Tech-Sex: TonyEatsPuppies Sends Naughty Pics, Gets Unnecessarily Cerebral About It

I confess: a couple of days ago, feeling inspired and randy, I sent a somewhat suggestive photo of myself to an old beau. (“I’m a slut!” *giggle*)

Almost immediately after pressing “send,” I experienced the kind of guilt pangs I used to get when, as a pre-pubescent, I shop-lifted muscle magazines from Eckard (You did it too, Homo); I felt like a petty criminal who deserved the punishment I was certain I’d receive. I began to think paranoically: This was the sort of thing that, if it got out, potential employers would deny me jobs for, or, if I ever became a politician (what?), would de facto end my career. 

What I came to realize was I thought this way because I had been brainwashed. In the cases of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Anthony Weiner etc. etc. capturing oneself amidst the sex act, photographically suggesting the act, or even expressing intention to commit the act - really any intersection of photography, communication and sex - is objectionable. “Tech sex” is embarassing. It’s shameful. It’s disgusting. It demolishes men’s credibility (well, Ray-J never had “credibility” per se’), and for women seems to grant inexplicable fame that extinguishes any semblance of real dignity.

There is an odd jump that goes on in the discourse about tech-sex scandals. Elizabeth Hasslebeck of “The View,” decidedly anti-tech sex, never says exactly what the person did wrong or who they were hurting (barring a betrayed spouse). When Hasslebeck talks about tech sex, she immediately claims incredulity over “WHY” someone would photograph themselves “like that” when “they KNOW ‘IT’ could get out.” But it stands to question what exactly the “it” Hasslebeck is talking about really is. And what “it getting out” means.

The (recorded) sex acts themselves are not objectionable. We wouldn’t lambaste someone for having sex with their significant other. Nor would we object to them showing that significant other their naked body in an effort to entice them. But if those acts are captured on film or digitized suddenly the participants are the dregs of society. What is recorded, people having sex, is not REALLY the problem, and the public knowing that “it” occurs is not the problem either. We could all readily assume that [insert shamed celebrity’s name here] was having sex. It’s the fact of the recording, that there is a purposely produced materialization of those acts, that is the problem. It’s recording sex that is objectionable. Tech-sex is the crime that is only its evidence: nothing more, nothing less. But is tech-sex really wrong? Ethically? Morally? Is it a breach of taste? Why? No one seems to say outright.

Hasslebeck’s attitudes are coyly anti-sex generally. We know why people mix technology and sex. Voyeurism and exhibitionism are parts of sex. It’s hot to show off. Enticing a lover is a part of good foreplay. Sex is very much about communication. We use technology to communicate. So, inevitably, technology will be involved in sex.

In the cancelled but nonetheless brilliant TV show, KINGS, the princess of a present day Biblical principality (forget it, this is why the show was cancelled) engages in a star cross’d love affair with a war hero who is also, losely, the Bible’s “David.” Stealing away to an abandoned house, the princess and the war hero make love. There is reason to believe the princess - idealized but infantalized - is giving the war hero, also boyishly virtuous, her virginity. In the after-glow, the war hero snaps a few pictures of the naked princess with a digital camera. He says he’ll stop and delete. She asks him to keep going, and says to save the pictures to remember her by (starcross’d, remember?). Going over the pictures in bed, the war hero says: “God, see how beautiful you are?” The picture taking is a way for the war hero to allow the princess to see herself as he sees her: as a woman. For the princess, tragically, tech-sex is a way to give something of herself to the man she cannot give herself to. In the world of KINGS, tech-sex is romantic.

So why are WE so mad about tech-sex? I have a two pronged theory. Because I like to think in prongs.

First of all, our culture perceives a kind of hubris in recording one self having sex or in the nude. There is audacity and presumption in thinking one is worthy - beautiful enough, sexy enough etc. - of having their love-making immortalized. We are a fame worshiping culture. Fame is defined, more than anything, by one’s presence on a screen, one’s being recorded. When we record something we automatically (if unconsciously) deem it worthy of our highest esteem. When these recordings are leaked, our culture reacts by shaming those involved; it says those people’s love making is not worthy of immortalization. In the case of people who are already famous, public denunciation only underlines the fact that - even if the people are worthy of fame - their sex acts are not. Recording something is enshrining it. When we willingly record sex, we are exalting it. And when our culture punishes those who would enshrine sex, it is expressing a hatred of sex. Sex becomes a necessary evil: we all do it, and that is ok, but multiplying its image and immortalizing it, that is unnecessary, excessive, and deviant. We should have sex, but we shouldn’t be proud of it.

Secondly, seeing “tech-sex” inspires shame. Watching other people having sex can be hot. Duh. But also, when we walk in on the sex act, rip it from its fragile context of intimacy and plunk it down in ‘the every day’ of society, it makes us incredibly awkward. And it does so for a lot of reasons. One of them is that, most of the things we say and do during sex, the way we contort our faces and bodies (“fuck faces” etc), although hot inside the context of sex, are at best inelegant and at worst gross outside of it. And when we watch a sex tape (as opposed to porn which oddly idealizes sex), and we giggle at how awkward and disgusting the people deluded enough to think they are worthy of recording their sex acts are, we are subtly reminded of what we look like while we have sex, which, let’s be honest, is most often not so cute.  

When I feel paranoic about my own “tech sex,” and imagine getting fired from a job I don’t have if a naughty picture of me ”gets out” (to where? I’m not famous!), I am manifesting the social controls of hubris/shame I describe above. I automatically think of my sex act (if you can even call it that), from the point of view of someone who isn’t invested in it. I’m player hating on myself. And when we hate on people whose privacy we’ve impinged upon by watching their leaked “tech-sex,” we are hypocritically player hating on them.