Computers Are Private Parts (of your life)

A lengthy example to demonstrate the problem with using a private tool for public discourse

Nov 02, 2024

I. Intro

As strange as it may seem given the content in the next section to follow, I’m writing this post to make a point about the computer as a private medium. We often hear that the internet has “connected the world,” it has “created a global village,” or alternatively a “global theater,” and that it has eliminated privacy in a variety of ways, chiefly by encouraging people to be more candid than ever before about their personal lives. Using the internet, people discuss private details that never would have been announced publicly, instead only confined to the pages of a journal or diary in previous centuries. Therefore, the reasoning goes, the people are content with making the private public. And quite concerningly for some, people willingly submit their private data to massive corporations, knowing entirely well that they are being spied on yet not particularly caring enough to do anything about it. So surely, privacy is gone, and there are no secrets on the internet, yes?

Well, yes, and no. There are some essential considerations that must be made when evaluating this question, and I’ll illustrate my point in the next section as I always do — in a roundabout way.

II. Quiz: Porn or Medieval Lit?

I’d like for you all to take a quiz. You enjoy quizzes, right? Sure you do. I’ve written down ten scenarios below, each of which involve adultery, specifically the kind in which a woman cuckolds her husband. What you’re going to do is read through each one and ask yourself the question: does this come from a modern porn movie/scene, or does it come from medieval literature? Go ahead and give it a shot. Try not to cheat.

