maybe we stop filming strangers in public

let's at least try it out, no?

I almost wrote about the most recent season of Selling Sunset for this post, but the below has been in progress since early April and, to be frank, I wanted it out of my brain. 

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Something [high school mean girl voice] very funny that's been happening in recent years is people's increasing comfort with taking photos or videos of strangers in public and then, not content with engaging in Weird Thing #1, happily move on to Weird Thing #2 and post these photos/videos on social media for even more strangers' consumption. All of this, naturally, takes place without a scintilla of consent or context. 

It has gotten to the point where, most times I'm in public, my first step is to take an immediate, almost compulsive awareness of my surroundings, to try to pre-determine if anyone around me seems like the sort of person who would, while I'm partaking in some innocuous activity, choose to document it without my consent.

(This is not a roundabout way of me playing coy and telling you that people recognize me from social media when I'm out and about, something that happens only occasionally and is typically lovely. No, here I am talking about actual, perfect strangers who don’t know me from Adam.)

It's an odd thing, to realize that your own image, one you did not agree to, can live forever, unbeknownst to you, on a stranger's phone. It can feel like a loss of autonomy over your person, one you can do nothing to prevent. 

Of course, it is not new for women to feel the stifling weight of others' perceptions when we walk into a room. I'm not seeking to re-invent the wheel here, and John Berger already said it best (emphasis mine): 

A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself .... One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.

Can you tell me the last time you got ready for a night out, or even a day at the office, without thinking about how you — the person that is you literally just existing — would be perceived from every angle? Without bending and stretching your body this way and that in your outfit, imagining yourself in different rooms, in different lighting, seeing yourself the way you'll be seen? It’s rare, isn’t it?

And yet — the technology of it all has destroyed our sense of privacy, shifted this already-high level of self-perception by making it even more acute. Moments that should be private or between friends are not just ours anymore, the assumption now being that if you are not at home, your behavior (even if mundane!) is open for public consumption. It's nerve-wracking, and it recalibrates all of our public interactions.

There are places, places outside my home, where I arrive and think ah, I'm safe here. Because, I ask myself, why would a person want to document a stranger at a coffee shop. Silly, naive me.

Enter, a couple of months ago, Man at Coffee Shop.

(This is not a meet-cute.)