all behind schedule and it wound up being a tad late. D’oh! But I still thought it was a point worth making, so I’ve put it here.

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The good news about the leak of nude photos belonging to several female performers is that we all seem to agree that what happened to these women was wrong. The bad news is that there is still some ambiguity over where to assign culpability for the leaks, at least to a degree. Those arguments have mostly been carried out via analogy.

Conservative commentators have tended to submit that the hackers behind the leaks are to blame, but have generally tacked on the addendum that if women don’t want their nude photos stolen, they either shouldn’t take them or shouldn’t keep them on their computers. As conservative columnist S.E. Cupp writes,

“Just as it is rational and reasonable to suggest protecting your credit cards and expensive things from fraud and theft, it is rational and reasonable to suggest the same of your nude photos. Rational people actually do suggest you don’t use credit cards in places like Internet cafes or public Wi-Fi spaces where stealing them is easier […]”

Cupp’s response is targeted at commentators from the left, who have largely used the same theft analogy to point out the lunacy of critiquing the victimized women for taking or possessing nude photos. But the comparison of nude pictures to the general category of material property is just that: a response. Left to their own analyses, writers on the left have tended to argue that the hacks should be understood as a type of sexual assault. But as Time’s Charlotte Alter points out,

“While the theft and humiliating distribution of these photos is an enormous violation of personal privacy and sexual autonomy, it is not the same thing as a physical sexual assault. It is is not the same as being raped, or forced to perform oral sex, or molested as a child, or beaten. It’s not a question of “more or less awful,” because both scenarios are horrific examples of how women are treated in our society. But they’re different, and it’s especially important to be precise when we’re talking about violence.”

In other words, the distribution of these hacked photos is absolutely a violation that’s sexual in nature, and it’s akin to sexual assault in that it has a distinctly sexual character and it involves the criminal, non-consensual abuse of one person by another. But it isn’t exactly like rape, molestation, or other violent forms of sexual abuse. And the difference isn’t one of degree – no one is arguing that the release of these photos is less bad than other forms of comparable sexual assault – but of kind.

And the property analogy is similarly inadequate when it comes to understanding the nature of these leaks. Yes, it is fair to expect that people who own particularly conspicuous property should take some measures to protect it, and one can even find themselves sympathetic, at times, with thieves: thus the trope of the lovable pickpocket a la Dickens’ Artful Dodger, and the tragic figure of Hugo’s Jean Valjean. It is much more difficult to imagine a sympathetic hacker of women’s private photos, precisely because the vast majority of material goods are simply different – not in degree, but in kind – from intimate photos that are of immediate personal meaning and represent a person’s private sexual life.

Nude photos might have a financial impact on women’s lives when they’re illicitly released, but the damage is only secondarily one related to income. (As Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian demonstrate, careers can be built off these releases as well, meaning the harm isn’t strictly tied to its impact on a woman’s earnings.) But neither can the damage be measured along the same lines as the damage done by violent sexual crimes. Measured in that way, these leaks really would come out looking fairly tame – which they aren’t.

What the theft of nude pictures reintroduces into public life is the idea of carnal knowledge, an archaic term for sex that arose from the Biblical use of ‘to know.’ But there is something significant about the knowledge of another person that comes from sex, and pictures communicate a walloping dose of information that unwelcome viewers are neither entitled nor invited to. The leak of nude pictures grants to millions of anonymous viewers something that can’t be summed up in proprietary terms because it doesn’t operate under terms of scarcity and use, and shouldn’t be measured in the same way as forms of violence because the damage it does isn’t exactly bodily. It has to do, rather, with a kind of privacy that isn’t about safety so much as secrecy: sexuality, and the sharing of one’s sexual self, gets part of its thrill from its exclusivity, and the exclusive knowledge of the other person one gains from those encounters. When that knowledge is wrongly gained, the damage done can only really be summed up rightly in those terms. Other analogies come out looking a bit incomplete.

And perhaps that’s why it’s so hard to talk about the abject evil of this brand of violation without resorting to imperfect analogy. We live in an age of constant access, especially to celebrities. Everything is meant to be knowable, and knowledge is always good or neutral. But the broadcasting of intimate images represents a kind of evil only newly available in its scale and scope, and summons a kind of uncomfortable old truth: there are some things we aren’t meant to know. The way a person looks, feels, behaves with their intimate sexual partners – that all falls into that category, something analogies to property and violence don’t properly encompass.