While a laborer goes out to work, his wife is accustomed to having sex with her secret lover during the day. One day, the husband comes home early, and the woman hides the lover in a large, thin portable tub. She upbraids him for coming home so early, and he says that he sold that same tub for a certain sum of money and wants to inspect it before completing the purchase. The wife declares that she had already sold the tub for an even larger sum of money, and the buyer is in the tub currently inspecting it for himself. Then, out pops the lover, and he says that the tub needs a more thorough scrubbing in order for the deal to go through. The wife convinces the husband to turn the tub over, shine a light on its interior, and scrub it from the inside. Once he does, the wife climbs on top of the tub and her lover has sex with her there, while she occasionally shouts instructions for the husband to assist in his scrubbing duties (“yeah, right there, ooh yeah, right there,” and so on).
A wife brings her lover home with her, believing that her husband is not there. As she tries to enter the door, however, she discovers that she has lost her key and cannot open it, so she crawls through a large hole nearby at the base of the wall, trying to get through so she can unlock the door for her larger lover. She has difficulty crawling through this hole, and her lover decides to have a bit of fun: he starts having sex with her from behind while she’s halfway through. Then, she finds that her husband is home after all, and he now sees her trying to crawl through, though he is unable to see the lover behind her. He scolds her for not being home, demanding to know where she went with her make-up and dress on. She appeases him, talking to him in a seductive tone before eventually convincing him to let her please him from the front, even as her lover continues to have sex with her from behind. Thus, she sexually satisfies two men at once. Eventually, her husband realizes that someone else is there, and so he runs out of the door to attack her lover. The lover has no difficulty getting away from him and running into the house, closing the door and locking out the husband. The lover and the wife continue to have sex while the husband storms off in a huff.
A woman’s secret lover comes over for a dinner with her and her husband. After a few drinks, the lover boasts that he’s so strong that he can deadlift three people off the floor all at once. The husband dares him to bet on it, so they place a bet. He instructs the husband to lie down face-first on the floor, so he does. Then, they get a maid to lie down on top of the husband, and then he has the wife lie down on top of the maid. The man has sex with both the wife and the maid at once while the husband is unable to see what’s happening, only feeling the intense weight upon him shift about as the man heaves, grunts, and groans. After the man has finished, he declares that he is unable to lift all three of them as he assumed he could, and therefore he has lost the bet. He assures the husband that he will pay the debt the next day.
Three women find an expensive and precious ring, and in order to decide who can keep it, they devise a contest. The contest is to see who can cheat on her husband in the most amusing way possible (all three women have regular lovers), and whoever proves the cleverest in humiliating her husband will get to keep the ring. This acts as a frame story for three cuckolding scenarios, which then follow.
A woman is with her husband, and they’re about to have lunch on a Friday at noon. He tells her to prepare him a certain meal. She tells him that their kitchen is unusable, so he tells her to use a neighbor’s kitchen. She then leaves for the entire week, spending the whole time with her lover. She returns exactly one week later on a Friday at noon, and presents him with the meal he requested, as though nothing had happened. He yells at her and accuses her of cheating on him for the entire week, and as he is starting to become violent, she screams for help. Some neighbors burst into the house, and she tells them that her husband has gone insane. When they hear him say, “She’s been gone since Friday noon!” they conclude he is truly insane since it is Friday at noon, and so they hogtie him upon the wife’s request and leave. The woman then invites her lover over and they have sex together while the husband is forced to watch.
A woman is having sex with her lover on their bed. Her husband makes some noise entering the home and the lover immediately hides behind the bed. The husband walks in, not seeing the lover hiding away, perfectly obscured from view. The wife darts upward with only her undergarments on, walks over to him, and greets him with a kiss. He tells her that he has had a long day and promptly goes to bed. Once he is asleep, the woman continues to have sex with her lover right next to his sleeping body. At one point he wakes up and asks her, “What’s going on?” while she’s on all fours in the bed, facing him directly as the man takes her from behind with a blanket covering him. She tells him, “You’re just having a bad dream. Go back to sleep.” He believes her and does, while she and her lover continue to have sex in the same bed as he sleeps peacefully.
A woman at a gravesite is mourning her dead husband, weeping profusely. Two men watch her from afar, and one bets the other that he’ll be able to have sex with her. They take the bet, and so the first man stays behind and watches on. The other approaches her, strikes up conversation, and she tells him that she wishes she could die, just so that she could be with her dearly departed husband in the afterlife. He tells her that he’s also in deep mourning because his wife has died, too. “How did she die?” the woman asks. The man replies that he killed her simply by having sex with her. The woman then gets an idea! She insists that he have sex with her so that she can die, too, and she gets on all fours, right next to her husband’s grave. They then have sex while the woman goads him on, telling him that he’s not going hard enough to kill her, insisting that he fuck her harder.
A woman is in bed with her husband, both getting ready to sleep, and she asks him if he would do anything in his power to protect her. He assures her that he absolutely would, and in fact he would even give his own life for her safety. Just then, they hear a burglar break into their home. The husband immediately panics like a coward and flees to another room, locking himself in and telling the wife to find another room for herself. The burglar walks in and greets the wife, and both of them embrace. The wife then reveals that the burglar is actually her lover and she had asked him to break into the house in order to test the husband’s bravery. After she verbally reprimands her husband for his cowardice, she has sex with the lover while he is forced to watch and listen from the other room, locked inside and unable to get out.
A jealous husband disguises himself as a priest, and hears his own wife's confession: she tells him that she’s falling in love with a different priest who comes to her house every night and has sex with her. Later that night, the husband posts himself by the front door to watch for this priest, but his wife brings him in via the roof, and they have sex there while the husband remains vigilant at the front door, ready and waiting to catch the intruder.
The wife of a wealthy businessman invites over his good friend while her husband is away on business. She tells him that she is unsatisfied with her marriage because her husband doesn’t pay any attention to her and refuses to give her any money for nice clothes. She asks him for some money, assuring him that she’ll make it worth his while, and so the friend kisses her passionately, confessing his desire for her, assuring her that he’ll get the money. Later on, the friend asks the husband to loan him the amount of money that the wife has requested, and the husband complies. The friend then gives this money to the wife, and she rewards him with sex. Much later on, the husband returns to town and visits his friend, asking him to repay the debt. The friend tells the husband that he already repaid the debt by giving the money to his wife. The husband goes home and chides his wife for not having told him that the debt had already been repaid. She then tells him that she spent all the money on clothes, and as she explains herself, she seduces him, telling him that she’ll repay the debt by other means. They then have sex.

