The Private I:
Privacy in a Public World

One would think that with the Internet, mass media journalism, reality television, and the surging culture of confession, that we as individuals would be obsessed with personal privacy. And we are — but not necessarily with protecting our own privacy.

What we are actually concerned with is the invasion of other people's privacy. If the invaded party is similar to us (in race, socioeconomic standing, etc...), we are outraged. If they are different — say, for example, if they are celebrities, or politicians — we feel they have voluntarily thrust themselves into the public light and their privacy is now a commodity that belongs to the public. We eat it up: read about it, listen to it on the radio, watch it on TV, discuss it on the Internet. We think: "Privacy is certainly everyone's right, as long as they are nice, normal people like me."

Private privacy, public privacy — one way or the other, privacy is extensively, effectively addressed in the latest Graywolf Forum collection, The Private I: Privacy in a Public World, edited by poet Molly Peacock. The greatest strength of this collection lies in the diversity of the essayists. Coming from many walks of life, they bring an incredible variety of experience to a concept that could easily devolve into a one-note discussion.

Barbara Feldman , the actress who played Agent 99 on the '60s television series Get Smart, and Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk, bed down comfortably with each other to discuss the lack of privacy of celebrity and the lack of privacy in a small town. They explore how gossip can turn one into a celebrity of sorts in a small pond, and how the size of the celebrity really doesn't matter when people are looking for a private world to righteously invade.

Essayist and ex-prison inmate Evans D. Hopkins discusses privacy, celibacy and sex in prison, while Anita L. Allen, a professor of law and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, debates the ethics of lying to protect sexual privacy, using Oscar Wilde and, of course, Bill Clinton, as her primary examples of men who needed to lie about their sexual forays. Giving the idea of privacy a global twist, Josip Novakovich offers a beautiful piece on the safety of childhood's secret spaces in the very un-private world of the former Yugoslavia, while Dr. F. Gonzalez-Crussi muses over the differences between warm Latin community and cold American privacy, while introducing us to the extreme image of the Chinese Empress who was never permitted to be alone, even while using her ornate chamber-pot.

As a woman who spends a great deal of time online, as well as the mother of a young girl who is already showing an interest in the workings of my computer, I found Bronwyn Garrity's essay on adolescent girls/young women and the Internet of particular interest. Among other things, Garrity is the creator and producer of Trackers.net, which is Oxygen Media's website for teenage girls. For the purposes of this review I visited the site, and found it considerably less offensive than I intially expected.

Using a thirteen year old girl (screen name: "DrRogue") with whom she has some regular contact as a focus point, Garrity explores the world of young women on the Web, why they go there and what they find that keeps them going back; namely, creating web sites of their own and visiting and commenting on the websites of others like them. She uncovers that the larger portion of young people online are aware of the safety precautions (no full names, addresses, phone numbers) that must be taken to remain safe from, as DrRogue refers to them, "psychopaths."

But the withholding of private information is not necessarily just a safety issue for Garrity's "subjects". The same anonymity that protects them from DrRogue's psychopaths allows them to create public-but-private spaces of their own, where they can present and receive feedback for creations and ideas, where the issue of who is pretty and who is rich and who is thin and who is popular is irrelevant. It also allows then to grow and change, as teenagers of both genders tend to do, flying from hippie to punker to beatnik poet to Britney Spears wannabe in the blink of an eye, without the hassle of having to present each new creation fresh out of the box to their peers. It provides a practice space full of people who have no idea that there was any incarnation previous to this one.

Garrity sees the Internet as a positive space for young women and a safe place rather than a hazardous one, since the greatest danger to the well-being of young women is one condoned by society — overt sexism is still alive and well in America.

As a lifelong media addict who has to read, listen to or look at anything new that comes in my direction, I feel constantly invaded by other people's need to confess and expose, to hang their dirty laundry out in my backyard, so to speak. This excellent overall collection reminds us that personal boundaries are important, that there is a difference between desiring privacy and harboring secrets.

Reviewed by Suzanne Cody
05.07.01

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