In the wake of the latest celebrity nude selfie leak, internet sages have been quick to dish up an age-old nugget of wisdom: “Don’t want your nude selfies leaked? Then don’t take them”.

After all, let’s remember that a woman’s body doesn’t belong to her in the sense that she permanently gets to control who sees it. Rather, it’s a contingent thing. She exists as a sort of perpetually contested turf; she gets to keep whatever bodily autonomy she can wrest for herself at any given moment. This panoptic environment might sound intolerable, and maybe like somewhere we shouldn’t expect human beings to be able to flourish, but it’s just, like, the real world. It’s just how it works. Sorry.

I mean, sure, you can talk about a feminist utopia where having a private life is compatible with being a woman in the public eye, but let’s get real here. It will necessarily and always be the case that people will use human-invented, human-facilitated technology to launch very specific attacks mainly on women, and there is literally nothing that can be done to prevent that, like, I don’t know, their deciding not to do that anymore, or our not hosting or clicking on the fruits of their body-piracy when they do. Far easier to ask everyone not to have literally anything at all on their laptop that they wouldn’t want to be made available to the Whole Internet Ever.

The fact that women are far more liable to get their bluff called on this than men are is neither here nor there. Despite the fact that I premise my “Don’t take selfies if you don’t want them stolen and circulated on the internet” argument with a caveat that Obviously I’m Not a Sexist or Anything and In an Ideal World It Wouldn’t Be that Way but Given that We’re Not There Yet I’m Just Saying that In the Real World, I think it’s reasonable to suddenly disengage with In the Real World when it comes to acknowledging that my advice, in practical terms, in my much-vaunted Real World, makes women responsible for not taking precautions that men just don’t have to.

And look, that’s not gendered or anything. I mean, I’d say the same thing if a man’s selfies were stolen – like what’s-his-face, the one man out of the hundreds of celebrities whose pictures were hacked in this batch, who has received just as much press vitriol and front-page attention for this as have his female counterparts, and who is now just as likely as J-Law to have to answer questions about his naked body at press conferences where he wishes to discuss his work. So obviously there’s nothing sexist there.

But okay, nit-pickers might point out that it’s still problematic because it happens more to women than it does to men. So? When a man’s Paypal details are stolen, we’re equally ready to point out that he had only himself to blame for having the temerity to purchase a second-hand iPhone charger on Ebay. Don’t want someone to publish your emails? Then don’t have a Gmail account, obviously. Don’t you know how easy those security questions are to guess? And by the way, the next time a virus destroys your laptop, you should apologise to the world for not having stronger security software in place. Actually, given that the malicious creeps who orchestrate celebrity selfie leaks are eerily dedicated to their cyber-lechery and can probably crack whatever code you put between yourself and them, it’s probably safer just not to own a laptop. Or a phone. Or a human body.

Or if you’re in the statistical majority, viz. people whom they could theoretically hack but in whose naked body they don’t have a particular interest, you can probably go on not taking the cautions you expect of Jennifer Lawrence. This in no way precludes you from judging her for being the target of other people’s actions. Don’t want strangers publicly adjudicating whether you did enough to protect the privacy most people can, and all people should be able to, take for granted? Don’t be someone other people consider worth exploiting. Be less famous, and preferably less female.

Don’t want to live in a world where a basic level of public sympathy is contingent on being a Good Victim, and where being a Good Victim is contingent on having done everything possible to prevent your own victimisation, and where any lapses on this front – even ones where you’re doing nothing that’s actually wrong – will render you a Bad Victim? Well, sorry, but you’re shit out of luck.