Alright — have you finished guessing which is which?

…

The results are in the next section.

III. Results

OK. Numbers 2, 6, and 8 are porno scenes. The rest are all from medieval literature. Number 1 is actually late classical if you want to get technical, since it comes from The Golden Ass by Apuleius, but it was adapted by Boccaccio for his Decameron (VII.2). so it still counts. Number 9 also comes from Boccaccio’s Decameron (VII.5), and Number 10 is Geoffrey Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales, while Numbers 3, 4, 5, and 7 are French fabliaux (dirty poems) by anonymous authors, all of which are found in this excellent collection translated by Nathaniel Dubin. Regarding my rendering of the plotlines, I deliberately neglected to mention that a few of the secret lovers are in fact priests or clergymen — a scandalous detail that ironically would be impermissible now, because even while the western population has gotten much less religious overall, it has also gotten much more culturally diverse and thus more sensitive. But everything else happens pretty much exactly as written, with only a few inessential details elided.

As for the modern pornos, I mostly discovered these by reading descriptions for scenes from various studios with cheating-themed content. I will also admit that I changed a single detail ever-so-slightly to make one of them a bit less “modern”: in Number Two, the “hole in the wall” is actually a doggy door for pet entry. But Number Two is quite modern for another reason, namely that no one was having oral sex like that back in medieval times, probably because personal hygiene just wasn’t where it needed to be for that kind of thing to seem enjoyable.

If you spend some time comparing plotlines, you discover that today’s pornos often have stories just as absurd and over-the-top as in the bawdy and trashy tales from the distant past, but their settings are typically more “modern” in nature, reflecting contemporary societal conditions and concerns. The plotlines commonly involve things like

Marriage counselors who have sex with the wife
Divorce lawyers who have sex with the wife
Repair men and/or auto mechanics having sex with the wife
Modern police officers having sex with the wife (after traffic stops, that sort of thing)
“Sex tape” footage being used as blackmail

…and other distinctly post-Victorian if not totally modern phenomena (one particularly clever scenario involves the husband playing a video game using a virtual reality helmet while the wife has sex with someone in the exact same room). I could have thrown in another dozen medieval examples for this little quiz, since those kinds of dirty stories are practically endless, and any of their cartoonish plotlines would be completely comfortable in today’s world of porn. But finding good scenarios from modern porn specifically for this quiz was a bit more difficult, which is why I only could select three. Conceptually, though, quite a few of them are more or less in the same spirit. Despite the distinctly non-medieval accoutrements of modern porn, we often find the same irreverence, the same flippancy, the same one-dimensional psychology, the same recurring themes of female sexual insatiability, and the same sense of chaotic humor.

IV. Private vs. Public Reception

Obviously, however, these things are meant to be appreciated differently. The medieval stories are primarily meant to be laughed at, while the pornos are meant to be used for masturbation. And just about everyone will be able to give the obvious answer as to why this is: it’s that the medium is the message. Duh! Video is different from written text. The naked words of the fabliau are designed to tell a witty tale with a certain breeziness that resembles the later puppetry of the Commedia dell’arte or the Looney Tunes cartoons more than anything involving real flesh-and-blood humans. The porno scene, by contrast, will focus on the flesh for extended periods of time, the story only developing sporadically before the camera returns inevitably to the flesh. A porn director could easily adapt any of the aforementioned medieval scenarios into a scene or full-length movie and it would work fine, but it would take a far longer time to watch the whole thing than it would to hear a medieval jongleur tell it. And with those necessary changes having been made, the basic meaning of the story becomes quite different.

