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.
TV 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, or the energy to understand extreme compulsions. But here we are again. More of them.
I’ve written before about the toilet voyeur in a past workplace who’d sneak into the building 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 and thermos 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 their 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’s not harmless. 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, who’d never see him in quite the same way again, 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, and 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 has ended because of her partner’s violence. Perhaps she fell for the all-toocommon appearance of a protector who becomes the opposite on closer acquaintance. It’s an old, old story.
Millie 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 memorial 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.