The XX Factor: What women really think.

Rihanna and Privacy Revisited

The current meta conversation burning up the net is the controversy over some media outlets' decision to publish a photo of a bruised Rihanna, post alleged battery by her boyfriend Chris Brown. The anti-publishing faction argues that it's an invasion of Rihanna's privacy, obviously an even more dire invasion than merely printing Rihanna's name in conjunction with the crime.

Gawker's Ryan Tate, in an entry discussing his site's decision to post the photo of Rihanna, says:

Critics say running the picture humiliates Rihanna at a time when she's already in emotional agony, that it pierces a zone of emotional and physical privacy already grossly violated in the apparent attack on her. Victims of domestic abuse and rape have long been accorded special rights in the criminal justice system; it is argued they should retain a similar degree of control if and when information escapes that system. Finally, it is lost on no one that sensational pictures like the Rihanna shot can bring profit-making publishers large amounts of traffic, opening publishers to charges of exploitation.

Those who support the publishing of the jarring photo of Rihanna make a similar argument to the one that I made when discussing the L.A. Times' decision to print Rihanna's name in the first place: By not printing the photo, which is clearly newsworthy, it's reinforcing the idea that she has something to be ashamed of.

It is also of note that photos of nonfamous women in domestic violence situations have been published without remark on sites like the Smoking Gun (example here). Is the outrage over Rihanna because that particular photo is so graphic? Is it because Rihanna had a pristine image, and it shatters the vaunted fantasy? If a less heralded celebrity, say, an Amy Winehouse, were in a similar domestic battery situation, would the publishing of her photos provoke such an outcry?

Finally, Newsweek has an interview with Leslie Morgan Steiner, the author of a forthcoming memoir about domestic abuse called Crazy Love. Steiner points out that Rihanna's well-publicized trauma may break down stereotypes of abused women. "I didn't understand that cycles of violence are passed from generation to generation, and I'd never known anyone who was abused," Steiner says. "I thought it only happened to poor women with children and without options."