So yes, the medium is the message, then, right? Well… yes, sort of, but that’s not the whole explanation. Because after all, there are plenty of fetish-themed erotic fiction writers who could take these old stories and adapt them into some purely textual spank material, making them available as e-books on Amazon dot com (or paperbacks in earlier decades), joining the ranks of such great cuckold-lit luminaries as Emilia Steele, Manus Dare, and Jason Lenov, and they’d probably make more money and have a bigger audience than they would if they didn’t market the stories as smut. So in that case, a purely textual modern adaptation of an old medieval fabliau could still turn into an altogether different literary experience, provided that certain emphases are shifted about and certain details are added or otherwise greatly expanded upon.

I think the more salient factor here isn’t “the medium” per se but rather the social environment surrounding it. A medium shapes an individual’s environment right down to his perception, yes, but it’s also true in some cases that the environment shapes one’s interaction with a medium, and the subsequent development of both things (i.e., the medium and other material factors surrounding it) are often mutually reinforcing.

Let me explain what I mean more pointedly. In the medieval period, a fabliau was written down, but it was designed for oral recitation. In fact, “fabliau” wasn’t even a recognized genre at the time — people just understood that there were some comic stories made for communal readings as opposed to private study, and their purpose was rather easy to recognize, since many would be authored or translated in the vernacular. It is not altogether clear just who the intended audience of these bawdy stories was, but it probably spanned the gamut of social classes. It’s certain that the manuscripts containing them were collected by wealthy members of the rising third estate, such as lawyers, physicians, merchants, and various courtly bureaucrats, and it’s conceivable if not utterly likely that one could read a given fabliau aloud at a tavern to entertain the lower-class patrons, who might then disseminate the stories to one other from memory (we do know that this was common with self-published pamphlets during the age of print). It’s also conceivable, though, that the nobility would have read all of these stories to each other since they often poke fun at the ignorance of the peasantry. I’d guess that pretty much everyone with a lowbrow sense of humor knew at least a few of these stories.

The more literary fabliaux (and other instances of smutty humor within longer frame stories or compilationes) could be found in Geoffrey Chaucer, Boccaccio, and in Jean de Meun’s long continuation of Guillaume de Lorris’s Romance of the Rose. Both Boccaccio and Chaucer most certainly wrote their stories anticipating public readings of them, but they also anticipated contemplative, private readings. Chaucer’s fabliaux are thus richer and more complex than most others, often combining different literary styles together in an experimental fashion, sometimes suggesting the possibility of ambitious allegorical interpretations that one might apply to Biblical scripture (The Miller’s Tale and its connection to the story of Noah’s flood, for instance). But in pretty much every case, even when rich in citation and literary detail, these were stories designed to make some sort of imagined crowd go wild with raucous laughter.

As for the Romance of the Rose, it was very popular among courtly audiences. In fact, it was so popular that it sparked a bitter debate that began when Christine de Pizan wrote a letter to the provost of Lille in which she criticized it and urged that people stop reading dirty excerpts from it aloud at courtly banquets and other such occasions. One gentleman responded to her and said, “Well, if the women get so embarrassed when they hear it, then they’re simply revealing their own guilt!”

We should really think about that last point for a second. In the case of these trashy rhymes and fabliaux, one would be hearing the story recited aloud while surrounded by a bunch of other people — both men and women alike — and each person would be constantly aware of the other’s presence. That fact alone tells us so much about how they were understood and received, since the way you’d react to the story would reveal something about you to everyone else in the room, and therefore you’d make the effort to adjust your reaction keeping that in mind (this group pressure dynamic, by the way, is what allows stand-up comedians to get away with all kinds of mischief).

