I. Not Safe For Work (or family, or “real-life friends”)
Shannon writes smutty stories — really dirty, dark ones, questionably legal ones with names like “Trailer Trash Teen” and “Daddy’s Firm.” By her own explanation, she first started reading erotica as a teenager and “was immediately attracted to the ‘taboo’ subjects rather than the ‘normal’ ones. Stories about humiliation, incest, and other ‘disturbing’ topics got me off a lot better than stories of romance ever did. I’m sure there are psychological reasons for this, but the bottom line is that I’ve never changed.”
So she started writing these stories in 2003, and created a blog called “Forbidden Fantasies” to host them. Simple enough. She writes smut targeted to her own particular kinks and posts it online so people who share her kinks can access it.
Except that also, shortly after the site was created, she started using the blog as a diary, too. As she writes on her blog, “At the time I had a LiveJournal that I updated on a frequent basis, but what bothered me about it was that I couldn’t be totally honest there, you know? My friends visited the journal, and there’s no way I wanted them to know about my ‘darker’ side. So I figured, Why not write about my darker side on my collection site? I could be honest there about my darker sexual desires, about my foolish and often reckless sexual behavior, etc. Basically, I could pour out the details of the life I hid from my real-life friends!”
And so while it’s a place where perverts of a certain stripe can find material to masturbate to, it’s also a place to get to know Shannon. Some is related: she’s a stripper who says she loves her job (“I mean, they really want me!”) and admits to giving handjobs to customers and says she usually gets off doing it, too. She talks about promiscuity: “I fuck a lot of people. I bet I’ve fucked more men than most women ever do... I just like it. There. That’s me, in a nutshell. I love getting fucked. I love fucking.” It isn’t “Trailer Trash Teen,” but “Nympho 25-Year-Old-Stripper” is not too far off topic.
But she also blogs, right there on the same site, about other things. About the psychology degree she’s hoping to go back to school to finish. About the credit problems she suffers because of the crushing student loans she incurred for her unfinished studies. About her addiction to politics — she’s a fierce Democratic partisan and an Obamamaniac. She writes about her body image problems and her (mis)adventures in dating members of both sexes.
And then there’s more. She wrote about being talked into joining Sexaholics Anonymous by her domme girlfriend. Recently she wrote about being briefly confined to a psychiatric hospital because that same, now-ex-girlfriend reported that she was suicidal. “Anyway. Yeah. I ended up in a fucking insanely bad nut-house for *THREE* days. I’m home, thank God, now, but all I want to do is cry and scream and yell and mourn.”
And then there’s even more. In a post from 2005, she mentioned that she was pregnant. “Yes I’m going to be a mother. I’m okay with that; actually, I love this about me. I’m going to be a mom!” But in the very next rambling post a month later, she agonizes over her recent abortion. “My baby, my baby, is dead because I chose to kill her. I’m a murderer. Yet I get to have orgasms? There is no god. No god at all. No god at FUCKING all. If you think otherwise, FUCK YOU!!! Because I did murder, and I liked it, because it allowed me to feel even better now... than ever. I aborted, I did shit. Shit. Shit.”
That’s all pretty heavy stuff for a reader who surfs around looking for a story about naughty schoolgirls. And yet her readers appear to love it. She gets dozens of comments — from registered commenters! — offering sincere advice and encouragement (alongside a dose of snark and the odd message doubting her veracity or advising her to find God). There’s a message board attached to her site with an active community posting to it. She carries on Instant Messanger chats and exchanges emails with her readers, apparently, and considers quite a few of them to be friends. Which is a big part of the reason she writes her blog at all. “When things get really bad in my life... well, especially when things get bad in my life... I come on here, share the details, and somehow feel *better* as a result. This site, and all of you who have made it what it is (Shadow, Neo, Spencer, Dolemite, Sphere, PT, etc.) have become, in some ways, more a family to me than my actual family. If that makes sense.”
Does that make sense? I mean, “Shannon” doesn’t even post her real name, or her photos, or any identifying details about herself (she claims to live in “Mostly Southeastern USA”). She writes frequently about preserving her privacy. As some commenters note, her readers don’t even know (nor do I) if she is a real person or a fictional character, an extension of the fantasy stories that got her blog going. And then there’s the fact that we’re talking about a website devoted to pornographic stories in the first place! How can these people — these strangers out there in internet-land — be a family? Here’s how: she shows them sides of herself she hides from everyone else. The jagged side of her id: her darkest fantasies, her most humiliating secrets, her biggest personal failures. And these strangers, out there in the big wide world of internet-land... they like it! “I mean, they really want me!”
