Someone took an upskirt photo of actress Natalie Morales. Her response is required reading.

Natalie Morales is unhappy with two different adversaries right now: the unnamed red-carpet photographer who angled their camera up her skirt in an attempt to take a picture of her vagina, and the press who’ve referred to the incident as a “wardrobe malfunction.”

Morales, who currently appears in the movie Battle of the Sexes, attended the film’s Los Angeles premiere on September 16 in a dress with a dramatic slit. “It's a high-ass slit because I like the way my leg looked & I wanted to get me some of that Angie look,” Morales wrote on Twitter in a long thread on Monday, referring to Angelina Jolie’s famous slit dress at the 2013 Oscars, “but I wasn't showing you my bits.”

Nevertheless, Morales says, a red-carpet photographer purposely shot an “upskirt” photo of her in an attempt to photograph her genitals. Morales notes that she was wearing nude underwear and the photographer didn’t actually see her body. “But if you could?” she wrote, “I wouldn’t be embarrassed. But YOU should be. What a disgusting, horrifying job you have.”

After Morales’s Twitter thread was aggregated on a few different websites, she followed it up on Tuesday with a new statement.

This photographer, Morales writes, was trying to humiliate her “for just existing as a human being. For having a body and body parts under my clothes.” Which is, she concludes, not a celebrity/paparazzi problem: “This is a problem with how we tear down women and reduce them to a sum of body parts, to be at once both sexualized and shamed.”

The idea that women are responsible for photographs taken and distributed of them against their will, and that it is their duty to be ashamed and humiliated for the crime of having bodies, was the unquestioned norm until very recently: hence the revenge porn industry flourishing until states began to legislate against it in 2014. (Reddit and Twitter didn’t establish rules against distributing nudes without the subject’s consent until 2015.)

As recently as 2012, Matt Lauer demanded that Anne Hathaway tell him the “lesson learned” when a photographer took an upskirt picture of her getting out of her car. Lauer’s implication was clear: Hathaway, surely, had made a grave mistake by allowing the world to recognize that she had a body underneath her clothes (after someone photographed and distributed pictures of her genitalia without her consent). How embarrassing for her! Surely she recognized that she was at fault in this situation, and would pass on valuable advice to her young female fans so that they, too, would realize how shameful it is to have a vagina.

That’s the attitude that Morales is reacting against in her statement. “It’s a vagina,” she writes. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of. But it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to me. And you can’t have it unless I say you can.”

We have a request

Vox's journalism is free because we believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, consumers and stewards of this planet. In short, understanding benefits everyone. You can join in on this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Reader support helps keep our work free, for everyone. Will you join us?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$95/year

$120/year

$250/year

$350/year

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $120/year

Yes, I'll give $120/year

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via