In his introduction to Dubin’s translation linked above, the literary critic R. Howard Bloch remarks that the moral stance of the fabliaux is “at once conservative and rebellious” — a more accurate understanding than what Mikhail Bakhtin had thought, since he saw it as entirely rebellious. But it’s both because while the stories avoid preaching to the audience moralistically even as they cover such scandalous material, they also in a sense reinforce social norms, as later feminists recognized. The priest is always a lecher because it’s appropriate to remind the clergy not to indulge in perverted behavior. The cuckold is always cowardly or foolish because it’s appropriate to remind husbands to be courageous and remain vigilant at all times. The women are always lustful whores because it’s right to discourage women from behaving that way. What we’d now think of as “stereotypes” were actually moral antitypes, and in order for their purpose to be realized in such a fashion, everyone would have to be around each other listening to the story, physically present in three-dimensional space, knowing that their reaction to its recitation would be part of the experience and judged accordingly. If you get embarrassed, you reveal your guilt.

Now, compare that kind of reception to one of purely private reading (or viewing, as with porno). When the solitary individual is left to his own devices, he’s free to react however he wants, and he has the time and space to indulge in various thought processes that would be otherwise disallowed. Obviously, he can pull down his pants and start jerking off — a luxury not afforded to him in public, at least not typically. This may seem like a trifling observation, but it definitely changed the nature of porn production from the 1970s up to now. Before the widespread usage of the Betamax cassette, pornography films often had elaborate, dialogue-heavy plots (some classier examples include The Devil In Miss Jonas and Through The Looking Glass). You weren’t really meant to sit there masturbating in the theater (although some people did anyhow, as Pee-Wee Herman helped us recognize). But when private home viewing became an option, the movies slowly become more and more sex-heavy, sometimes removing any semblance of plot altogether. Pornography thus slowly morphed from a lowbrow film genre into a lowbrow performance art, if not some kind of strange sport.

But there’s more to the experience of total privacy. During a private reading or viewing of cheating-themed material, the person can start to pursue intrusive thoughts that he otherwise wouldn’t entertain while surrounded by others. Thoughts like, “Duhhh, gee, maybe I’m just like the cuckold in this scenario…” or, “Oh no, maybe my wife is doing this same thing… boo hoo hoo, I’m such a loser….” These are the thoughts that occur to someone who no longer has to save face surrounded by his peers. If you think about story Number Seven in particular from our quiz, titled “The Mourner Who Got Fucked at the Grave Site,” that’s quite a potentially dark story, but it’s only in solitude that one would be able to take it so seriously, treating it as a springboard to begin pondering some deeply uncomfortable questions. And once that train of thought is underway, it’s easy to predict what comes next. Essentially, the mere fact of private reception is what allows the light-hearted and fancy-free presentational style of the fabliaux to become intensely sexual. It’s what allows those kinds of relatively lighthearted stories to create a demand for stories that placate the sexual yearnings of the full-blown cuckold fetishist — a type of person pretty much inconceivable in the distant past.

V. Privacy and Publicity

Do not worry — I haven’t forgotten my introduction to this little discussion. We’re not going to make this any more gross than it needs to be. My point is simply that although the internet has expanded and widened the potential for “public discourse” far beyond what anyone could have predicted a thousand years ago, this “public” discourse is perhaps not as truly public as we’d like to think.

Intellectuals like to ask questions about what constitutes a true public space or “public sphere.” Jürgen Habermas defined the public sphere as a collection of private people who get together as a sort of collective in order to engage in reasonable and critical debate with the aim of regulating the actions of state authorities. They thus have to do it as private citizens, not representatives or clients of the state (hence his criticisms of social welfare and other state encroachments). Moreover they have to be rational, and they can’t be excessively specialized in their interests. Habermas went to great lengths to qualify his definition over time in order to explain why today we don’t have a true “public sphere” as he conceives of it in its ideal form. He held the enlightenment bourgeoisie as the premier model to follow, and his major work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962) is largely about why those guys were great, and also how society changed over time to get rid of their rather unique social arrangement. I have no desire to share my opinion on his particular understanding of the public sphere right now, but I’ll just acknowledge that he does make a valuable point: the public sphere during the enlightenment had a distinctly “oral” character to it. Out of the culture of letters, coffeehouses and salons sprung up to act as hubs for lively discussion in which everyone could discuss written or soon-to-be-written material face-to-face. As he explains (emphases in original),

Diderot’s distinction between written and oral discourse sheds light on the functions of the new gatherings. There was scarcely a great writer in the eighteenth century who would not have first submitted his essential ideas for discussion in such discourse, in lectures before the académies and especially in the salons.

