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Behind the Fence
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Behind the Fence There are certain assumptions that all of us AFFer's make... and while the specifics of that assumption may vary from person to person, I think at least some form of it is universal: Affairlook is our dirty little secret. Sure, some of us really don't care whether the world knows we're pervin' on the Internet. But almost all of us do, at least to some extent. It makes you wonder, however briefly, how well those Affairlook tee shirts sell. I think I speak for almost everyone that would read this blog - there's nothing wrong with wanting to enhance your sex life... and what the Internet has done is taken that search out of the meat market bars and alleys and glory holes, and placed it in our homes, were we can switch it on and off at will, with our computers. Of course, our homes, being much safer than the bars and the back alleys, mean we leave the switch on more than off... and it invites more people to join the search in the first place. So since the search for more and better sex is easier and (at least at one level) safer, I think it is reasonable to assume that there are more of us wandering around out there. So as you walk through the grocery store, or drive down the road, you can't help but ask yourself, is that attractive woman... Or that handsome man... On Affairlook? There's no way to tell, really. You see, perverts look pretty much the same as everyone else... And most of us don't go out of the way to advertise our proclivities in a public way. When I go out in public, I look like any other forty-something guy. But if you could look over the fence, into what's going on inside, it might look nothing like what you see from the street. Where we're really starting to run into trouble is in the virtual world. In addition to wasting too much time on Affairlook, I have a business that I run, some websites I maintain, and at least three other blogs that I write. I have twitter, and twenty email addresses. And while it is easy to keep what happens on the inside of my personal fence out of view from the street, the very tools that make the Internet such a powerful tool and a great platform for social networks blast through our virtual boundaries as if they're not there. I know several people that are quite concerned about making sure that their tawdry virtual life doesn't leak into the grocery store and their workplace - and they are right to be concerned. Even<b> eighteen </font></b>years ago, when the World Wide Web was fresh out of the oven and still cooling, a Canadian friend and I posted a slightly racy website, and in just a matter of weeks, her employer was pressuring her to take the site down. Today, websites and newsgroups are processed almost instantly, and show up on search engines in a matter of hours. If there is identifying information out there about you, it can be found - and quickly. My reason for pointing this out is not to be alarmist. The thing is, everyone has a private side of themselves that we don't want seen from the street - hence, we build our real and virtual privacy fences. If we could all peek over our neighbor's privacy fence, there would be plenty that we would see that our neighbor would prefer that we keep hidden. For some of us, that would be Affairlook. For some others, it would be something a lot more embarrassing. The unfortunate part is that when one peeks over our fence, there seem to be external constituencies that are very interested in our personal morals, and want to make our private lives a part of their public functions. In some cases it is misplaced. In others, it can be a real concern. I am pretty sure that my three years on Affairlook has ended any hope of a political career for me - not that I wanted one, necessarily. On the other hand, AFFers DO vote. Technology is even blurring the real and virtual privacy fences. A few months back, I was browsing through one of the virtual satellite viewing applications - the one that starts with a G and ends in oogle Earth. I happened to be looking at someplace in Europe. I was looking at a very high resolution satellite image of a residential neighborhood. Every house had a privacy fence, and in one of the backyards, you could make out a woman sunbathing in the nude. This... From a satellite. I'm just sayin'... |
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