IT'S been six weeks since the great photo-leak, in which private pictures of celebrities were disseminated across the web to be goggled at by thousands.

Since then there has been the drip release of more hacked photographs, including of reality TV star Nick Hogan. But there has also been a bold and defiant image of Jennifer Lawrence on the cover of Vanity Fair. In an accompanying interview, the actress declared that the distribution of her photos across the web was a "sex crime", that anyone looking at them was "perpetrating a sexual offence" and "should cower with shame" for looking at her naked body without her permission.

If the critics of these celebrities are not decrying them for narcissism and self-absorption, they're saying they were fools, stupid for being so reckless as to put the photos on iCloud and for taking the pictures in the first place, given they were famous. European Union digital commissioner Günther Oettinger even called it dumb.

This kind of talk is a form of victim-blaming. And it's not just the celebrities being shamed, but a whole generation of young people who blithely take photographs or their intimate parts and send them or store them. They are supposedly stupid too, or badly informed. Last week, Woman's Hour presenter Jenni Murray wrote of her shock at Lawrence's actions: "How naive to imagine there's any such thing as genuine privacy online - especially if you are a celebrity beauty and therefore a target."

If nothing else, the episode is a reminder of how deep the generation divide is, how little the old understand what the young are doing. Too often, a bemused older generation fails to acknowledge the way that, for the young, social media, selfie-taking, sexting and other digital technology activities are really just extensions of themselves: their minds and bodies. They have something we never had as kids - a digital life - and they are using it to relate to each other.

Many of us older types might recoil in horror at the idea of joining the great digital naked selfie carnival. But we need to be honest about some of the reasons why we're not at it ourselves - and acknowledge that it's not because we are wise, but because we are no longer young, no longer so youthfully self-absorbed, no longer so physically beautiful, no longer on the pull, no longer in the trance of first sexual infatuation, and if we were all those things we might do exactly the same.

Truth be told, I've only ever taken one naked selfie and that was when I was nine months pregnant with my first child. In the seven years since I have never wanted to turn the camera on the stretch-marked wreckage of my post-partum body. That to me is rather sad; not something to be proud of.

Lawrence, it seems, was behaving like many of the rest of her generation, who simply use digital media to communicate their sexuality to each other. Actually, it would be remarkable if they didn't, given that so-called Generation Selfie digitally records almost every other aspect of their lives. According to researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, sexting is "a new normal part of adolescent sexual development and not strictly limited to at-risk adolescents".

It seems pointless to tell that generation not to take these pictures at all. Given it has become part of how they relate, that's never going to happen. It's like rolling out abstinence-only education, when what most young people really need to be taught about is safe-sext.

So it's time we stopped tutting over the risks taken, as if we, when young, did not take any chances ourselves. Presumably these celebrities did know there were dangers to their actions. But they are also real human beings, with real sex lives, and sex is always bound up with an element of risk. Shaming them for their stupidity or recklessness also plays into the hands of the trolls who, one presumes, were not getting off on the images themselves, but on the celebrities' embarrassment at appearing "dumb".

If this is what the hackers were trying to do, I don't think it quite worked. Actually, the photo-leak turned these celebrities into real people - and I think for the most part, they gained affection that way. As Roisin Kiberd, writing in Vice magazine, put it: "One of the oddly reassuring takeaways from this has got to be that celebrities really are like us: they pull unconvincing selfie faces, they emulate (badly) the poses they see in porn in cheesy pictures meant for their partners. They feel entitled to all the rituals of a normal relationship."

In other words, they came across like all other members of their generation, utterly human in the folly of their digital openness. We may wish these relationship rituals did not exist. We may call them foolish.

But ultimately, I believe the nude selfie is here to stay. And we must learn to deal with that, instead of hoping that by crying out "dumb" or "stupid", we can chase it away.