II. Peep Culture? Or Show and Tell Nation?The conventional wisdom is that we’ve become a nation — a whole post-industrial world, in fact — of voyeurs. True, that. Ours is a culture in which every celebrity trip to the grocery store or donut shop is photographed and published; in which Sean Combs’ colon cleanse is Tweeted (by him) and
photos of Demi Moore around the house in her white cotton undies are Tweeted (by her husband) and the grainy, poorly lit videos of of the mundane sexcapades of every heiress and B-list actor and washed-up singer and previously obscure television performer are instantly accessible to anyone with a high-speed internet connection.
And something you notice when you get to see these multi-millionaire stars of stage and screen go about their business is that Bonnie Fuller was right: they’re just like us! Demi Moore has the same granny panties as us.
Rachel McAdams bikes around Toronto and wears an iPod and faded jeans, just like we do. When Paris Hilton has sex with a complete jerk, she looks like she’s kind of bored, just like... well, like people we’ve heard about. Thanks to technology, we get to join — sometimes invited, sometimes not — into the intimate lives of the famous, and though they are generally richer than we are and generally better looking than we are, their lives are just as mundane as ours! And somehow because of it, they’re as fascinating — maybe more fascinating — than ever before.
But that’s not all. We’re not just a voyeur nation. We’re an exhibitionist nation, too. Thanks again to technology, the reverse of Fuller’s dictum is also, more and more, becoming true: us, we’re just like celebrities. Check it out: when we go out,
we’re all shooting photos of each other looking glam with cocktails in our hands and then publishing those photos for the world to see on Flickr and Photobucket and Webshots and Facebook. When we’re at our worst, our own personal cadre of paparazzi — our roomate with a cellphone cam, but still — is there to get the snaps and share them around. Blogs offer an opportunity for self-revelation previously reserved for people prominent enough to publish memoirs — you visit Blogspot or Wordpress, click a few buttons and voila — Now It Can Be Told: The Life and Times of Me and My Cats is out there. Our own music videos are just a YouTube upload from a mass audience. Our own grainy porn photos and sex tapes find an audience ready and waiting at
Voyeurweb and
YouPorn.
It took the celebrity industry the entirety of human history to come up with “
Gawker Stalker,” tracking sightings of stars going about their lives in real time — yet mere years after their conception, Facebook and Twitter offer the same opportunity to their more than 200 million combined users — to you and me. “I’m having a coffee on the patio at Starbucks — a caramel latte. Delicious.” “I am expected at CiRCA tonight for Randomland — be there!” “I was up to no good last night. I regret my behaviour.” And what exactly is a Facebook profile, anyway, if it is not a tabloid newspaper devoted exclusively to — and edited by — its owner. The Me Enquirer: Enquiring Minds Want To Show.
At least, lots of us do. The young, those under 25 who’ve grown up with this world of constant, instant recording and transmission, view the whole thing kind of the way they do the existence of cars: we use them, sometimes they’re very cool, sometimes they cause problems, but really? What’s the big deal? Everyone drives one, right?
Their parents, however, are largely horrified. What about privacy! What about perverts lurking out there! What about when you go out to get a job — why would kids today want to share so much with, with, with… everyone?
But even the parents, grumbling all the way, and all those in between the two generations, have joined in the Me Media Revolution. My 66-year-old uncle is on Facebook. My mom is on Facebook.
Oprah, for goodness sake, is Tweeting. It isn’t just Kids Today who have celebrified their lives. It’s all kinds of people of all ages. And of course, those of us in the media, the old-fashioned, professionally generated media, look at all this and think: what does it all mean?
Enter Toronto writer Hal Niedzviecki — founder of
Broken Pencil magazine, author of books of non-conformist leftist social commentary and a Facebook friend of mine. Even though he’s an indie-culture guy, Niedzviecki doesn’t know what to think of all this either. But in his new book
The Peep Diaries: How We’re Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors, he tackles the whole of what he calls “Peep Culture.”
