Porn (And Sex) in the 21st Century

To a certain extent this post is a “me too” post, piling on to what Jamal Registre said in a post on Boinkology 101. (Boinkology 101 is Lux Alptraum’s new blog, and I’ll be following it closely. It promises to be quite interesting.) Registre’s main point (if I may oversimplify) is that his phone is so tied into every facet of his life – including his sex life – that he’s having trouble learning how to cope with the new technology. Or, at the very least, integrate it with his sex life. I especially like the anecdote about him setting the phone down at work only to have the phone’s Live Tile feature start displaying his sex pics for his colleagues to see. I can easily see that happening.

And I feel his pain.

Compartmentalization

We have a long history of compartmentalizing our lives. I’m not the same person at work as I am at a party, and the versions of me at work and at parties aren’t the same as the version of me who yanks it to porn. Even the version of me who goes to Ashley Madison for sex with married ladies isn’t quite the same as the me who likes porn. That’s just how we are; we often use the metaphor of wearing different “masks” in different contexts to describe this phenomenon.

But the thing is, we don’t always realize when technology is knocking down the walls between those compartments, and sometimes we can get embarrassed when we show up wearing the wrong mask in the wrong context. (The sex-related photos showing up in Registre’s Live Tile were a perfect example of this.)

In my own case, I’ll see a commercial with a bunch of twenty-somethings seamlessly integrating their smartphones and their lives, having parties and taking pictures and videos and having all of that stuff going to “the cloud” so that they can relive the memories forever, and I think, “I want to do that too!” But in the moment of the brilliant smartphone advertising I forget that I spend much less time at cool parties with fun-loving twenty-somethings than I do in the privacy of my home yankin it to porn (or writing blog posts about it). But whether I’m the life of the party trading witty banter with my friends or in the bathroom making my “o-face” as I masturbate over the toilet, the phone in my pocket is the same phone.

It’s all well and good if I went to a party and want the world to know that I was there (and be impressed with how cool I am), but what if I’m snapping a photo of my junk for a cyber lover? Do I want my Google+ profile to get populated with a picture of my cum-covered tummy and my quickly deflating cock? If I’m not careful that’s exactly what will happen: when I take a picture with my Android phone it gets automatically uploaded to my Picasa account, which is somehow tied to my Google+ account. Luckily photos don’t get automatically shared with anyone (at this point in history), but they’re there. In the cloud. Even if I were to go and delete them after the fact, would they really be gone? Would there be some trail left, somewhere, “in the cloud”?

So when I do want to snap an illicit photo of myself that I want to keep private I have to figure out how to defeat these features. On Android I have to turn off the phone’s “sync” feature, snap the photo(s) or video(s), do whatever I want with the material, delete it from the phone, and then turn “sync” back on (so that I can start getting email and Google+ posts and other stuff again). It’s difficult – and getting more and more difficult by the day – to use your smartphone for anything that you want to keep private, because smartphones aren’t built for privacy, they’re built for sharing.

Extreme Compartmentalization

This is all assuming that you have one account, but I go further than that and create different accounts for different facets of my life. (It allows me to name the masks. This blog’s mask is named “Thinking Inside Your Box.”) If I want to create an account on Ashley Madison I create a Gmail account to go with it; if I create accounts on Smutty and Fantasti I create another Gmail account for them; if I create a blog about pornography... well, I use the same Gmail account that I used for Smutty and Fantasti, because I can’t keep track of all of these damned email accounts. (My memory ain’t what it used to be, and it was never that good in the first place.) On the whole, I have, oh, almost a dozen different accounts created across Gmail, Hotmail (don’t make fun, they’re old), and various other services, some of which are “real,” some of which are for fake internet personas (like this one), and some of which are strictly devoted to fucking.

