When he was 16 years old, Justin Bieber made the mistake of becoming an idol to teenage girls the world over. He had a big smile, a bright, shiny haircut and that extremely catchy song, Baby. That alone was enough for us all to decide we hated him, right?
And that was the word that we used over and over again: hate. Hate hate hate. Aimed at a teenage boy, all because he released an admittedly slightly irritating pop song, that teenage girls liked. How dare he be so confident, so young? Of course he had to be stopped.
Eventually, of course, if enough people call you a dickhead for no reason, you're going to give them cause to, which brings us to present day Bieber, a man it's becoming more and more difficult to defend as the days go on. There was the pissing in the mop bucket. That godawful leaked police interview. Claims in the press that he'd been rude to his loyal fanbase. Media reports of him behaving spoilt, entitled, aggressive.
And that's why when his nudes arrived online, nobody seemed to mind that they were clearly taken with a long lens, at a time he thought he was enjoying a private moment. It's only Justin Bieber, right? Who cares?
The photos immediately became a source of laughter and derision, strangely enough, from a lot of the same people who were sticking up for Jennifer Lawrence, Jessica Brown Findlay and all those other stars who had their private photos hacked and posted online this time a year ago.
My Twitter timeline immediately became (and, at the time of writing, still is) a race between the people I follow to see who can crack the quickest funny about The Biebs. People were saying this was the moment they'd been waiting for, that they could barely look at the photos for laughing, that it was like all their birthdays and Christmases come at once.
But in my opinion, it doesn't matter how big of a dickhead you are, your body is your own, not to be shared among people against your will for other people to poke fun at or leer at, you know? And if you're cracking jokes about these pictures, or ogling them, or worse still sharing them for other people to crack jokes at and ogle, then I'm really struggling to see how you're any different than those pervs falling over themselves to save Jennifer Lawrence's leaked pictures to the 'Work Stuff' folder in their external hard-drives last September.
We all condemned the French magazine who published topless photos of Kate Middleton on holiday a few years ago, but put Justin Bieber in the same position and suddenly it's fair game?
You can say it's all in good humour, you can say he needs to roll with the punches if he wants to succeed in his industry, you can even say this is karma for his terrible behaviour - but, be honest, a part of you is still just pissed off at having to hear 'Baby' over and over again, aren't you?
My point is, you don't have to like Justin Bieber, his life choices, his terrible behaviour, or his stupid bastard hair. But you do have to respect that he's a 21-year-old guy who's just had his privacy violated in a pretty gross way, during a moment he thought he was finally allowed to let his (regrettably, bleached) hair down for a minute.
If you truly need to make fun of Justin Bieber, you don't exactly need to look far for material. It's only a matter of time before he opens his mouth again and says or does something ridiculous. Just be patient, people. It'll happen.
But poking fun at someone who's actually gone through something invasive and all-in-all pretty shitty seems to me like an unnecessarily low blow... no matter how much of a "douchebag" the people on your Twitter feed say he is.