These Celebs Are Gonna Be Glad We Leaked Their Nudes When They’re Older

I’m almost hesitant to even write this for fear of being branded a bad mother, but sometimes I feel like I don’t take enough pictures of my son. I know, I know. It’s the cardinal sin of parenting – never miss a moment! The ABC’s of raising a child – Always. Be. Camera. If you want to have a fucking kid, you have to be camera. Good dad? Go fuck yourself. You’re nothing without rolls and rolls of your child’s life on film. Good parents take snapshots all the time.

Sure, I’ve got a couple of Mason’s precious moments developed and laminated. His first steps. His first trip the hospital. His last steps. All the major milestones. I’ve got plenty of pictures of him in the bathtub. Lots of shots of his penis as a baby. He keeps asking me to get rid of them, but I know he’ll want them later. That’s how kids are; they protest all these bathtub penis photos, thinking that they’ll never look back and cherish those days when they had really small dicks. But, we parents know better. We know that one day, they’ll have their own kids. And they’ll bathe their children, and as they wash the little hands and little feet and look down, they’ll think, “Did my penis look like that when I was a baby?” And they’ll bust out the old photo albums and compare penises with their children. It’s important to do what’s best for our children’s future, even if it makes them uncomfortable now.

That’s why I’m finding it a bit hard to have any sympathy for these celebrities that had their nude photos leaked this weekend. Jennifer Lawrence, Aubrey Plaza, Judi Dench – beautiful young starlets, beacons of virginal purity, tainted and degraded by the crushing weight of digital permanence. Like Samson bringing down the walls of Philistine temple, Christina Hendricks’s huge tits smashed through the lackluster security measures put in place by Apple’s iCloud. But, is this really a moment of shame for these young women, or is it merely a bonding experience between us regular folks and the celebs? Is this really not something they won’t look back on and cherish?

In many ways, celebs are sort of like our children. We live vicariously through them, all the while criticizing their every action in a loving but dismissive way, despite the fact that comparatively, we’ve done absolutely nothing with our own lives. We mock and deride them, but only because we cherish and envy their youth and virility. We understand that their presence supersedes ours, but our latent jealousy is kept in check by our possession of their naked bathtub photos, and the delicate power play is kept in balance – just like the mother-son relationship.

I for one think these young women should be grateful. They should appreciate the fact that the world cares enough to steal their personal photos and use them as masturbation aides. They should appreciate our attention, our gaze, our desire to document and infiltrate their lives with the kind of parental love that we would show our own flesh and blood. Because before Jennifer Lawrence knows it, she’s just going to be an old shitty actress, and she’s going to want to remember the days when everyone gawked at pictures of her genitals. Just like my son panics whenever I show house guests pictures of his tiny bathtub baby penis, Lawrence must initially panic as the whole world stares upon her indecencies, but we all know, as adults and parents, that this whole ordeal is for the best.