At work we’re assaulted daily
by the Privacy Act. Confidentiality I respect but things done by the letter of
the law and in the name of privacy border on lunacy.
Gen Y and Gen Z couldn’t give a
hoot about privacy, sexting their private parts on smartphones and boring the
rest of us with the minutiae of their lives. People’s private lives are usually
boring beyond belief. Or is it just teenagers’ lives?
There are things I’d like to
keep private, personal habits—picking my nose, pissing in the shower, writing
sentence fragments—but it’s those close to me I’m protecting from this
knowledge.
The things we older generations
were instructed to keep private by our parents and betters—never talk about
politics, sex or religion—are the very things I love to gab about and let
everyone know my opinion. I don’t give a fig who knows where I live, how much I
earn, who I vote for, or the state of my health.
Writing this blog is a test. I can’t
always keep my children nameless, although I’ve never outed my good woman. People
who once lived in Iron Curtain countries view privacy differently.
I’ve worked as an artist’s
model, posed naked in front of the rigidly regimented girls of Luther College
and the more relaxed kids at Yarra Valley Grammar. The door might be locked and
the windows shuttered, but life modelling is warts, pot belly, saggy private bits
and all.
If I need to change my pants
after a long bike ride, I can’t be bothered with privacy. I peel off in car
parks, whip on clean shorts, and people rarely notice because I don’t make a
big deal of it. How the human animal came to think of some particular parts of
their anatomies as private is beyond me.
I guess it’s what separates us
from the (other) animals.
Rock on.
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