The thieves of our privacy
My family had its secrets. Whose doesn’t? Illegitimate kids, shotgun weddings, battered wives, drunks, liars, adultery, thieves – the usual human misery will be there if you scratch deep enough, but it’s probably best left alone.
Television soaps, dramas and novels paint a fictional picture of what other people get up to, which is educational, but specialised real-world peculiarities have private outlets. It’s depressing when those activities reach the courts, thanks to new spying technology, accessible to everyone.
Sexuality can kick-start in odd ways. Voyeurism is one, and I lack the imagination to understand where and how it begins. But here we are again. More of them.
I’ve written before about the toilet voyeur in a past workplace who’d sneak in at dawn and park himself in the stall at the end of the row of women’s loos. He’d lurk there till the building closed at night. Possibly he brought a packed lunch for the long days on voluntary duty.
One day, a woman looked up to see him peering down at her over the partition. She screamed, he was caught, and the courts dealt with him. I’m glad I wasn’t that woman. It would be like finding a rat in your kitchen. You’d be upset for days.
Animals, including us, are cautious about toileting and like to feel safe and unobserved. You’re vulnerable with your pants down, and you’re not using the toilet for other people’s sexual gratification anyway. The basic rule of sex – and voyeurism is a one-sided sexual act – is that it’s consensual, otherwise it’s a violation of privacy, and scary. It causes harm.
It’s baffling that the former top Defence Force man posted in Washington set up recording devices to watch his colleagues use the toilet. Once the gadget was found and traced back to him, public naming and shaming, and the bewilderment of family, were inevitable.
He had to know that would happen, as must the Nelson cardiologist caught making intimate loo recordings who, surprisingly, has just been allowed to continue practising.
They risked it, as have the other men who turn up in the news for making similar recordings in their homes and homestays, which makes you wonder who else is using spy kitsets, what the demand is, and why they’re available at all.
Equally baffling are people who use the internet to share quirks and miseries best told to a therapist. The Kardashians have made themselves rich being celebrities online and wherever, but you’d have to be hard as their fake nails to keep that up. Real people aren’t.
Millie Elder Holmes is very real and plainly isn’t. She has just revealed online that her latest romance in Greece ended because of violence by her partner. Perhaps she fell for the appearance of a protector who becomes the opposite on closer acquaintance. It’s an old, old story.
Elder Holmes was led into the media world by her stepfather, broadcaster Paul Holmes, who relished living in it. Quixotic, egocentric, gifted and shameless, he must have believed he was doing her a kindness, and when he died she had a huge tattoo of him inked on her skin.
But it was no favour, and reporting on her since has revealed an insecure, fragile young woman who should have slammed the door on celebrity long ago rather than seek it out. She doesn’t need YouTube confessionals. What she needs is what everyone needs: a real friend.
We have a generation of opterouters and ‘‘me-meme’’-ers in New Zealand.
So the Big Five have teamed up with Sport New Zealand to shake up kids’ sport in Aotearoa. We’ve heard the reasoning, but the actual ‘‘how’’ is something the heads of hockey, netball, cricket, football, rugby and Sport NZ, the Crown entity responsible for governing sport and recreation in New Zealand, have left unsaid.
We await further instruction. Meanwhile, sports fields are rife with controversy.
The fear that our precious pups won’t have anything to aspire to at the tender ages of 10, 11, 12 and perhaps beyond is causing quite the stir.
It seems we’ve proven to be less than adequate (again) at a key aspect of our main job – raising healthy-bodied and healthy-minded kids.
We’ve been shown how to support kids from the sidelines. Now we are being told we’re pushing them too hard, too fast.
Where I come from, this certainly couldn’t be further from the truth. We still have a grip on the fact that just because the 11-year-old has some natural ability on the paddock doesn’t make him an All Black. He’s 11.
It’s been suggested that a general rule of thumb for hours spent per week on kids’ sport should be age-based. So at 12 years old, no more than 12 hours’ total sport activity. Any more than that and you’re potentially in child abuse country.