Shannon is not in there, but very much of the rest of the mass media universe gets squeezed onto his pages — reality TV, mommy bloggers, YouTube diarists, Facebook, Twitter, nanny cams… he may, in fact, have tried to squeeze too much in.
It’s a subject that is so of this moment that the temptation to wedge in a unified theory of everything was, one assumes, irresistible. And so we have a long discussion of the culture of surveillance (people tracking loved ones and spying on alley cams). We get a full chapter on government surveillance, especially in the wake of 9/11. We get much devoted to his largely unfruitful experiment with joining the “Peep Culture” himself by blogging and Tweeting and trying and failing to get an audition to a reality show.
None of that turns out to be particularly illuminating (though it’s interesting that his varied social-media failures come because he’s unwilling to share enough). He’s drawn to non-sequitur observations about how people are providing information to advertisers (to which one can hear the response of the Me Nation: “Yes, and…?”) and how sexual exhibitionists are turning themselves into cyborgs, or robots (a point he makes over a few pages but doesn’t really demonstrate).
He works hard to connect dots that, once connected, don’t add up to a larger picture: the government surveillance material is interesting — and important in its own right — but sort of besides the point. The stuff about how we’re using technology to attempt to feel safer — through surveillance cameras and such — and that it just makes us more afraid seems to be a different, though obviously related, subject. The inclusion of various theses and observations about corporate blah and government blah blah helps Niedzviecki maintain his leftist cred (one assumes this material is what prompted Naomi Klein to blurb the cover) but it’s not… the story.
The really interesting thing, and the riveting passages of his book, are not the business side or the invasion-of-privacy implications. It’s not news — and it’s not even interesting — that capitalism is home to greedheads who will turn every human exchange into a commodity, or that governments need to be watched carefully to see how they’re watching us, or even that we’re a nation of voyeurs. Why and how they watch us is fine, but sort of ho-hum. What’s interesting — to me, at least — is not them, it’s me. It’s us. Why people are interested in reading our diaries and watching our sex tapes is a story as old as time. Why we’re suddenly interested in sharing them — that’s interesting.
III. The Me Decade enters its 40th smash year!In his celebrated 1976 essay for
New York magazine, “
The Me Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” Tom Wolfe tackled what he viewed as a cultural revolution he saw as almost religious. Looking at the growing culture of self-actualization then taking hold in the
est movement, the sexual liberation movement, the Jesus freaks, he saw a culture summed up in the advertising phrase, “If I’ve only one life, let me live it as a blonde.” And he concluded that the relative rise of wealth and leisure time among ordinary people had led to a whole culture in which, through therapy and shopping and religion, people took personal fulfillment — and the communication of the “real me” to those around them — to be the ultimate goal of life.
“The appeal was simple enough,” he writes. “It is summed up in the notion: ‘Let’s talk about Me.’ No matter whether you managed to renovate your personality… or not, you had finally focused your attention and your energies on the most fascinating subject on earth: Me. Not only that, you also put Me up on stage before a live audience.”
In 2005, The Onion ran a story headlined “‘
Me Decade’ Celebrates 35th Year.” (“Author Tom Wolfe, who coined the term,” the story reads, “was unavailable for comment, as he is working on his memoirs.”) As the satirists note, Wolfe was just viewing the match flare that has since turned into a raging bonfire of vanity. The whole self-help industry has doubled in size and doubled again, and through the ’80s and ’90s, new and improved diet fads and entire shelves of magazines devoted to self-improvement through simple living or better flirting or toned abs swelled up. Oprah and Jerry Springer brought on an era in which the subject of how to realize your potential (and how to demonstrate your flaws) led to the onslaught of reality TV in which ordinary, boring people become riveting content.
Wolfe also diagnosed a problem: human relationships, they’re about more than just one person. Couples would feel they weren’t adequately focused on real communication about each other’s real needs for fulfillment and self-actualization he wrote, “so they communicate with great candour! and break up! and keep on communicating! and then find the relationship hopelessly doomed.”
