Jennifer Lawrence, November 2013 | Photo by meckert75 via Flickr (http://bit.ly/WDPh0l)

I wasn’t going to say anything about it. There have been enough thinkpieces written about the celebrity photos leaked last week to last you at least a week, and these things come and go so quickly. I was going to exercise restraint and hold my tongue until the next kerfuffle arose on which my commentary was desperately needed.

Until I read this.

If you’re not familiar with him, Tim Challies is a Reformed Christian blogger and pastor who lives near Ontario, Canada. He is a reliably quick responder on Twitter and his blog, and his blogged for almost four thousand days in a row, a figure which he keeps track of in a running tally at the bottom of his website.

I don’t read Challies’ blog often, but a friend of mine sent this particular post my way. I was struck by a number of reprehensible claims throughout, but none more than the notion that the women whose photos were leaked are victims–not only of the hacker who criminally violated their privacy and knowingly distributed intimate material, but of the devil.

Here’s Challies on the matter:

We could talk about the folly of taking nude photographs, and the inappropriateness of such moments shared between two people who are not married (which, I assume, is the context of most or all of the photographs)…But there is still another aspect of their victimization I want us to see: The very fact that these women took these photographs in the first place is proof that they are victims of the world, the flesh, and the devil.

Challies’ explicit statement of assumption about these photographs is one of the most irking things about the whole post. I don’t think he would appreciate us assuming things about him, private things that had been made public by no fault of his own. Yet he assumes the photographs were mostly “shared between two people who are not married.”

Where to start?

How about here–with Mary Winstead, an actress among those whose photos were leaked?

https://twitter.com/M_E_Winstead/status/506197725285998592

Ah, hmmm. Okay, so the thing about the married couples, not so much. Well, at least we know all these women fell prey to the objectifying male gaze–oh, hang on. Detroit Tigers pitcher Justin Verlander was a victim, too?

And let’s not focus on the man or men who leaked these photos–that would be distracting. No, let’s focus on what’s wrong with the women who had private photos saved to their personal computers or cloud backup services. Let’s make them feel more shame, more powerlessness, more like there’s something wrong with them for having an expectation of a right to privacy. What Challies is proposing here is that we feel sorry for these women. That we see them as pitiful. But the thing is, as a friend reminded me, you don’t feel sorry for victims. You work on their behalf. You feel sorry for people you are superior to.

Here’s the bottom line: These victims may have skewed ideas about sexuality. They may have unorthodox understandings of relationships. They may be saving these photos to their computers to remember what they once looked like. I have no idea. You know why? I don’t know any of them. I don’t get to judge any of them. I don’t know what all their pictures were for, although I know many of them claim the images are not them and are actually doctored photos.

I know women already take enough shit from white men about how they are supposed to be–attractive enough to entice a partner, but not so sexy that they draw attention (God forbid) to their bodies. Intelligent enough to carry on an intellectually stimulating conversation, but not so opinionated that their partners view them as a threat. Women are repeatedly told that we can never do it all, have it all, be it all, and then we are told in no uncertain terms exactly how we do not measure up.

I don’t know why some people take nude photos of themselves, but unless they’re a friend asking my advice, it’s not my place to offer my opinion. You know why? They might have totally different standards for this kind of thing than I do. My job isn’t to make sure their standards align with mine. My job, when it comes down to it, actually comes down to something Challies said: “As Christians we are called by Jesus to love our neighbors as ourselves—we are to have compassion on them…”

Compassion does not look like a blog post telling these women they are “victims of the world, the flesh, and the devil,” at least not anymore than you or I or anyone else who considers themselves a Christian. Compassion (and wisdom, for that matter) often looks like silence. It looks like mourning with the victims who have been wronged. It looks like love. Not like this.