When news of Lenny Kravitz's pierced willy making a show at his concert in Stockholm hit the headlines, we felt a little funny about it. Not funny ha ha, funny weird. We thought about publishing it, then we realised that that might be a little hypocritical.
Under a year ago, we were calling 'The Fappening' - you remember it, the leak of hundreds of photos of mostly naked, mostly female celebrities, eagerly pored over by the internet - 'a horrible invasion of privacy'. So why should we publish images of Lenny Kravitz's exposed dick?
Sure, there are differences in these situations. The Fappening was a calculated hack on vulnerabilities on iCloud's software done by the sort of nerd who gets all of his vitamin D from a computer screen's blue glare at 2am. It was also done seemingly to drag down women who'd got above their station - Jennifer Lawrence (who, coincidentally, co-stars with Lenny in The Hunger Games) was the highest paid action star of 2014, surpassing men in a tradionally male field. The solution? Knock her down a peg or two by wanking over photos of her and going 'ner ner, you just want to be a sexy starlet'.
Meanwhile, Lenny Kravitz's trousers splitting on stage was no-one but his trouser-maker's fault, and a lot of people at the gig didn't have to go out of their way to see what was poking beneath this 'wardrobe malfunction'. It makes people feel less creepy to see image of him crouched out, pants split, penis lurking beneath, if it was just an accident that happened. When it's presented like that, people are going to feel like taking a peek is harmless.
But regardless of how the image of his dick came about, he didn't want it to be out there. So much so that his lawyers are taking legal action. According to The Metro, his legal representatives have warned the photo is an invasion of privacy, and 'breach their client's copyright, human rights, right-of-publicity and performer's rights.'
Lenny might have joked about the picture right after it went viral, tweeting a screengrab of a text his pal, Aerosmith's Steven Tyler, had sent him:
But making light of something doesn't mean you're not hurt by it. Remember how Kirsten Dunst tweeted this after images of her were exposed by 'The Fappening'?
That doesn't mean she was any less hurt by it. She later told E!: 'I try to have a sense of humor about a really unfortunate situation. The FBI is investigating so they’re handling it right now.'
Though celebrity mishaps and stuff gone wrong on stage will always entertain, maybe we should take a moment to decide if we really want to be that person looking for naked images of someone they didn't want us to see.
As Anne Hathaway explained after an upskirt of her (she'd too, like Lenny, gone commando) was taken and sold and went viral: 'I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of someone in a vulnerable moment and rather than delete it and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies sexuality of unwilling participants.'
Maybe, next time we want to see a celebrity naked against their will, we just...don't?
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Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.