Helen Mirren Gets It

In a preview piece for an interview with Helen Mirren that will be broadcast tomorrow night in the United Kingdom on Magic FM, Hannah Furness, Arts Correspondent for the London Telegraph decided to sample some of Mirren's thoughts about the recent incident of hacking into personal cell phones to download nude photographs. Mirren was not particularly kind to either side of this issue. Furness' headline quoted her as saying: "Who on earth would put nude photos of themselves on their phones anyway?" In the article itself, Mirren followed up on this remark by observing that people have not yet learned how to avoid doing stupid things where Internet technology is involved. (To be fair, she used much politer language.)

The fun part came, however, with a quote of her thoughts about the hackers:

I think only women’s phones have been targeted because only 12 year old boys want to look at it. There are an awful lot of 12 year old boys, who are anything between the age of 11 and 45. They think it’s really funny and fun to look at pictures of naked girls.

I wonder whether, in the full interview, she acknowledged that her age bracket probably includes a fair chuck of the Silicon Valley community, particularly those involved with founding and running new companies. Had she taken a broader view, she probably would have acknowledge that there are plenty of men out there who never grow out of being twelve-year-old boys!