And then later on, discussing the phenomenon of printed “weeklies,” Habermas remarks,

When Addison and Steele published the first issue of the Tatler in 1709, the coffee houses were already so numerous and the circles of their frequenters already so wide, that contact among these thousandfold circles could only be maintained through a journal. At the same time, the new periodical was so intimately interwoven with the life of the coffee houses that the individual issues were indeed sufficient basis for its reconstruction. The periodical articles were not only made the object of discussion by the public of the coffee houses but were viewed as integral parts of this discussion; this was demonstrated by the flood of letters from which the editor each week published a selection. […] The dialogue form, too, employed by many of the articles, attested to their proximity to the spoken word. One and the same discussion transposed into a different medium was continued in order to reenter, via reading, the original conversational medium. A number of the later weeklies of this genre even appeared without dates in order to emphasize the trans-temporal continuity, as it were, of the process of mutual enlightenment.

It’s important to bear this crucial information in mind if you’re inclined to believe that the reading public’s relationship to the printing press during the eighteenth century was entirely defined by its use of “the eye.” On the contrary, it involved the eye, the ear, and perhaps most importantly, the body, placed dynamically within a three-dimensional space accompanying other human bodies. When we think about the “public space,” we really ought to acknowledge that it’s not really public until there’s actual space. Three-dimensional spaces are incredibly powerful because if a bunch of people fill them up, the social atmosphere becomes self-regulating over time, and thus they will tend to elicit discussion of a kind that prevents the sort of thinking with which we ended the previous section.

A medium typically functions as an extension of some part of the body. Bifocals are an extension of the eye, clothes are an extension of the skin, and the radio is an extension of the ear. But what do you do exactly with the internet, which is an extension of not just the eye and the ear, but also the genitals — and moreover one that can keep the user’s unextended, unaugmented body concealed from all interaction?

If we’re able to share our opinions on complex political matters while sitting on a toilet with our pants around our ankles, then we’re not really saying anything “in public.” Similarly, if we’re able to browse content that appeals to our most prurient interests immediately before discussing complex ideas pertaining to public policy, then, again, we’re not really in a “public space.” The thoughts that come to our minds during internet discourse often do so intrusively or compulsively, marked by the solitude one experiences merely sitting there in his apartment or staring off inside a car. Computers may have created a “global village” or “theater,” and perhaps they have in a sense brought us back to the conditions of pre-literate tribes, before “privacy” was understood as a legitimate concept. But nevertheless, they have by no means eliminated the feeling of privacy. And illusory as it might be, that feeling plays a distinct yet often overlooked role in shaping the contours of discourse. The internet is both maximally public and maximally private at the same time, and this duality comes with fascinating consequences.

I’m about done with this discussion, but since I did spend the majority of this post talking about smut, I might as well end on this point. I’m not the first to notice that 21st century political discourse is increasingly ignoring matters that affect everyday people in day-to-day life while also becoming increasingly characterized by what seems to be sexually-projected fantasy. There are obvious examples that I’m sure one could think of immediately, but there are also signs of this tendency that present themselves sometimes out of nowhere, and can either stand as false signals or indeed point to a real cross-pollination of, let’s just say, very private and very public thoughts. I’ll remain vague for the time being. Politics has always had a psychosexual dimension to it, but the public-private duality of the internet seems to have taken it to strange places. I believe that this situation is going to get more and more interesting as time goes on, probably in all of the wrong ways.