Privacy and Perversion, by Mike Gold – Brainiac On Banjo #190

October 4, 2010 Mike Gold 0 Comments

“Roommate asked for the room till midnight. I went into Molly’s room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay.” That’s how it all started. With a Tweet. Three days later, 18-year-old Rutgers freshman Tyler Clementi jumped from the George Washington Bridge to his death. Make no mistake about it: this was suicide. Clementi’s final Facebook post was “Jumping off the gw bridge sorry.”

Clementi’s roommate, Dharun Ravi, and Molly Wei, have each been charged with two counts of invasion of privacy for using “the camera to view and transmit a live image” of Mr. Clementi making out with another guy.

That’s a pretty perverted act. Not the marking out part; that’s private and none of our business. It’s also not Ravi and Wei’s business, assuming they are guilty. We’ve got this whole presumption of innocence thing, and that’s a good thing, so I’m making these points in the abstract. Ravi and Wei should be allowed to mount their defense.

Nothing in this country goes unobserved. We’ve got security cameras everywhere, and damn near everybody, including my nearly-blind 94 year old mother, has a camera on his or her cell phone. At the very least, we should be able to control our own personal space, even if we’ve got a roommate.

So what sort of people would go to such lengths as to set up a webcam and netcast two people sharing an intimate moment? More to the point, what sort of people would do this when, in our uptight and discriminatory society, the video could cause ostracism and social exclusion at the very least, and perhaps impair that person’s future potential? Nothing goes away once it’s online; it’s always there somewhere. This video could easily prevent the victim from getting a job, advancing in his career, participating in religious activities, or being in the military. To name but a few.

I’ll tell you who. Perverts. Spineless, giggly, self-absorbed perverts who think they have the power to destroy a person’s life because they think it’s funny… if they bothered to think at all.

Some say this is a hate crime. I disagree. I believe the First Amendment tells us there are no hate crimes. There are real crimes, and you can’t have a hate crime without the real crime. Prosecute that and not what’s in a person’s heart, not what’s missing in a person’s head. Revenge, even righteous revenge, is not justice.

While I’m at it, “pervert” is a societal definition that changes frequently and defies the notion of privacy. Interfaith and interracial marriages were seen as perversions, and many still view these acts as such. But there’s the underlying concept of “between consenting adults.” Sex with children is outside of our ken, as is rape.

Given his subsequent suicide, I highly doubt anybody got Tyler Clementi’s consent to be videotaped that evening. There are exhibitionists out there, and that might make for an interesting defense if it can be established that Clementi gave his permission.

The overwhelming likelihood is that Tyler Clementi committed suicide because of somebody, or some people’s, perversion.

And that’s the part of the story that is so sickening.

Fellow-traveler, anarcho-syndicalist and www.ComicMix.com editor-in-Chief Mike Gold performs the weekly two-hour Weird Sounds Inside The Gold Mind ass-kicking bizarro music and blather radio show on The Point, www.getthepointradio.com, every Sunday at 7:00 PM Eastern, replayed three times during the week (check the website above for times). Likewise, his Weird Scenes Inside The Gold Mind political and cultural rants pop up each and every day at the same venue.