"OUR SHARED AFFAIR: THE SEXUAL SHAMING BEHIND THE ASHLEY MADISON HACK"

"What is truly “coming home to roost” here is the profound moral illness propagated by the false notion that social media swarming of individuals constitutes an exercise in “justice.” Justice must restore and rebuild on the wreckage of injustice — it cannot merely be another wrecking ball. What good is truly served by this punishment, or the equally unsettling zest for it? Worse, we fail to grow as a society by failing to interrogate our understanding of what is sexually possible by projecting a sitcom narrative onto this hack; queer and poly relationships are invisible, and we do not ask whether sometimes “cheating” can be acceptable. Finally, we also fail to ask how, even the case of the most reprobate users on the site, this data dump will hurt innocent spouses and their children...

What queer homeless youth does this revelation house? Does it magically transport a poor woman in rural Texas to her nearest abortion clinic? Does it #SayHerName? Much ink is spilled over whether exposing right-wing hypocrites is worth our time and energy, or on whether it is moral. Allow me to spill a little more to say that in the vast majority of cases, it isn’t — and is, in truth, merely a punitive action meant to hurt someone who has hurt us."

http://feministing.com/2015/08/27/our-shared-affair-the-sexual-shaming-behind-the-ashley-madison-hack/

I've totally noticed this in my reaction - this vague, default sense of vindictive glee/"yay, justice" about this. The hack isn't being covered as a crime so much as another inevitable outcome of people being on the Internet and doing sex things, and sex things never stay secret on the internet! and people should know that and just go back to writing chaste letters that are delivered by the pony express/never having non-monogamous non-heterosexual feelings. 

It's sort of like we-as-a-society feel entitled to this information, as though these people have transgressed and the outcome is that their sex lives are supposed to become public now. Like the weird undertones of acceptance of revenge porn and leaks of celebrities' nude pictures. I think this interpretation is informed by something I read recently - "when prostitution is nobody's business".