And just to show that I’m not completely “old fashioned,” I even store my illicit photos in the cloud – I just do it in a compartmentalized fashion. I’ll use a Picasa account linked to my “fucking” account to store my photos, or a different Picasa account for my porn account (though I don’t store a lot of porn, I just get it from other services like Smutty and Fantasti), and I have no problem storing my stuff up there. As long as the stuff I meant to go to the illicit account(s) doesn’t accidentally end up in my real account(s), or vice versa.

The good news is that all of these accounts are web-based, so I can fire up Chrome in Incognito mode or Firefox in a “private window” or Internet Explorer (eugh) using InPrivate browsing and check my accounts and upload and email my photos without leaving any kind of a trail on my computer. And since I get most of my porn these days from the web-based Smutty and Fantasti I can do the same thing with the browsers and still not leave a trail. There’s a trail “in the cloud,” there always is, but in my case it’s a compartmentalized trail; anyone at Google who was to look at thinkinginsideyourbox’s activity would see a lot of porn and blog posts about porn, but that’s it. (Folks at Google, feel free to look through my account and share in the porn. My gift to you.)

Which is all well and good, but who really wants to open up a browser and log into a dozen email accounts, one after the other, to check for new messages? Nobody, that’s who. And frankly we spend more time on our smartphones these days than we do on a computer – at least I do – so that’s probably where we’re going to do the majority of our email checking, isn’t it? So we’re back to the smartphone problem.

And it’s so tempting to let my smartphone know about all of these accounts because it turns out smartphones are pretty good at having a bunch of accounts on them at once. Tell the phone about your Gmail account or your Hotmail account or whatever, and it adds the account to your phone’s Inbox, the calendar to your phone’s calendar, and even adds the contacts! It’s drop-dead easy to have someone in a contact list used only for illicit sex, and be able to email them or IM them or text them or make a calendar appointment with them all from your phone.

But my phone is an Android, and Android is tied to a Google account. So you’ve got a “primary” account for the phone, and then a bunch of other accounts. So if, for example, I were to add my thinkinginsideyourbox account to the phone, somewhere in “the cloud” Google would have a record that my “real” account is somehow associated with my thinkinginsideyourbox account. And if I were to add my “getting laid on Ashley Madison” account, too, then all three would be tied together, somewhere, in the cloud. Who knows, if I ever became famous (or infamous) some smartass at Google might decide to do some digging, turn up that the accounts are all associated with each other, and publish it. Worse yet, technology and privacy changes minute by minute; I might wake up one day to realize that Google+ had simply created a new section in my profile, “related accounts,” and listed them there for the world to see.

Even aside from this far-fetched idea there’s the problem that so many things are tied to your “primary account” on the phone, and we come back to the photos problem: I may have a dozen accounts configured on my phone, but if I snap a picture of my dong or a video of me fucking a lover and Android uploads it automatically for me, it’s going to my primary account. The real one, that my colleagues and friends and spouse know about.

This is all aside from the fact that my wife sometimes decides to play with my phone while we watch TV, and I have to be careful what I put on it.

So technology, especially smartphones, is making it easier and easier to tie all of your accounts together, which is great, but I’m in a situation where I don’t want all of those accounts tied together. I need to keep my phone “clean.” Even when I’m using my own, personal phone to surf Smutty or Fantasti, I still do so using the browser’s privacy mode, so that when my wife decides to grab my phone and look something up on the internet she won’t see it in the phone’s history. (I have also found an email program for the phone called K-9 which is able to connect to multiple email addresses and is highly configurable, so that I can configure it to not show notices when I receive emails on certain accounts. I don’t want her looking something up on the phone and see a notice that I’ve received an email with the subject “my pussy is so wet 4 u!”)

However, being human (it’s true), I do sometimes make mistakes. Once in a while I’ll open a browser – either on a computer or on my phone – and forget to go to privacy mode before surfing somewhere nefarious. This means that it starts showing up in the browser’s history, and I have to remember to wipe that history, just like in “the olden days” before browsers had privacy modes.

Maybe the answer is to buy a different smartphone for each account. And then on the back of each phone I’d write the name of the account associated with it. And hope that my wife never finds them.

That would work, right?