A relentless and searingly honest focus on me, me, me, it turned out, was not the best way to support a relationship, or a community. All the repression and alienation that for centuries had kept people’s true selves hidden and bottled up served the purpose of making them a functioning part of something larger than themselves. Your spouse doesn’t need or want to see your inner free-spirit adventurer set loose — he wants you to help support the family. Your boss cannot concern herself with the yen of your darker sexual impulses, she needs you to serve the interests of the company. Almost by definition, being part of a community involved sublimating parts of your real true self. And this reality crashed headlong into the new religion of self-actualization and the result was that… well, the self-help industry doubled in size and doubled again.
IV. Everyone Wants A Piece of Me Niedzviecki, in his book, puts his finger on the type of relationship needed for the Me Culture to thrive. “Parasocial.” It is, he writes, “the term social scientists use to describe the kind of one-sided relationships we have with celebrities. (We know everything about them, they don’t know we exist.)”
All along, it has been celebrities who get to express something of themselves to us without the burden of a reciprocal relationship or mutual compromise. Of course — obviously — we’ve never or seldom known the “real me” a celebrity sees in the mirror. They’re different, less polished, less funny, less whatever when they’re with their families and friends. But they have gotten to show us the part of themselves they want to express outside of those relationships and we give them a type of love and attention — generally rewarding them more the more we feel they allow us access to something real — you cannot get from family. (No man is a prophet in his hometown, no woman a rock star to her mother, and all that.)
But now, the state of technology is such that we can all have parasocial relationships. You may not attract a crowd of millions to your blog — hell, you may not want to — but to some people you are just a writer. Or a video performer. Or a sexpot. They do not know about your failures at work and they don’t count on you to be understanding. If you put up glamorous pictures of yourself because inside, in a part of your real self, you feel glamorous, then to them you are glamorous. Time and again Niedzviecki’s subjects tell him about the community they feel a part of. About the sides of themselves they get to show, and about how gratifying it is. That’s not robotic. It’s intensely human.
Niedzviecki wrestles with this — he seems to get it, but he feels something is missing. We all tend to immediately assume there’s something sad about online relationships, lacking as they are in flesh and blood and eye contact and warm hugs. Yet it’s the very lack of face-to-face contact — the element of anonymity or quasi- anonymity — that allows us to express certain elements of ourselves.
Historically, a gay teenager in a rural area could go her whole life not knowing anyone else like her — fearfully keeping secret a part of her identity. Now a supportive and understanding community is a click away. An overweight man with thick glasses will — no matter how much his friends love him — rarely be able to be viewed in person for the suave dude he is, because people are stopped by his appearance. Which is not to say he’s faking anything when he goes online — he’s just showing a different side of himself. The nature of our relationships with people dictates how much of ourselves we can express to them — or how much we want to. Today, though, we can develop all sorts of new types of relationships that were previously impossible.
Returning to Shannon: her readers know very little about her “real” life or her “real” self. Yet, the parts of herself she hides from her physical-world friends mean they do not know the “real” her either. She gets to express herself — something like the whole of herself — to two different crowds of people. And, presumably, she finds receptive audiences in both places.
Even those of us who don’t have strange kinks or disfigurements get to tweak our personas online. We select facts and photos, think up jokes, be incrementally different, incrementally more like we would sometimes like to be, without abandoning our existing lives. And the more we exist in those personas, the more they are a true expression of an element of ourselves. To those on the other end of them, those elements are us. We contain multitudes. And now we have a multitude of relationship dynamics in which to express them.
And yes, there are risks. Your boss or your mother can stumble upon your porn video. Your sincere efforts can make you the object of scorn. These are familiar pitfalls to celebrities and politicians. Niedzviecki does a good job of detailing them, as have others who’ve addressed the subject. But Niedzviecki, in the mass of his research, also provides a — dare I say heartwarming? — look at the benefits we gain for accepting those risks. And as Emily Nussbaum noted in her 2007
New York magazine story “
Say Everything,” we really have no choice but to accept them, because the world has turned. “Surely,” she wrote, “when the telephone took off, there was a mourning period for that lost, glorious golden age of eye contact.”
Except, of course, we never did give up eye contact. And so it is in the Me Media Revolution — the risks of “oversharing” are real, but so are the benefits. And the costs? Our new celebrified personas do not replace our old selves or supplant our existing relationships, they supplement them.
Just like with celebrities, it seems that everyone wants a piece of us. And maybe it’s OK that we want that too.