Susie O’Brien: No one cares about privacy anymore
People who think they might be a certain part of the human anatomy need you to confirm it online. So please don’t hold back, writes Susie O’Brien.
Susie O'Brien
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Should you stop seeing your mother because she keeps feeding your dog human food? Should you drop your girlfriend for kissing her ex just before you were going to propose to her?
Should your bridesmaid pay you $30,000 for the cost of your wedding because she upstaged you by being pregnant and having a hot husband everyone was swooning over?
I’ve had fun this week on Reddit.com’s forum Am I the A---hole, known as AITA.
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The site is used by more than 600,000 people and at any one time there are 30,000 people on hand to “judge you right now” on a range of moral conundrums. I should have been working, walking the dog or cooking dinner but instead I’ve been assessing the inane and insane confessions of complete strangers.
Yes, you are an a---hole for asking your girlfriend to shave her legs.
Yes, you are an a---hole for kicking your friends with kids out of your child-free wedding.
Yes, you are an a---hole, breaking up with your boyfriend after he had a car accident.
Remember: if you are on Reddit to ask if you are an a---hole, you know the answer already.
AITA is a goldmine of craziness and neediness with a large dose of self-justification and paranoia.
Once upon a time, dodgy decisions or daily dilemmas were nutted out between two friends over a Nescafe and a scotch finger biscuit or two. Now people are outsourcing their moral compass to anonymous strangers in order to obtain their unfiltered views.
They willingly offload their ethical dilemmas to people with online names like “certified proctologist”, “partASSipant” and “Master of DiASSter”. It’s 2019’s version of PostSecrets — the postcard service people sent their innermost secrets to. Remember those?
“I wear headphones because I don’t want to talk to people,” said one.
“My parents are one of the main reasons I don’t want to get married,” said another.
AITA is PostSecrets for the millennial generation because it offers more approbation than affirmation.
Reddit calls it “catharsis for the frustrated moral philosopher in all of us”.
I call it a last-ditch effort for people to argue why they’re right after all. It’s weirdly addictive.
I love the idea that strangers are being asked to decide whether a woman should dump her husband for being a “snobby movie critic” and whether a guy is wrong to tell people his sister’s “youthful looks” isn’t due to great skin but fillers and surgery?
And whether a mum should give her teenage son make-up tips — “the foundation he is wearing is basically grey,” she writes.
It’s a reflection of our times, where everything occurs in the public domain and if it’s not logged on social media, it didn’t happen. In Vogue this month, pop icon Lenny Kravitz says he doesn’t like selfies and offers fans hugs instead.
“But they don’t want that. They want the proof and the showing and the posting,” he says.
These days there’s no line between private and public; celebrities such as reality star Sam Wood and Pink post photos of their kids naked and then get indignant when they’re criticised for it.
Instead of encyclopedias, people turn to Reddit forums like “Explain like I am five” to find out things they should already know.
And instead of telling someone not to push into a queue for tickets, people take a photo of the pusher-inner and post it online for them to be shamed by indignant strangers who weren’t even there.
No one seems to care about privacy anymore.
Reddit even has a “roast me” function, where people post photos of themselves inviting others to be as mean as they can about them in a funny way.
A pretty blonde is told: “You look like a Barbie doll some kid threw in the microwave on high for 3 minutes” and “You’re so gross even your press-on nails are making a break for it”.
Two guys in Mario Kart T-shirts posing in their parents’ garage are told they look like “an elementary school poster for stranger danger”.
“You guys look like you get off on throwing raw baloney on each other’s butt cheeks just to hear the slap”, another roaster advises them.
It’s awful and awesome in equal measure.
Who’s got time to cook a chook when you can read roasts like these instead?
Susie O’Brien is a Herald Sun columnist
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