CHAPTER 24

WHAT PRIVACY TELLS YOU ABOUT YOUR DICK

Your privates are no longer private.

–The Shepherd

Imagine yourself as a peaceful alien from a distant galaxy. You land on earth and set up an observation post unknown to the earthlings. You watch what goes on, and since your technology enables you to see through buildings and clothing, the things that you see are most interesting. First, you go to the capital of the most prosperous and most powerful country on the planet. You observe that every day, in many of these offices, the men who seem to be in charge are walking around with hard penises for part of the day. You see many of them putting their erect organs into the mouths or backsides of female employees who work in their offices. The men seem to enjoy this a great deal, the women less so. This is evidenced in that most of the females spit out or clean up the contents that the organ has deposited so quickly in whichever orifice has been used. The alien observer also notes that females with symmetrical faces, large breasts and round backsides seem to make up a large percentage of the work force of the most powerful offices of the Capitol.

            The observer notices some other peculiar things also. There are some men who seem to enjoy having organs stuck into their mouths and backsides also. There are also men and women in the Capitol buildings who engage in self-service. If a female is not available or vice-versa, a hand motion appears to produce the desired result. The alien observer notices that in almost all instances these acts occur in private–they are not for public consumption, and indeed many of these men and women will go to great lengths to avoid being discovered engaged in genital activity. The alien observer can only conclude that these people are engaged in some kind of illegality, but he is a bit confused, as this seems to be the center of government.

            So what do we tell our alien? Why is all this sexual activity so hidden, so furtive? “Shame,” you say casually, as if that is a full explanation, dependent on nothing else. What exactly is it that we are ashamed of? “We humans are just embarrassed by certain things in general,” you might say. True, but that is an obfuscation. Why don’t we say, after eating five large cheeseburgers–if asked what we were doing– “I just finished eating five big cheeseburgers?” We might prefer to say, “I just finished eating.” What is the relationship between shame and privacy?

       We are ashamed of what is immoral because activities covered by the cloak of privacy are revealed to be moral or immoral by the degree of self-restraint or lack of self-restraint that can now be plainly seen once that cloak is lifted. Being seen defecating in public might be embarrassing but being ashamed and embarrassed are two different things. You might not be ashamed of taking a dump in public, if there was simply no other way of attending to the task. You would, however probably be terribly embarrassed, but not as ashamed as you might be if you were caught jerking off in a company toilet by your boss. Sexual activity is private by degree. That is to say, as a species, we generally don’t like to disclose the detailed contents of the activity with anyone, but only our associates, friends or family. (Of course if we have slipped into brutishness, we may want to inform everyone as to our prowess, but most people will find this loutish.)

            If sexuality as a bodily function tends towards privacy, then why would we engage in sexual activities that might become public? Bear with me on this. If sexuality at its best is private, then sexual acts that tend towards becoming public may be much less desirable. Now if someone finds out that you are having sex with your spouse, no one cares, but the moment you have sex with someone who is other than your spouse, everyone is interested. (By the way, when was the last time you heard a married man boast of getting laid, i.e., having sex with his wife?)

            Having good sex with someone who is not your spouse is good (so you think) only as long as it remains private. It ceases to be quite so good once your wife discovers the activity. Privacy allows us to both hide what is shameful, and secure from the gaze of others, events and actions that might not be fully understood outside the subjective context of the people involved. The subjective context of experience, however, is not always good, and likewise, the objective analysis of subjective experience may be incomplete or even undesirable. On this side of the coin, privacy shields us from unnecessary embarrassment. Picking our noses, taking food out of our mouths, or passing wind are sometimes requirements that we do not wish to share with others, as we ourselves would not like to view others engaging in similar actions. What could be more grotesque, for instance, than watching someone on a public bus picking their ears and smelling their own ear wax? We just don’t want to see it–just as we don’t want to watch anyone hurl the contents of their stomachs anywhere near our shoes.

        Therefore, privacy can be a shield for the best of what we do and the worst of what we do. Privacy is morally ambivalent. Unfortunately, the ambivalence of privacy is popularly used as a blanket to somehow sanction actions that have historically been considered immoral. Copulating with a dead body is certainly a private act, but is it a good act? This is what advocates of “privacy as morality” overlook. There is the implicit assumption that because an act is private it is not subject to the moral scrutiny of universal rules of good behavior. The difficulty of drawing a moral line in the sand cannot be equivalent to the assumption that there should be no line at all.

            Sexuality creates its own form of privacy whereby there is a process of inclusion involving the persons involved and an exclusion involving those who are not allowed to participate. Privacy, like the dual-headed god Janus, has two faces. There is good privacy and there is bad privacy. Good privacy builds on a moral life but bad privacy destroys morality. Privacy is made good or bad by what goes on inside the world of privacy. If you are mounting dogs or dead bodies in your private sexual world, let’s just say that you have bad privacy. Who would want to be part of your world, except maybe other dog “lovers” or necrophiliacs? Certainly not your mother.

       We might judge the goodness of our actions and indeed our lives, by the number of people whose lives are improved as a consequence of our activities or good example. What is good tends towards the greatest improvement of self and others. This is goodness by inclusion. What is bad tends towards exclusion. If private sexual actions consistently exclude everyone but yourself and improve no one’s life, including your own, you can be pretty sure they are unhealthy.

Somebody figured it out–we have 35 million laws trying to enforce the Ten Commandments.                

–Anonymous

MANAGEMENT TIPS

·        Are you ashamed to be seen in public with the person you are having sex with? This is not the sign of a healthy relationship.

·        If you do not feel like talking to her after sex, what kind of relationship do you think you have?

·        Do not lie about your feelings to a woman. If you do, this will come back to bite you in the ass.

·        Do you think that just because no one sees what you are doing that it is good?

·        If you feel ashamed after sex, your feelings are probably right. Shame can be the function of a soul that knows itself better than the ego does.